Only within the past decade have researchers warmed to the possibility of abrupt shifts in Earth’s climate. Sometimes, it takes a while to see what one is not prepared to look for.

Spencer Weart(sweart@aip.org)directs the Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics.

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Physics Today56, 8, 30 (2003);https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1611350

How fast can our planet’sclimate change?

Too slowly for humans to notice, according to the firm belief of most scientists through much of the 20th century. Any shift of weather patterns, even the Dust Bowldroughts

that devastated the Great Plains in the 1930s, was seen as a temporary local excursion. To be sure, the entire world climate could change radically: Theice

ages proved that. But common sense held that such transformations could onlycreep

in over tens of thousands of years.

In the 1950s, a few scientists…