The Rate of Climate Change

Life can adapt to global climate change but the rate of climate change is important. The gradual cooling that ran from about 50 million to 1.8 million years ago was accompanied by a diversification of life and increasingly complex ecosystems. The shifts between glacial-interglacial conditions that have characterized the past 1.8 million years have been harder on life. These shifts have been accompanied by sudden temperature swings that have happened on the order of centuries or even decades.1 Similarly, there is a big difference between a car going from 60 to zero miles per hour in 10 seconds and 60 to zero in one second.