Think zebras not just horses

[StuM]

Originally Posted by transmitterdan

Thank you for the link. I don’t have an opinion. I am looking for facts. The most studied recent abrupt climate event (Younger Dryas) has now been said to have occurred as a result of multiple comet fragment impacts. As I understand that is a recent finding which prompted this thread. In the past the YD climate shift has been used to show that abrupt climate change can occur organically with small unknown forcings. But now we know that did not happen in the case of YD. A major ET event caused the abrupt change.

I am not saying abrupt change cannot happen. I am asking for non ET examples. Or perhaps stated another way as a result of non cataclysmic events. I have not been able to find any example of a rapid shift in climate that was caused by anything other than huge and widespread devastation such as asteroid, comet or volcanic eruption.

Is there any example in the research of rapid change in climate caused by something else besides a devastating event?

People tend to concentrate on the start, and possible cause, of the Younger Dryas. That is a very narrow view of things.

When you look at the roughly 2000 year sequence of Oldest Dryas, Bølling oscillation, Older Dryas, Allerød oscillation, Younger Dryas and the very rapid rise at the end of the YD, it's hard to imagine that they were all of extra terrestrial origin.

[transmitterdan]

All I could find were discussions that never pinpointed the causes of rapid CC other than catastrophes like comet impact or extended volcanic eruptions. For me it’s hard to imagine any steady non life threatening process causing rapid extinction.

But it’s easy to imagine a comet impact causing mass loss of species and rapid CC. I believe strongly in Occam’s Razor. So I am looking for hard proof that it’s ever happened in the past that climate suddenly ramped to a new norm (like in a century) without a huge calamity as the forcing event.