Where fact is stronger than fiction: ice age phenomena

Science fiction enthusiasts , environmentalists and general movie buffs will be familiar with the 2004 film 'The Day After Tomorrow" where the Earth particularly the Northern Hemisphere is faced with another ice age in a very short time frame of only weeks whereas conventional theory and models tended to view changes as taking decades to occur. Recent research from ancient lake drillings at Lake Monreagh in Ireland have indicated that the Younger Dryas mini Ice Age which took place 12,800 years ago took only months, at most a year, to occur. 

This ice age wihich covered the Northern  Hemisphere was caused by a slowdown in the Gulf stream and lasted approximately 1,300 years with a correspondingly devastating impact on early human societies and culture which existed in the region at that time. Until recently it was considered, based on ice core samples from Greenland, that the mini ice age took at least a deacde to evolve but this has now sharply contradicted by the new findings. The conclusion to draw from this research is simply that climate change phenomena can occur much more quickly that first thought and simply delaying essential decisions does little to reduce risk.