Even for those who consider climate change a serious issue, it’s easy to be lulled into a sense of complacency. It’s understandable, if you can’t feel it or see it every day in your daily life, it is a challenge to see it in your mind’s eye. But the problem is, that when a system reaches a critical state, change isn’t always gradual.

It’s what pop culture types call “The Tipping Point” and what complex adaptive systems researchers call a “phase change” or inflection. And Hollywood if I recall correctly memorably once called it a “critical desalinization point” in a movie starring a very fetching young actor and featuring a cargo ship inexplicably full of wolves parked in front of the New York Public Library.

But I digress, this is serious stuff, there’s new science out just now, and it’s scary. One of the most thorough research projects yet has made some interesting discoveries:

JUST months – that’s how long it took for Europe to be engulfed by an ice age. The scenario, which comes straight out of Hollywood blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow, was revealed by the most precise record of the climate from palaeohistory ever generated.

“This is significantly shorter than what has been suggested before, but it is plausible,” says Derek Vance of the University of Bristol, UK. Hans Renssen, a climate researcher at Vrije University in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, says recent findings from Greenland ice cores indicate the Younger Dryas event may have happened in one to three years. Patterson’s results confirm this was a very sudden change, he says.

And don’t let the fact that Europe happened to end up cooler fool you, warming occured elsewhere, and the real take away here is the fact that climate change can be so rapid and severe:

Patterson says that sudden climate switches like the Big Freeze are far from unusual in the geological record. The Younger Dryas was brought about when a glacial lake covering most of north-west Canada burst its banks and poured into the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans. The huge flood diluted the salinity-driven North Atlantic Ocean mega-currents, including the Gulf Stream, and stalled it.

Some climate scientists have suggested that the Greenland ice sheet could have the same effect if it suddenly melts through climate change,

Indeed they have, and it’s not pretty.

So if you don’t have your own Dennis Quaid super-dad on call for you, perhaps doing your part to make a difference is the next order of business.