• http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98jan/climate.htm at The Atlantic Monthly's nice web site, complete with all the artwork by Guy Billout, who also did the cover.
• http://WilliamCalvin.com/1990s
  /1998AtlanticClimate.htm. Same text, but has some useful supplementary illustrations of ocean currents and ice-core temperatures.

WHOI's up-to-date Abrupt Climate Change references.

My new book on paleoanthropology, paleoclimate, and considerations from neurobiology and evolutionary biology is:

 A BRAIN FOR ALL SEASONS
Human Evolution and Abrupt Climate Change
by William H. Calvin

which will be out in Spring 2002 from the University of Chicago Press.  It is already posted full-text on the web  and also in Palm download format, for reading on the commute.  It's about what sudden climate flips did to human evolution over the last 2.5 million years.  It includes the climate history and flip mechanisms that I described in The Atlantic Monthly cover story, "The Great Climate Flip-flop" and covers the paleoanthropology as well. 

ALTHOUGH William H. Calvin, the author of this month's cover story, "The Great Climate Flip-flop," says that he is "not primarily an author," readers would be forgiven for assuming that he does nothing but write. A theoretical neurophysiologist at the University of Washington at Seattle, Calvin has written nine books, including five in the past seven years and two (How Brains Think and The Cerebral Code) just last year. But he also maintains a punishingly busy schedule as a researcher, investigating how brains work and evolve, and travels extensively on the lecture circuit. Readers would therefore also be forgiven for wondering why Calvin devotes so much of his precious time to following the study of climate change.
      The answer, Calvin says, is that the evolution of the human mind is intimately linked to abrupt climate change: our brains seem to have begun their transformation from apelike to fully human just when temperatures on earth began their current trend of jumping rapidly -- often within a single lifetime -- between warm and cold. Calvin argues that in the context of brief environmental opportunities (periods of warmth) and hazards (sudden icy temperatures), survival for our ancestors became dependent on having highly agile, "jack-of-all-trades" minds. The flip-flop of climates, in other words, led to the evolution of brains that could themselves flip-flop abruptly between strategies for survival. In describing the minds that we have ended up with, Calvin is fond of referring to a passage by William James that appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in October, 1880. "Instead of thoughts of concrete things patiently following one another," James wrote,

we have the most abrupt cross-cuts and transitions from one idea to another, the most rarefied abstractions and discriminations, the most unheardof combinations ... we seem suddenly introduced into a seething caldron of ideas, where everything is fizzling and bobbing about in a state of bewildering activity.

William H. Calvin ("The Great Climate Flip-flop") is a theoretical neurophysiologist at the University of Washington at Seattle.