Os paso el abstract original de "Nature". Lo de antes era casi una traducción directa
The shape of things to come?
During the past million years or so, the Earth's climate has been in a transient state, fluctuating between one stable regime and another, reports a paper in this week's Nature. The research indicates that the planet has been approaching a state of permanent mid-latitude Northern Hemispheric glaciation that could occur in the geologically near future.
There have been dramatic climate fluctuations over the past three million years, with conditions on Earth swinging between cold glacial and warm interglacial extremes. Such changes are often interpreted by scientists as being large nonlinear responses of the climate system to subtle cyclical changes in Earth's orbit, combined with a gradual reduction in the Earth's background carbon dioxide levels.
Thomas Crowley and William Hyde propose that these increasingly pronounced fluctuations, while still driven by orbital variations, are indicative of the transient behaviour of a system approaching a bifurcation point - at which the system will undergo a transition to a new stable climate state with expanded Eurasian and North American ice sheets. Modelling results predict that such a transition could occur in the next 10,000-100,000 years. The authors caution, however, that even the small changes in carbon dioxide levels now in the atmosphere could prevent this transition indefinitely.
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