The author questions the validity of earlier attempts at squeezing global Pleistocene glacial events into the mold of the “four glaciation”; Alpine model, and is even more critical of the recent trend to expand the number of Pleistocene glaciations even further. He points out that ice core data from both Greenland and Antarctica would suggest that there has been a progressive global climatic cooling throughout the whole of the late Cenozoic, provoked by a reduction in size of ocean areas and an increase in the areas and heights of the continents. This cooling trend reached a maximum in the late‐Quaternary (30,000 to 20,000 B.P. approximately), which was associated with a marine regression which caused the isolation and severe cooling of the Arctic Ocean. This in turn provoked a drastic cooling of the climates of the adjacent continents and initiated a limited glaciation. Ice cap formation was on a much more restricted scale than has been conventionally proposed for the Pleistocene glaciations. On the other hand permafrost was very extensive on the northern hemisphere continents, the ratio of glacier area to permafrost area being about 1:10. The area of sea ice cover in the North Atlantic and North Pacific also expanded considerably.