Lacustrine records that encompass the full and late glacial periods and extend into the early Holocene document climate changes through the effects climate has on limnology. Wind intensity, temperature, and water balance are the principal climate effects recorded by lake sediments. A selection of lake records along the Pole-Equator-Pole: Americas (PEP 1) transect from Alaska to southern Patagonia reveals broad zonal regions of climate-controlled paleolimnology that change as the climate systems respond to changing forcing mechanisms operative during the past 20,000 years. In the Arctic, lakes record climate mostly as temperature signals that change the effective moisture balance and their productivity. South of the Laurentide ice sheet, lakes also responded to warming temperatures and reduced anticyclonic wind systems between the full glacial and the early Holocene. Lakes in the Great Basin were high during the full glacial period as a result of southerly storm tracks displaced by the mass of continental ice in central and eastern Canada. This effect can be documented as far south as central Mexico. A related effect, the disruption of Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) and the moisture-bearing trade winds responsible for maintaining lakes in Central America and northern South America, caused basins in this region to be shallow, saline, or dry during the full glacial period and to become reestablished only by the latest glacial and early Holocene. Easterly moisture, perhaps related to the interaction of the South Atlantic high-pressure system and ocean temperatures, appears to have controlled lake stage elevations and immunology throughout much of central South America. The details of these interactions will require sites that are analyzed more carefully with adequate chronological control. Full and late glacial lake conditions at sites in Patagonia, and perhaps those farther north as well, responded to an increased intensity of cold polar outbreaks to variable degrees. The single site in southern South America that was included in this chapter apparently did not receive moisture in significant amounts until the early Holocene, as westerly precipitation finally became established in the region. Throughout the PEP 1 transect, the effect of temperature in determining lake levels and salinity operated in conjunction with precipitation sources and seasonality. This analysis indicates that lakes recorded generally synchronous climate changes by similar but sometimes opposite responses. This synchroneity does not imply the same causality, even though the dynamics of climate change between the full glacial and the Holocene were clearly linked and mutually interdependent.