When Malcolm Gladwell, a writer for The New Yorker, published the best-selling book “The Tipping Point” in 2000, he was writing, in part, about the baffling drop in crime that started in the 1990s.
The concept of a tipping point was that small changes at a certain threshold can lead to large, abrupt and sometimes irreversible systemic changes.
The idea also applies to global climate change.
An example can be found in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning System, also known as the Gulf Stream.
Under the tipping point theory, melting ice in Greenland will increase freshwater flow into the current, disrupting the system by altering the balance of fresh and saltwater. And this process could happen rapidly, although scientists disagree on when.
Parts of the West Antarctic ice sheet may have already passed a point of no return, and a tipping point in the Amazon, because of drought, could result in the entire region becoming a savannah instead of a rainforest, with profound environmental consequences.
Other examples of climate tipping points include coral reef die-off in low latitudes, sudden thawing of permafrost in the Arctic and abrupt sea ice loss in the Barents Sea.
Scientists are intensively studying early warning signals of tipping points that might give us time to prevent or mitigate their consequences.
A new paper published in a scientific journal in November examines how accurately early warning signals can reveal when tipping points caused by climate change are approaching.
Recently, scientists have identified alarm bells that could ring in advance of climate tipping points in the Amazon rainforest, the West-Central Greenland ice sheet and the Gulf Stream.
What remains unclear, however, is whether these early warning signals are genuine – or false alarms.
The study concludes that the early warning signals of global warming tipping points can accurately predict when climate systems will undergo rapid and dramatic shifts.
“We can use the same mathematical tools to perform climate change prediction, to assess climatic feedback, and indeed to construct early warning signals,” said Valerio Lucarini, one of the study’s authors and a professor of statistical mechanics at the University of Reading in England.
According to Michael Oppenheimer, professor of Geosciences and International Affairs at Princeton University, “The authors show that behavior near tipping points is a general feature of systems that can be described by [equations], and this is their crucial finding.”
But Oppenheimer also sounded a cautionary note about the study and our ability to detect tipping points from early warning signals.
“Don’t expect clear answers anytime soon,” he said. “The awesome complexity of the problem remains, and in fact we could already have passed a tipping point without knowing it.”
This article comes from our partner, Inside Climate News, the Pulitzer prize-winning nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter by visiting insideclimatenews.org/newsletter/ .
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