Leaders may be headed into the UN climate summit in Glasgow with the life-or-death goal of keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, but scientists aren’t worried about exceeding that limit.
The genuine doomsday scenario starts with the triggering of climatic tipping points, which are undetectable climate tripwires.
“Climate tipping points are a game-changing risk — an existential peril — that we must do everything we can to prevent,” said Tim Lenton, director of the University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute.
Anyone who has leaned back in a chair while balancing on two legs knows there is a point at which you will fall to your death.
A tipping point is a transition between two stable states, such as an upright versus a fallen-over chair, and Earth’s complex, the interwoven climate system is replete with them.
These temperature thresholds could have far-reaching consequences.
If temperatures rise sufficiently to melt the ice sheets atop Greenland and West Antarctica, ocean levels might rise by more than a meter (40 feet).
The Amazon tropical forest, which we rely on to absorb carbon emissions, may become a savannah.
Permafrost, or shallow subsurface, is largely found in Siberia, and it is tenuously storing twice the amount of greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere, allowing those damaging emissions to escape into the sky.
