From the “no tipping points observed, though many have been predicted” department and Rutgers University
Rutgers and Harvard scientists lay out strategy for investigating societal consequences
The phrase “tipping point” passed its own tipping point and caught fire after author Malcolm Gladwell’s so-named 2000 book. It’s now frequently used in discussions about climate change, but what are “climate tipping points”? And what do they mean for society and the economy?
Scientists at Rutgers University and Harvard University tackle the terminology and outline a strategy for investigating the consequences of climate tipping points in a study published online today in the journal Earth’s Future.
“I hear from a lot of people in the general public who wonder whether we’ve passed a tipping point with respect to the climate, but frequently they don’t know precisely what the term means,” said Robert E. Kopp, the study’s lead author and an associate professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Rutgers. “And that’s on the scientific community. Oftentimes, we use the term in a way that doesn’t quite jive with popular understanding.”
“In the climate science world, the consequences of what are sometimes called tipping points may take decades or centuries to play out,” Kopp added. “By contrast, many people think, ‘OK, we’ve crossed a tipping point now, something is going to happen quickly.’ That’s more consistent with the way the term was popularized, before it was adopted by the climate science community, and that’s a terminological confusion we wanted to clarify.”
The authors recommend using the phrase “climatic tipping elements” to describe portions of the climate system that may be abruptly committed to major shifts as a result of the changing climate. Arctic sea ice, the Antarctic ice sheet, and the Amazon rainforest are examples of elements to which the term may apply. They also draw a connection to “social tipping elements,” such as public opinion and policy changes, technological or behavioral changes, mass migrations and conflict-development traps.
Social tipping elements may be influenced by climate change. And some climate tipping elements and social tipping elements may have the ability to trigger economic shocks – large, rapid losses in a country’s economic capacity. Civil wars, which are made more frequent by temperature extremes, are an example of a social tipping event associated with economic shocks.
But not all climate tipping elements play out quickly enough to have major economic impacts in time frames relevant to policy or economic decisions.
“We wanted to clarify the difference between a ‘tipping point’ the way that Malcolm Gladwell uses the term and a ‘critical threshold’ in a system, which may or may not lead to a quick change,” Kopp said. “You cross a critical threshold with respect to the Antarctic ice sheet, which we may have already crossed, and we may be committed to multiple meters of sea level rise, but those may play out over centuries.”
Study authors include Rachael L. Shwom, an associate professor in the Department of Human Ecology at Rutgers; Gernot Wagner, a research associate at Harvard University’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Jiacan Yuan, a post-doctoral fellow in the Kopp-led Rutgers Earth System Science & Policy Lab.
“We’re worried about mass migration or increases in poverty and civil conflicts that lead to destabilization of societies following climate change,” Shwom said. “That certainly will increase suffering among people.”
The literature on the costs of climate change often links climatic “tipping points” and large economic shocks that are often called “catastrophes,” according to the study. The phrase “tipping points” in this context can be misleading because the subsequent changes can be either abrupt or slow.
If the lag between crossing a critical threshold and an impact is too long, we may not notice until it’s too late to do anything about it, Kopp said. If we notice that we’ve done something wrong, it may be possible to intervene and limit the damage.
The authors propose a research agenda that advances the study of the social and economic consequences of climatic tipping elements, social tipping elements sensitive to climate change, and climate-economic shocks.
Shwom wants to look into any cases where it looks like social tipping elements have been tipped and the underlying conditions.
“There’s been a lot of attention paid to climate tipping points where some major change in the climate happens, but this study gave me a chance to think about how social systems will respond to climate change,” she said. “Social system tipping points can worsen or reduce the impacts of climate change.”
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That the politicians running on the meme hope we’re all a bit tipsy when we go to the polls?
Then they can really turn the world upside down!
(With them on top, of course.)
Tipping points in climate are irrelevant as they would have happened already if what is being claimed is real. We know that climate has been much warmer than now and CO2 has been much higher than now during most of the last 600 million years. Any tipping points have already happened, and we are back down in this stupidly low CO2 and low temperature world. So, much for tipping points, the ephemeral, useless boogeyman in the closet.
Okay, let’s imagine the origin of the first Amazon society dominated by women.
According to warmists there must have been global warming which increased the rate of rape so high that the women rebelled and took over their society. Economically this would have been turbulent times, because the increased rate of prostitution also caused by global warming would have increased that industry’s income. The revolt would have destroyed and otherwise thriving industry. Hard times for everybody.
I had to replace a toilet at my condo and of course started with an online search for a suitable replacement. Funny thing is … every time I click on these stories about nonsense research into global warming the article is surrounded by adds for toilets. I highly recommend googling “Toto dual flush for sale” and then continuing to read the latest in global warming research.
Image if there had been no Franco-Prussian War which means there would have been no Great War and no Russian Revolution, no Great Depression, Adolf Hitler would have remained an itinerant pavement artist, no Second World War, no Cold War, no Space Race, no Digital Age … and it was all because Count Benedetti was so impolite as to interrupt the Kaiser Wilhelm I during his morning walk in Ems.
We progressives have no problem with tipping points.
Our political philosophy is based upon the Hegelian Dialectic, in which two opposing forces inspire debate to such an extent that there arises a tipping point, with both parties arriving at a new, shared perception of the issue. Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis. This is recognized as a force of nature – it is the process of change.
We don’t often know that this Hegelian Dialectic is the foundation of our beliefs about the world. We also rarely are aware that Marx took this model of natural forces and painted the Bourgeoisie and Proletariat as the prevailing social forces, and anticipated Communism as the synthesis, the resolution.
What is more recognizable to us is the Hundredth Monkey Effect. This tale, or fable, or anecdote, or model of reality, is far more well known to us. You can enter this term in Google, or Youtube. But in short, these monkeys were bothered by sand on their yams, yet continued to eat. One day, one monkey washed his or her yam in the surf; he or she continued to do this. A couple others observed, and caught on.
Eventually, at the hundredth monkey, this behavior became so well-recognized that it became common knowledge.
Hence, we have “critical mass” bike rides, and we are eager to teach children to “change” the world, be the force of change, if we all just communicate then things will get better, etc. But things get better in a specific way: you have enough broadcasting and sharing that you hit critical mass; you hit the hundredth monkey.
You hit the tipping point.
Tipping Points resonate with how we have been taught to perceive the world.
I actually had to pass an exam on this kind of babble. Professors, unite!
In college, I studied philosophy, and so got exposed to Hegel. The rest I have self-taught.
It’s plenty real-world too. When I was teaching in an inner city (mostly Hispanic) public school it wasn’t too many years before I could recognized that some of my classes could be victims of a “critical mass” of misbehaving students – reach a certain percentage and they could really go off the deep end. Nothing I could do. The flip side was that some classes could be an utter delight with a core of students who possessed some mix of positive virtues: inquisitiveness, tenacity, strength of character, or just good English skills. Imagine the police who get out of cars to check for an i.d. One bystander is no sweat. Two must make them nervous. Five or six who are recording with their i-phones while they are simultaneously jeering and taunting, and you have a mob. Police know about critical mass.
The only tipping points are downward.
The Eemian (probably 2°C warmer than today) is as warm at the Pleistocene Epoch got. There hasn’t been an upward tipping point during the warm period that whole time.
If never is defined as for the next Megaannum, then we aren’t going hit an upward tipping point, not now, not ever, NEVER.
The Himalayas are growing 5 mm/Y. We are losing daylight because those ever growing mountains carrying ever larger glaciers are bouncing it into space. As I read Ceres the Himalayas lose 200+ W/m2.
Antarctica which is cooling at the pole is another issue.
Until Antarctica, the Greenland core, and the Himalayan glaciers are gone there isn’t enough energy to push temperatures up much. CO2 may have small effects, but once it starts increasing evaporation and convection its potential warming effect is limited.
The only tipping point seen in the last 1.8 million years from current temperatures is downward.
If CAGW alarmists could actually point to definitive causes for the tipping points that started and ended the Minoan, Roman, Medieval warm periods, the Little Ice Age cool period, the Younger Dryas, the Holocene and repeated glacial maximums every 100K years, I might be a tad bit more inclined to listen to their current whinging. Of course then they’d also have to tie all those tipping points to current human burning of fossil fuels and show how our fossil fuel use is a causal equivalent to those earlier conditions. What do you suppose is the probability of that happening?
phanerozoic
http://what-when-how.com/global-warming/phanerozoic-climate-change-global-warming/
I’m not sure what reason anyone would have to “KNOW” which direction temperatures are going to go from here, but it seems like there’s more likelihood of them going up than down over the next million years or so. and there’s a lot of “UP” to cover before we reach former geological highs.
Scroll down to see C.R. Scotese’s “Ice House or Hot House?” Graph
http://www.scotese.com/climate.htm
NOBODY knows which direction we’re moving long-term (or why we’re moving that direction), warmists’ CO2 deterministic BS notwithstanding.
A tipping point is a point in time, an instant. When this did not work out they became tipping rollovers. That is, you cannot see the change for millions of years or whatever. If the prediction fails, redefine the term.
We are now in the Alarmazoic. Everything has become alarming.
Nice discussion. It is interesting that the term “tipping point” has been yet another call for panic, which is what the advocates seem to want, and get very huffy when they fail.
There’s no reason to worry about climate tipping points because we’ve seen them all before. We have seen them in proxy pictures of ancient times, and we have seen some in modern times. Snowball earth to tropical earth in one fell-swoop of a couple of million years. Ice age to temporary warming in thousands of years. All the while, short-sighted scientists worry about a few parts per million of carbon dioxide when the real tipping point is embodied in international terrorism versus civilization. The climate change points can be called slipping points, not tipping points.
The Little Ice Age did not cause the American Revolution, nor did it bring on Napoleon’s Russian invasion attempt. The migration of people from Mexico to the USA is not a function of climate, but it is a function of the disorder of Mexican society.
Climate change may bring about long term population migrations, but technology should be able to mitigate this. People migrate because of social persecutions more so than anything else. Technology can provide water and fertilizer, and robust transportation systems can bring food and other resources into climate stressed regions. Most of the famine, disease, and population migration is the direct result of social stresses like predatory dictators, and world-wide terrorism based on tribal mentalities.
If the lag between crossing a critical threshold and an impact is too long, we may not notice until it’s too late to do anything about it, Kopp said.
The world already crossed the 2 C ‘critical threshold’ (a.k.a. tipping point) 1,300 years ago. We’re still waiting for the impact. Nobody noticed the ‘tipping point’ until Gladwell invented the phrase in 2000.
“There’s been a lot of attention paid to climate tipping points where some major change in the climate happens, but this study gave me a chance to think about how social systems will respond to climate change,” she said. “Social system tipping points can worsen or reduce the impacts of climate change.”
She is at the tipping point of sanity. With the above statement, she went a bit over the edge. Yoga and meditation help control the psychotic symptoms.
Yadda, yadda, yadda