A New Analysis of Tipping Points
A new meta-analysis of tipping points[1] was just published that evaluates the 10 most significant tipping elements, and for each tipping element, the study assesses how well we understand the processes involved, the associated time scales, and how large the climate impact may be. The paper is currently behind a paywall, and while the authors have said they're working on making the paper open access, you can still view a prepub version of the paper[2] on line for free. The concept of a tipping point can be easily misunderstood. It's often described (at least in climate discussions) as a point beyond which catastrophic, runaway global warming occurs, taking global climate irreversibly into an inhospitable state (sometimes compared to runaway warming on Venus). This paper defines "tipping elements" and "tipping points" consistent with a paper by Kopp et al 2016. For this paper, "'tipping elements'...refer to any systems capable of committed nonlin...