Guest post: Exploring the risks of ‘cascading’ tipping points in a warming world

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Original article by Dr Nico Wunderling and Thilo Körkel republished from Carbon Brief under a CC license

Huge wave in the Atlantic Ocean. Credit: mauritius images GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo

Tipping elements within the Earth system are increasingly well understood

Scientists have identified more than 25 parts of the Earth’s climate system that are likely to have “tipping points” – thresholds where a small additional change in global warming will cause them to irreversibly shift into a new state.

The “tipping” of these systems – which include the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the Amazon rainforest and the Greenland ice sheet – would have profound consequences for both the biosphere and people. 

More recent research suggests that triggering one tipping element could cause subsequent changes in other tipping elements, potentially leading to a “tipping cascade”.

For example, a collapsed AMOC could lead to dieback of the Amazon rainforest and hasten the melt of the Greenland ice sheet.

However, the interactions between individual tipping elements – and the ways they might trigger each other – remain largely underexplored.

In a review study, published last year in Earth System Dynamics, we unpack the current state of scientific understanding of the interactions between individual tipping elements. 

We find that scientific literature suggests the majority of interactions between tipping elements will lead to further destabilisation of the climate system. 

Existing research also indicates that “tipping cascades” could occur even under current global warming projections.

Scientific understanding of individual tipping elements is continuously improving, but more research on their interactions is needed.

An emerging field 

The history of tipping elements as an object of investigation is relatively short. As a result, they are only partially accounted for in current climate models

For the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the possibility of abrupt changes in the Earth system was first mentioned in its third assessment report in 2001. At the time, climate scientists expected these changes only in scenarios where temperatures rose to 4-5C above pre-industrial levels

The term “tipping elements” was first used in the context of the climate system in 2008, in a foundational paper in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Since then, significant progress has been made on tipping element research. 

For instance, the 2023 global tipping points report – co-authored by more than 200 researchers from 90 organisations in 26 countries – recognised that five “major” tipping elements –  the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, the warm-water coral reefs, the North Atlantic Subpolar Gyre and global permafrost regions – are already “at risk of being crossed due to warming”. 

However, tipping elements have so far largely been studied in isolation. Most research has neglected the interactions between different tipping elements which could further destabilise the climate system – and eventually even lead to tipping cascades. 

Tipping cascades

Interactions between tipping elements clearly exist. 

For example, we find robust evidence that an influx of freshwater into the North Atlantic caused by the disintegration of the Greenland ice sheet would destabilise the AMOC and could trigger its slowdown. (This, in turn, could result in the ocean currents moving less heat from equatorial regions to higher latitudes, leading to significant cooling in Europe.)

In worst-case cascading scenarios, the tipping of one system directly leads to the tipping of another. In less dramatic cases, it only reinforces destabilisation of other systems.

So, what additional effects are to be expected from these interactions?

The map below shows how 13 out of 19 tipping element interactions analysed in our review study are expected to lead to further destabilisation. The arrows indicate destabilising (red), stabilising (blue) or competing (grey) effects, while the dashed lines show where there is only limited evidence for a connection.

A prominent example of a tipping point that leads to further destabilisation is the impact of changes to the AMOC. The weakening or collapse of the system of ocean currents may lead to accumulation of warm ocean water in the Southern Ocean, which could, in turn, contribute to a destabilisation of the West Antarctic ice sheet. 

It has also been suggested that a weaker AMOC could promote El Niño events by increasing the temperature difference between the equator and the poles, which would strengthen trade winds. (While the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, is not a tipping element, it may play an important role as a propagator of disturbances.)

There are also a few examples – two out of 19 interactions – where a tipping point can help stabilise another system. For example, the weakening of AMOC could lead to an interrupted flow of warm water from equatorial to the polar Atlantic regions. This would drastically cool large parts of the polar region and could therefore stabilise the Greenland ice sheet. 

Map of interactions between tipping elements.
Map of interactions between tipping elements. Stabilising effects are shown in blue, destabilising effects in red, and unclear effects in grey. Effects with very limited evidence are denoted by dashed lines. Credit: Wunderling et al. (2024)

A conceptual model

While scientists have gathered evidence for tipping points from observations, models and proxy data from the distant past, we still need more research to study interactions.

Our ongoing research aims to quantify the risk of tipping cascades using a conceptual computational model. 

The model is “conceptual” in the sense that it is not grounded in physical or chemical processes, such as heat transfer or circulation patterns. Instead, a range of measurements  – such as global average temperature, tipping temperature and temperature overshoot trajectory – serve as “modelling parameters” that can be varied to study a large range of possible scenarios. 

To date, the model is limited to simulating the Amazon rainforest, the AMOC and the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets – tipping elements whose respective interactions are relatively well established. 

However, using this model we can investigate – among other things – tipping risks under different so-called temperature “overshoot” scenarios. 

This is where global warming peaks at a certain temperature level – for example, 2C – before declining to a lower long-term stabilisation temperature. (The subsequent decline is assumed to be the consequence of a global roll-out of negative-emission technologies, as assessed in several recent publications.). The difference between the peak temperature and the long-term stabilisation temperature is the overshoot.

Evaluating millions of scenarios, our model calculates “tipping risks” for fixed combinations of a particular overshoot and stabilisation temperature.

The main finding of the research is that long-term tipping risks are in the order of 15% if warming peaks at 2C and then stabilises at 1C. 

In contrast, in a scenario where the peak warming reaches 3C and stabilises at 1.5C in the 22nd century, there is a 66% probability that at least one of the four modelled tipping elements would lose stability.

The figure below shows tipping risks where warming peaks at between 2C and 4C (“peak temperature” on y-axis) and takes 100-1,000 years to stabilise (“stabilisation time” on x-axis). 

The figure on the left shows tipping probabilities where temperatures eventually stabilise at 1C and the figure on the right where temperatures settle at 1.5C. Darker colours represent higher tipping risks.

The figure shows how tipping risks increase with higher peak and stabilisation temperatures, as well as with longer stabilisation times.

Tipping risks under global warming overshoots for peak temperatures
Tipping risks under global warming overshoots for peak temperatures (between 2C and 4C) and overshoot durations (stabilisation time of 100 to 1,000 years) for stabilisation temperatures of 1C (left), and 1.5C (right). Credit: Adapted by the authors from figure 3 in Wunderling et al. (2023)

While solidly calculated and based on recent scientific literature, our results can not count as projections of future climate due to the conceptual nature of our underlying model. 

Nevertheless, the findings are useful and complement findings from traditional climate models, known as General Circulation Models (GCMs). 

GCMs have only started to fully address the dynamics of tipping elements and their interactions. For example, most do not yet feature fully interactive ice-sheet dynamics, nor their interactions with global oceans. 

In a paper published last November, we used our conceptual model to show that neglecting interactions between the Greenland ice sheet and the AMOC can alter the expected number of tipped elements by more than a factor of two.

In addition, the high cost of running GCMs means researchers cannot run large “ensembles” of multiple model simulations to account for uncertainties in knowledge of key parameters. Our simplified conceptual model, on the other hand, can account for this uncertainty.

By drastically reducing physical complexity, we are able to compute several million – and up to a billion – ensemble members in large-scale Monte Carlo simulations.

Historical tipping events

While our results need to be confirmed by more complex Earth system models, such as GCMs, they hint at the need for scientists to examine interactions between tipping elements and potential tipping cascades more closely. 

The study of abrupt climate changes of the distant and not-so-distant past is critical to convince researchers of the existence and significant impact of tipping cascades. 

A potential candidate for investigation is the Eocene–Oligocene transition. This took place roughly 34m years ago and led to the formation of a continent-scale ice sheet on Antarctica which buried the region’s forests. 

The transition likely involved the interaction of several tipping elements, including global deep-water formation, the Antarctic ice sheet, polar sea ice, monsoon systems and tropical forests. The monsoon-like climate of the Antarctic content at the end of the Eocene would have had to change drastically – or tip – to allow for glaciation during the transition to the Oligocene. 

Since the events at that time were also linked to a major loss of mammal species, mostly in Europe, the Eocene–Oligocene transition might even have involved a climate-ecology tipping cascade. 

Heinrich events, which took place in the last ice age – around 120,000 to 11,500 years ago – as well as the mid-Holocene, could also be especially revealing around what we can expect in the near future.

These events, which involved the release of icebergs into the North Atlantic, resulted in a fresh water inflow that substantially weakened the AMOC. This, in turn, led to the drying of northern Amazonia and the retreat of the rainforest. Today’s melting of the Greenland ice sheet could have similar consequences for the AMOC. 

While these climate changes in the past happened through natural drivers, humans are potentially forcing these rapid changes now in the modern era through emissions of carbon dioxide, possibly on a much faster timescale. 

Updated climate models

The science of interacting tipping elements and tipping cascades is in its early stages – and there is significant debate within the scientific community on the topic. 

Some consider a global reorganisation of the climate system induced by tipping elements and cascades to be speculative, given that recent observations are not available and proxy data is scarce. 

Additionally, there is scientific uncertainty of how tipping processes may play out across different spatial scales, as well as how to increase the resilience of tipping elements against perturbations.

Therefore, significant work is underway to investigate tipping processes in complex Earth system models. The Tipping Points Model Intercomparison Project (TIPMIP) and European Union-funded projects ClimTIP or TipESM are among a raft of such initiatives.

Although these initiatives are largely looking at tipping elements in isolation, they will also shed more light on the interactions between these important parameters of the Earth’s climate system stability.

Original article by Dr Nico Wunderling and Thilo Körkel republished from Carbon Brief under a CC license

Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.

Wunderling, N. et al. (2024): Climate tipping point interactions and cascades: a review, Earth System Dynamics, doi:10.5194/esd-15-41-2024.

Continue ReadingGuest post: Exploring the risks of ‘cascading’ tipping points in a warming world

Poor regulator driving soaring water bills, watchdog finds

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/poor-regulator-driving-soaring-water-bills-watchdog-finds

‘A wholesale betrayal of the people and our environment’

 Campaigners say privatised water has failed the public and the environment

REGULATORS have fuelled soaring water bills by not encouraging private companies to spend “what they need to deliver the performance expected,” a damning public spending watchdog report concluded today.

The National Audit Office (NAO) highlighted “inconsistent responsibilities” and gaps in oversight within the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and the sector’s regulators.

The watchdog examined the effectiveness of sector regulators — Ofwat, the Environment Agency, and the Drinking Water Inspectorate — as well as Defra, which sets policies for the sector in England.

It found that complex and lengthy regulatory frameworks have contributed to “worsening investor perception of the sector” which will need to attract “investment and spend at a rate not seen before” to meet its “significant environmental and supply challenges.”

NAO head Gareth Davies said: “Given the unprecedented situation facing the sector, Defra and the regulators need to act urgently to address industry performance and resilience to ensure the sector can meet government targets and achieve value for money over the long term for bill payers.”

Article continues at https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/poor-regulator-driving-soaring-water-bills-watchdog-finds

Continue ReadingPoor regulator driving soaring water bills, watchdog finds

So, Are We Just Going to Let Ourselves Die?

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Original article by Roger Hallam republished from Roger Hallam. I don’t have permission to republish this article but expect that it will be ok & he’s in prison.

The elites are blind, the media asleep — but the fuse of revolution has been lit, and history is about to turn.

Shortly before I was imprisoned last year, I had the privilege of joining a Zoom call with a man living in the Central American rainforest. He had been the primary fundraiser for the Social Forum, which, as some readers will recall, was the first international organisation of this century to call for a new global social system: “Another world is possible.” He told me, “Roger, when you go to see funders, tell them two things: First, that the money is not theirs, and second, that it will be worth nothing in ten years.”

This week, I recorded a message for one of the most radical Western companies funding climate crisis activism. I spoke to them about these two realities. Five years ago, perhaps even a year ago, they would have politely—or not so politely—shown us the door. But not now. My colleague was told the presentation was “magical,” information about funding a new global movement was shared with over 100 staff members, and a personal letter from me will be delivered by hand to the company’s founder, whose funds run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

At the same time, Just Stop Oil announced it would no longer engage in civil resistance. The media response has been significant, but none of it has focused on what really matters. I was sent a series of questions by Justin Rowlatt, the BBC environment correspondent. I replied to him with three main points. First, it is the evolution of a deep culture of respect, service, and trust that took us from three people in a room with a few quid to a household name, with thousands of arrests and millions of pounds in financial support, all within a year. Equally significant has been the unprecedented battering we have received, resulting in hundreds of people being imprisoned, many on multi-year sentences, including nearly all the key organisers. Nothing like this has happened to an open, nonviolent organisation in this country since the Napoleonic Wars.

A day or two later, the police battered down the door of Westminster Friends Meeting House in a raid to arrest a group of young people planning a protest. How many centuries would you have to go back to find this kind of treatment of the Quakers? The point, however, is this: it is only in the face of such state violence that the fearless personality is forged, prepared for the enormous sacrifices needed to bring down regimes.

Then there is the third, least important point, that obviously JSO has not been able to stop the metamachine of universal death that is the British carbon regime. Justin, in true neoliberal style, focused only on the third point: our “failure” – the superficial, the short-term, the flat material plane. He and the media cannot see cultural and spiritual depth. 

The key determinants of regime change are now coming into place — large-scale funding, service-based culture, and the spirit of fearless sacrifice. There is one more ingredient. Ignored by the media is the “climate news” of the past 12 months, which is a hundred times worse than what provoked the mass mobilisation of Extinction Rebellion back in 2018. Underlying temperatures have jumped 0.2°C in a single year. We are now over 1.6°C and will be hitting 2°C by 2030. The carbon sinks are collapsing, and the feedbacks are triggered. Buried in the Appendix of the recent British Insurance Industry report is its prediction of 2 billion deaths at 2°C, and 4 billion at 3°C. That is half of the world’s population dead. This reality is about to explode upon us and trigger the fusion of the elements of revolutionary transformation.

Chris Hedges, the Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent for the New York Times during the 1990s, told me a while ago that the reason why the elites do not see revolutions coming is because they only speak to themselves. They are stuck in their silo. Like Justin Rowlett and the BBC, they can only see what they want to see. The world is falling away beyond our feet. Trump is doing his stuff. They have no alternative but to resort to appeasement. And like in the 1930s, their dream world is about to be swept away.

So are we just going to have ourselves die? The deepest paradox of the present historical moment is that only when we have the courage to answer yes to that question, and so allow ourselves to experience the agonising depths of despair, desolation, and self-contempt, can we come to see and feel reality as it actually is, and so play our part in the coming re-making of the world.

To find out about this new global movement (we’re recruiting!) go to rev21.earth.

Sign Up for Revolution in the 21st Century

Original article by Roger Hallam republished from Roger Hallam. I don’t have permission to republish this article but expect that it will be ok & he’s in prison.

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Orcas comment on killer apes destroying the planet by continuing to burn fossil fuels.
Continue ReadingSo, Are We Just Going to Let Ourselves Die?

Gaza government warns of imminent mass deaths due to Israel’s blockade; urges immediate humanitarian corridor

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This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

A Palestinian child named Osama El Rakab struggles for his life at Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, located in the southern part of Gaza, due to malnutrition-related body weakness on April 24, 2025 [Doaa Albaz/Anadolu Agency]

Gaza’s government issued a dire warning, Friday, that Palestinians in the besieged enclave are “on the brink of mass death” from widespread famine due to Israel’s nearly two-month aid blockade and the total collapse of essential services, Anadolu Agency reports.

In a statement, the Government Media Office held Israel and its backers responsible for a “genocide documented in sound and image”.

We warn of the worsening humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza as the complete Israeli siege and closure of crossings enters its 55th day, leading to the spread of famine and endangering the lives of over 2.4 million people

the office said.

The office added that famine in Gaza is now “a grim reality, not a threat”, with 52 recorded deaths due to hunger and malnutrition including 50 children, describing the situation as “one of the most horrifying forms of slow, deliberate killing.”

It added that more than 60,000 children suffer from acute malnutrition, while over a million children are facing daily hunger, leading to visible wasting and frailty.

READ: ICC judges ordered to review Israel’s challenge of jurisdiction

Calling it “a final call before the catastrophe”, the office stressed that any delay in response would amount to “clear complicity and active participation in the crime, a stain on the conscience of humanity and history.”

It demanded the urgent and unconditional opening of a safe humanitarian corridor “to save the lives of over 2.4 million Palestinians in Gaza before it’s too late.”

The office also called for independent international investigation of “the crime of starvation and slow killing committed by the Israeli Occupation.”

On 2 March, Israel shut all three Gaza Crossings to humanitarian aid and fuel, resuming its onslaught. The blockade has plunged Gaza’s 2.4 million residents, already dependent on aid after nearly 19 months of war, into extreme poverty, according to World Bank data.

Nearly 51,400 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza in a brutal Israeli onslaught since October 2023, most of them women and children.

The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants in November for Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.

Israel also faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice for its war on the enclave.

READ:  Gaza doctor receives parents among victims of Israeli bombardment

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpA
Vote For Genocide Vote Labour.
Vote For Genocide Vote Labour.
Continue ReadingGaza government warns of imminent mass deaths due to Israel’s blockade; urges immediate humanitarian corridor

Trump’s MAGA Wants To Kill US Public Broadcasting Because It Symbolizes a Better World

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Original article by Christian Christensen republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

People participate in a rally to call on Congress to protect funding for US public broadcasters, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR), outside the NPR headquarters in Washington, DC, on March 26, 2025. (Photo by Saul Loeb / AFP via Getty Images)

Anything representing the idea that the state could in any way contribute to the greater good is horrific and must be crushed.

The Trump Administration has announced its intention to withdraw over $1 billion in funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the organization that supports public broadcasting in the United States in the form of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR).

Although federal funding makes up only a small portion of the overall budgets for these organizations—a combination of private donations, corporate sponsorship, state financing makes up a larger part—the funding is vital for public television and radio in smaller local markets where public or corporate support is difficult to obtain. The cuts would likely kill off those smaller stations and weaken those in larger markets.

In effect, the last traces of public media would disappear from large sections of the United States, leaving them entirely in the hands of corporate media.

This attack on U.S. public media is perhaps the least surprising news imaginable. When I was interviewed last month here in Sweden after Trump effectively shut down Voice of America (VOA), I was asked what could be next on the Republican media agenda. I didn’t hesitate in my response: next would be the de-funding of the nation’s public broadcasting system. To me, it wasn’t a question of if…but when.

In its classic form, public service broadcasting of the type we have here in Europe treats the inhabitants of the country not as potential consumers, but as actual citizens.

The threat to kill public broadcasting in the U.S. is not the same as the killing of Voice of America. Through stations such as Radio Free Europe, VOA had always had been the mouthpiece of the U.S. state. It was part of global U.S. soft power, promoting the nation’s foreign policy and economic interests. It was anything but objective, independent journalism.

PBS and NPR, on the other hand, are something entirely different. They represent an alternative model for how media in the U.S. could be…or, at least, could have been. Created in 1967 under President Lyndon Johnson, and decades after private media giants ABC, NBC, and CBS had been allowed to take near-complete control over U.S. broadcasting, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was meant to provide U.S. citizens with a non-commercial media alternative.

Unlike their European counterparts, however, which began as well-financed monopolies in the 1920s and 1930s, U.S. public media were born weak. They were never meant to challenge the power of U.S. corporate media.

For the past half century, U.S. public broadcasting has existed at the margins of the national media ecosystem, producing high-quality educational programming and decent news that attracted a predominantly well-educated, urban audience. Low levels of federal funding meant that U.S. public broadcasting, again unlike European counterparts such as Sweden’s SVT or the UK’s BBC, was forced to take money from corporations in order to survive. When I lived in the U.S., PBS took so much “sponsorship” money from oil companies such as ExxonMobil that it was jokingly referred to as the “Petroleum Broadcasting System.”

So, why kill off the last remnants of a media system that attracts only a tiny fraction of the U.S. audience and gets the majority of its financing from non-government sources?

Simple. Because of what it represents.

The Trump administration and its oligarchy of advisors have as their central goal to destroy or undermine any and all institutions in U.S. society that either suggest an alternative to private, corporate control or provide a counter-argument to the myth that the “free market” is the best option for structuring U.S. society: from education to health care to media. The very idea that the state could in any way contribute to the greater good is horrific and must be crushed.

In its classic form, public service broadcasting of the type we have here in Europe treats the inhabitants of the country not as potential consumers, but as actual citizens. In modern societies, absolutely soaked in the logic of consumption, there needs to be at least a few spaces where your value is seen as inherent and not related to how much disposable income you have.

Here in Sweden, for example, that includes not just public broadcasting, but things like universal healthcare and university education. The logic is simple: being informed, being healthy and being educated should not be privileges restricted to those who can afford it. And, a well-informed, healthy and well-educated society benefits everyone.

Public broadcasting in the U.S. is in need of serious reform. And, public broadcasting in Europe isn’t perfect. But, despite their various flaws, their value can be found not only in what they produce in terms of content, but in what they tell people about how society can be structured. That working alternatives exist and can co-exist. That it’s possible to have a free market, but at the same time recognize there are some elements of society too important to be left to the mercies of corporations, billionaires, and profit margins.

For people like Trump and Musk, these non-commercial spaces of citizenship are viruses eating away at profits. But they aren’t the virus.

They are the vaccine.

Original article by Christian Christensen republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Continue ReadingTrump’s MAGA Wants To Kill US Public Broadcasting Because It Symbolizes a Better World