Tipping Point

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, tipping points are "thresholds in the climate system that, when exceeded, can lead to self-sustaining changes in the state of the system even if the anthropogenic forcing is reduced," resulting in impacts that are often considered irreversible. They are moments when accumulated pressure on a system can trigger a major shift that is sudden and most likely irreversible. (1) Think about it as the moment when adding the last drop to a glass causes it to overflow, or when removing a piece from a Jenga tower causes it to topple.

These moments can happen in any kind of system, from social to natural environments, but the most urgent and widely discussed right now are climate tipping points. These are critical, and they are changing because of our actions, driven primarily by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. The most significant climate tipping points identified by scientists include the collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, the dieback of the Amazon rainforest, the thawing of permafrost regions, the disruption of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), and the mass die-off of tropical coral reefs. (2) Scientists now warn that the world has already crossed the first of these tipping points, with warm-water coral reefs having reached a point of widespread and irreversible mortality. (3)

A classical example is the melting of glacier ice in Greenland. If global temperatures keep increasing at the level they are increasing right now, it is more likely that the ice sheet is going to melt faster than before. This will dramatically increase sea level rise around the world, but also affect climate patterns in every corner. Once this process starts, it is almost impossible to stop and probably not able to reverse. There are going to be changes within the water system, the food systems, and food security.