Faster than forecast, climate impacts trigger tipping points in the Earth system
Opinion by David Spratt, First published at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, April 19, 2023
(Editor’s Note: I was writing songs about this article in 2010! Momentum of Ignorance, See all our music and our award winning film here. -MeltOn)
“Could anthropogenic climate change result in worldwide societal collapse or even eventual human extinction? At present, this is a dangerously underexplored topic… yet there are ample reasons to suspect that climate change could result in a global catastrophe,” wrote the eminent Australian climate scientist Will Steffen and his colleagues in August 2022 in “Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios.”
Steffen, who died earlier this year, will be remembered for some of the big, crucial ideas he contributed to the understanding of the Earth system, particularly planetary boundaries, tipping point vulnerabilities and cascades, risk and nonlinearity, and the “hothouse Earth” scenario—ideas developed with Tim Lenton, Johan Rockström, Katherine Richardson, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, and others.
In their 2018 “hothouse” paper, Steffen and his colleagues explored the potential for self-reinforcing feedbacks to push the Earth System toward a planetary threshold that, if crossed, “could prevent stabilization of the climate at intermediate temperature rises and cause continued warming on a ‘Hothouse Earth’ pathway even as human emissions are reduced.”
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