Scientists warn of ice-sheet collapse, coral die-off: Climate tipping points teetering on edge
An international team of researchers have identified five climate tipping points that are on edge and could lead to irreversible damage to the planet.
Sep 09, 2022
From floods in Pakistan to wildfires in the United States to droughts across China, the effects of climate change have become more frequent and severely intense as the world looks on. A new study warns that five climate tipping points could happen sooner than expected.
Published in the journal Science, researchers warned that these changes may lead to abrupt, irreversible, and dangerous impacts with serious implications for humanity. It is worth mentioning that climate tipping points are conditions beyond which changes in a part of the climate system become self-perpetuating and potentially irreversible.
Researchers have been monitoring 16 climate tipping points, the environmental threshold beyond which the global climate system could spiral toward a dangerous state, for over a decade and have found that while most are not possible at current temperatures, a few could happen sooner than expected.
CLIMATE TIPPING AHEAD
Researchers warned that with only a few more tenths of a degree of warming from now, at 1.5 degrees Celsius, warming since pre-industrial times, five climate tipping points will enter the threshold zone. These five tipping points include:
* Irreversible collapse of the Greenland ice sheet
* Irreversible collapse of the west Antarctic ice sheet
* Immediate loss of tropical coral reefs around the globe
* Collapse of the Labrador-Irminger Seas convection
* Thawing of high northern permafrost that releases massive amounts of greenhouse gases
"We can see some potential early warning signals. The Greenland Ice Sheet is showing signs of destabilization with lots of melt and there are potentially early warnings that the Atlantic circulation might be slowing down," climate scientist David Armstrong McKay, a coauthor of the study said.
Earlier this year, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated that the risk of triggering climate tipping points becomes high at around 2C of warming.
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?
While ice sheets with several meters or yards of potential sea rise can reshape the coastline over centuries, the loss of coral reefs could have major consequences on human life since millions of people, especially poorer tropical area residents, depend on fisheries linked to the coral reefs.
When it comes to the timing of the consequences, while the ice sheet collapse could be triggered soon their impact will take some time to play out as compared to the loss of coral reefs, which will have consequences within the decade.
"It's a future generation issue. That ice sheets collapsing is kind of that thousand-year timescale, but it's still bequeathing an entirely different planet to our descendants," McKay added, while study co-author Tim Lenton, an Earth systems scientist at the University of Exeter prayed that they are not right.
"There's a distinct chance some of these tipping points are going to be unavoidable. And therefore it's really important we do some more thinking about how we're going to adapt to the consequences," Lenton told the Associated Press.
The analysis by the international team of researchers indicates that even global warming of 1 degree Celsius, a threshold that we already have passed, puts us at risk by triggering some tipping points.
