‘Climate Tipping Points’ May Help Us Predict Earth’s Future, New Research Says

Just before you know it, changes in the Earth system could happen in much shorter timescales, not long enough to "challenge the capacity of human societies to adapt to environmental pressures," or that was what this new study believes.

Even geological records of the past can attest to this. For instance, the abrupt changes to Earth's climate thousands of years ago caused extreme sea-level rise due to massive ice melt. Researchers are convinced that even the thousand-year-old record of change in one component of the Earth system provides an "early warning system for today's planetary tipping points".

Climate tipping points over the centuries are irreversible

The thing about the past that makes it significant still, regardless of how long ago it occurred, is that it will always serve as a critical threshold to the present, and even Earth's future. They are 'irrevocable over centuries or longer' and it is only a matter of perspective whether this long-term information is used to generate an idea, or be neglected for life.

These natural world changes include calamities like the melting of ice sheets atop Greenland and West Antarctica, which has enough frozen water to lift oceans more than a dozen meters (40 feet), although these phenomena were hardly anticipated due to the 'relatively small or incremental changes' in variables that trigger them.

"The geological record provides the only long-term information we have on the conditions and processes that can drive physical, ecological and social systems into new states or organizational structures that may be irreversible within human time frames," the scientists wrote.

The team used well-documented abrupt changes over the last 30,000 years to illustrate their impacts through the Earth system, such as the conditions that led to the Bølling-Allerød warming event nearly 15,000 years ago and the so-called African humid period around 6,000-5,000 years ago. Furthermore, they examined two major instabilities in the Earth system through ocean dynamics and rainfall patterns of the various past climate systems.

The current climate crisis is human-induced

"Earth's recent past shows us how abrupt changes in the Earth system triggered cascading impacts on ecosystems and human societies, as they struggled to adapt," said Tim Lenton, review co-author and director of the University of Exeter's Global Systems Institute.

"We face the risk of cascading tipping points again now - but this time it is of our own making, and the impacts will be global," he added.

The new research suggests that the new tipping point can trigger a rapid change that will challenge the capacity of ecosystems and human societies to adapt to the impacts.

"The chance to detect abrupt changes and tipping points - when small changes lead to big impacts - increases with the length of observations," the team wrote. "This is why analysis of abrupt changes and their cascades recorded in geological archives is of enormous importance."

While it might sound illogical, the authors 'foresee the future' by looking into the past.