Tag: Tipping Points

New paper out on climate tipping points

~ dvdmckay ~ Leave a comment

We had a new paper out a month ago in Science, in which we reassess climate tipping points based on the past ~15 years of climate science. We conclude that five climate tipping points could already be possible at current warming levels, four of which becoming likely beyond 1.5°C. You can find a free referral link to the final published version over on my publications page (plus links to the accepted version and preprint), and a blogpost explaining the paper over at climatetippingpoints.info.

Summary figure for the paper, showing the climate tipping elements we identify and what global warming level they might tip at

This paper first started out in late 2019 during my last year as a postdoc at Stockholm Resilience Centre on the ERA project, with preliminary results first presented at EGU2020, so I’m really pleased to finally have this out (it’s effectively been my covid project!). It’s also in a way the academic manifestation of my climatetippingpoints.info science outreach site, writing for which led me to build up a big database of papers on various climate tipping points which I felt would be useful to bring together in a scientific paper. Along the way I teamed up with Prof. Tim Lenton, who had been planning on such an update of his 2008 paper that kicked off a lot of climate tipping points research, along with various colleagues from Stockholm Resilience Centre and the Earth Commission (who helped fund the latter stages).

We’ve had a lot of media coverage of the paper, despite an unexpectedly busy media landscape (the news about the queen broke just minutes before our press embargo lifted…). I was interviewed about the paper by Carbon Brief, The Guardian, New Scientist, New York Times, BBC World Service, Euronews, various Swedish outlets (Dagens Nyheter, Sveriges Radio, SVT Nyheter, TV4), and upcoming podcasts (Radio Ecoshock, Living on Earth, Voice of America). I also wrote an explainer blogpost as well as a piece at The Conversation highlighting the study’s nuances on how close we may be to reaching tipping points that some media coverage missed.

Talking about the paper at the Exeter Tipping Points conference

The paper also tied in with the “Tipping Points: from climate crisis to positive transformation” conference in Exeter in mid-September that I was on the programme committee for. We had over 200 delegates attend in-person from across academia, business, policymaking, and social movements (with more online and at the public debate), and had a lot of great insights on topics ranging from the risks from climate tipping points and socio-ecological cascades through to the possibility of triggering ‘positive’ socio-economic tipping points to accelerate decarbonisation. Outputs will be online soon and form the basis of a follow-up working paper and a new annual pre-COP ‘State of Tipping Points’ report.

So it’s been a busy few weeks on climate tipping points, capping off a few years of science synthesis and outreach. Hopefully this paper will serve as a useful reference point, and help show where some of the gaps are that bigger follow-up projects and assessments can tackle.

New Project: Agent Based Models & Ecosystem Tipping Points

~ dvdmckay ~ Leave a comment

Things continue to keep rapidly changing this year, and I’ve started on another new academic project!

Back in May I started a new Post-Doc Research Fellowship in the Global Environmental Change and Earth Observation group in the Geography and Environment dept. of the University of Southampton, working on the ReCoVER Network-funded pilot study project “Agent-based models for the analysis of early warning signals of ecosystem tipping points” with PI James G. Dyke. In this project we’re working on some new potential early warning signals for ecosystems near tipping points – in particular looking at the ecosystems’ compositional disorder and food web dynamics and replicating these using Agent Based Models (ABMs) – using lake eutrophication as a case study. We’re hoping this 6 month pilot study will lead to some new useful metrics for detecting potential tipping points in ecosystems (and socio-ecological systems) developed through a bigger project in future. Thanks again to the ReCoVER Network for funding this project! This means I’ll still be In Southampton for the rest of 2017, but beyond that who knows…

In other news, I’ll be giving a Winchester Café Scientifique talk on Monday 4th September about Climate Tipping Points (linked to my http://www.climatetippingpoints.info outreach project) – I’ll be talking about what climate tipping points are, how they might affect us, and whether we can predict them, as well as considering how they make climate change more of a “wicked problem” to deal with. Come along if you’re around!

ReCoVER Outreach Project on Climate Tipping Points

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I’m pleased to announce that I’ve been giving funding by the ReCoVER network to do some Outreach linked to the end of my current Research Fellowship, and so we’re now launching the project: “The Point of No Return? An Interactive Stall and Website Starting Conversations on Climate Tipping Points”.

title-pageIn this project we’ll be hosting conversations about climate tipping points at a series of stalls, public discussions, and online during October and November 2016, focusing on how they happen, why they’re important to our lives, and how researchers are trying to understand and predict them.

We’ll be running stalls at Southampton Sustainability Week (8th-16th October) – including at the Family Festival of Science at Thomas Hardye School on October 8th (tomorrow!) and at Researchers Café at Mettricks on October 14th – and at TEDx Southampton (5th November). We’ll upload materials from the stall on the website along with additional articles, blog posts, interactive discussions, integrated social media feeds, a podcast, and videos (in collaboration with local film-maker global documentary and a local animator) about climate tipping points.

So please pay a visit to www.climatetippingpoints.info, on twitter at @climatetippoint, and on facebook – we look forward to starting the conversation and invite you to join in!

NEWS: New Post-Doc on Palaeo Early Warning Signals (funded by ReCoVER)

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I’m pleased to announce that I’ve just started a new Post-Doc today at the University of Southampton, funded by the EPSRC/ReCoVER Network’s Early Career Researcher fund. I’ll be working for the next few months as a Research Fellow at Ocean and Earth Sciences in the National Oceanography Centre on a project entitled “Can early warning signals be reliably detected in the Cenozoic palaeoclimate record?” along with Co-Is Toby Tyrrell, James Dyke, and Tim Lenton. This will continue with research on the same topic that I started during my PhD, with the aim of extending the data and techniques used and write up some papers.

Some background: there are many points in Earth’s history where the Earth System is hypothesised to pass a ‘tipping point’ beyond which a rapid transition to a new and very different state occurs. These critical transitions are common in other complex dynamical systems and are often preceded in datasets by ‘early warning signals’ (EWS) such as critical slowing down (i.e. the system’s recovery time in response to perturbations slows down) and increasing variability (as the data gradually contains more extreme values). Dakos et al. [2008] and subsequent studies found that EWS can be detected prior to several past climate shifts, suggesting that critical transitions can successfully be detected in the palaeorecord and that palaeo tipping points can be identified. However, doubts have been raised about the reliability of EWS analysis on palaeoclimate records, the degree to which parameter selection can affect the results, and the risk of committing the ‘prosecutor’s fallacy’ when analysing suspected critical transitions. In my PhD I did a pilot study in which I analysed the highest-resolution palaeorecords currently available across a number of perturbations to the Cenozoic carbon-climate system, and found some promising results even when using a cautious approach to counter potential problems. In this Post-Doc I’ll focus on these most promising events with additional analytical techniques and data and publish the results in due course.

I’d like to thank the ReCoVER network and EPSRC for funding this research, and I look forward to sharing the results here in future!