Planetary Tipping Points
3 years, 11 months, 4 days, 18 hours
17 August 2025
How certain and imminent does something need to be, before we care enough to try to avoid it?
In the Science and Technology section of The Economist this week there is a two page discourse on planetary tipping points - components of the earth’s climate system that are at risk of irreversible loss as the average temperature of the planet rises. At least four of them are estimated by scientists to be highly vulnerable as that temperature crosses 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, ie, in less than four years, as per the countdown title of this post. They are the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet, collapse of the Greenland ice sheet, loss of the permafrost across the north of Canada, and permanent dying of the Australasian coral reefs.
I am happy to see that the Economist is raising awareness of something so important. But also gobsmacked that the piece is so intelllectually detached that its focus is about the difficulty of estimating exactly when a tipping point might be breached, and the efforts being made to use technologies to measure the precise rates of loss. It talks about the ‘pressing questions’, namely ‘how to tell if a tipping point is actually being crossed’ and ‘how to prepare for the consequences if it is’.
What about the pressing question of what we should do to avoid this catastrophe in the first place? For some bizarre reason that doesn’t feature at all.
It’s the equivalent of someone being diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, and deciding the two most important questions are improving the estimate of when they might die, and who will get their dog when they do, rather than what they could do that might cure it.