{"id":290836,"date":"2023-12-11T09:58:14","date_gmt":"2023-12-11T08:58:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=290836"},"modified":"2023-12-11T09:58:16","modified_gmt":"2023-12-11T08:58:16","slug":"no-media-catastrophic-climate-tipping-points-are-nothing-to-worry-about","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=290836","title":{"rendered":"No, Media, \u2018Catastrophic Climate Tipping Points\u2019 are Nothing to Worry About"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Anthony Watts<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This week a number of mainstream and online media outlets have run alarming headlines warning of imminent \u201ccatastrophic climate tipping points,\u201d citing a recently published paper that warns of the immediate danger of passing the 1.5\u00b0C mark of planetary warming. The claim is false. Not only has objective data shown that mark has already been passed with no effects whatsoever, the claimed dangers are based on climate model projections, not actual cause and effect connections demonstrated by data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, The Guardian<\/em> blares the headline: Earth on verge of five catastrophic climate tipping points, scientists warn<\/strong><\/a>, <\/strong>while Politico writes Catastrophic climate \u2018tipping points\u2019 may be imminent<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to The Guardian<\/em>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many of the gravest threats to humanity are drawing closer, as carbon pollution heats the planet to ever more dangerous levels, scientists have warned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Five important natural thresholds already risk being crossed, according to the Global Tipping Points report<\/a>, and three more may be reached in the 2030s if the world heats 1.5C (2.7F) above pre-industrial temperatures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The tipping points at risk include the collapse of big ice sheets in Greenland<\/a> and the West Antarctic, the widespread thawing of permafrost, the death of coral reefs in warm waters, and the collapse of one oceanic current in the North Atlantic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At Politico, the doomsday news is even worse:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The melting Greenland ice sheet is the single largest contributor to global sea-level rise \u2014 and some experts are warning it could soon cross the threshold into a slow but irreversible death spiral.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A sweeping new scientific report<\/a>, with contributions from more than 200 researchers, finds that continued warming could trigger not only the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet but a wide variety of tipping points in the Earth\u2019s climate system. Once crossed, those thresholds would have unstoppable consequences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Greenland is one immediate worry. While it\u2019s still unclear exactly how much warming it would take to push the ice sheet over the edge, some experts say it could be as little as 1.5 degrees above preindustrial levels. Temperatures have already risen between 1.1 and 1.3 degrees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is worth noting at the outset that the sweeping new scientific report<\/a> upon which these news articles are based is not<\/em> a peer-reviewed scientific report, but rather simply a white paper published on a website. Further, the entire project was funded by the Bezos Earth Fund<\/a>, aka Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com which has pledged<\/a> to make its products and their delivery \u201cclimate friendly.\u201d On this basis, one could be excused for thinking the paper is nothing more than a feel-good marketing ploy to virtue signal Amazon\u2019s support for the doomsday-oriented climate narrative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Further undermining the idea that this is an objective scientific document is the fact that the authors themselves describe explicitly political ends as the reason for talking about tipping points. Their goal is not providing knowledge for consideration but rather explicitly about motivating political action, as stated in introduction pulldown preview section:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why we need to talk about tipping points<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This report is for all those concerned with tackling escalating Earth system change and mobilising transformative social change to alter that trajectory, achieve sustainability, and promote social justice. <\/em>[emphasis mine]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This political advocacy calls into question the scientific claims made in the report.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Addressing the specific claims, the assertions concerning Greenland\u2019s Ice Melt are wildly overblown, as seen in Figure 1 from\u00a0Climate at a Glance: Greenland Ice Melt:<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Figure 1. A comparison of presentations of satellite data capturing Greenland\u2019s ice mass loss. The image on the right show changes in Greenland\u2019s ice mass relative to Greenland\u2019s total ice mass. Sources: The data plotted in these graphs are from the Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-Comparison Exercise, a joint exercise by NASA and the European Space Agency.\u00a0Graphs originally by Willis Eschenbach. Adapted and annotated by Anthony Watts.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s true of the Greenland claim, is equally true of the other supposedly imminent tipping points assertions made in the report. The documents consistently fails to reference existing climate data, observed processes, or provide key context, preferring instead to focus on computer climate model projections of the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most importantly, the authors missed is the fact the longest existing temperature record on Earth suggests that temperatures have already increased 2.0\u00b0C \u201cabove preindustrial levels.\u201d Despite this, no worsening weather trends or damage to human societies from this have been measured.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Europe possesses the best, longest-running temperature records on the planet, those temperature records show warming has already exceeded 1.5\u00b0C, as can be seen in Figure 2 below from Berkeley Earth.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Figure 2. Berkeley Earth average European temperature since 1750. Source: https:\/\/berkeleyearth.lbl.gov\/regions\/europe<\/a> Graph annotated by Anthony Watts.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Yet even with 2\u00b0C of atmospheric warming since about 1820, the claimed catastrophic climate tipping points have not occurred. As discussed at <\/em>Climate at a Glance<\/em><\/a> and in dozens of posts on Climate Realism<\/em><\/a>, existing data refutes claims that the warming experienced so far, or that can be reasonably expected in the coming century, has or will cause worsening weather or increased natural disasters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The various projections of future tipping points resulting from rising greenhouse gas emissions are not based real world data, but are generated by deeply flawed computer models<\/a> that don\u2019t portray past temperature trends or present temperatures accurately.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The tipping point claims focus on the purported 1.5\u00b0C \u201cwarming limit\u201d climate alarmists within the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and in the mainstream media and NGO community have claimed since 2010 posed an amount of warming that would bring catastrophic, irreversible consequences. The big worry is that at 1.5 degrees, \u201ctipping points\u201d in the climate will occur<\/a>. As Climate at a Glance: Tipping Points<\/em><\/a>,<\/em> shows there is no evidence that any such tipping points exist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Climate Realism<\/em> article, Media Can\u2019t Agree on the Number of Climate Tipping Points, Much less When<\/a>,\u201d noted that the same five tipping points were listed as cause for alarm. The article also pointed out that this sort of scare story has been going on for at least 20 years. We\u2019ve been warned of climate tipping points before, so much so that they\u2019ve racked up an impressive record of non-performance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example. Google search shows well over a hundred, here is just a few of them:<\/p>\n\n\n\n