“A B S T R A C T
Keywords: Climate change, Tipping points, Global warming, Climate models, Climate projection
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Climate models are developed based on well-established physical principles applied to past and recent climate
changes. There is considerable confidence that the models can also provide estimates of some climate variables
(i.e., surface temperature, 2 levels, ocean heat content). Despite advanced mathematical developments in
the field of climate modeling, the existing climate models suffer from the following major limitations: first,
the models do not consider that their estimations will be highly unreliable when a tipping point is triggered;
secondly, many of the environmental tipping points are already triggered, however their existence is overlooked;
and third, the existing climate models do not consider the interrelations among the tipping points (i.e., one
tipping point can trigger other tipping points to be tipped more rapidly). Our objective is to describe the
importance of environmental “tipping points,” the importance of which is often ignored or downplayed in
relevant literature. Our analysis, based on extensive multidisciplinary literature searches, reveals that there are
many environmental tipping points which are overlooked in climate-modeling studies. We argue that climate
modeling could be improved when the tipping points and their interrelations are all considered within the
modeling process. We further discuss two other important issues regarding environmental tipping points: first,
all tipping points might not be as impactful on the climate system, therefore their relative impacts should
be ranked; second, it is in principle impossible to know the exact number of environmental tipping points,
therefore even though it could be possible to devise improvements to the existing climate models with our
suggestions, it may be impossible to achieve a perfect model to estimate the climate variables of the upcoming
years. The remainder of this paper is structured as follows: In the background section, we introduce research
on tipping points within commonly used climate models. We explain the aerosol masking effect and ocean
dynamics with respect to their commonly overlooked roles as important contributors to environmental change.
We introduce remote sensing and AI methods that serve as promising approaches for identification of currently
unknown tipping points. We mention perturbation theory, a standard set of mathematical methods in physics
that serves as a potentially systematic method to rank environmental tipping points according to their impact on
extant climate models. In the discussion section, we make suggestions regarding further research on identifying
the typically overlooked tipping points, and we make suggestions to improve climate models by considering
additional information presented in the current paper. Finally, we conclude this article summarizing our chief
methodological recommendations.”
Read or download the PDF of the full paper here.
Jullienne, how interesting. I will supplement the summary above with a link to hard data that puts it into perspective: https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/ . Guy McPherson would remind you that governments of the world, via the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, have concluded that climate change is the most abrupt in planetary history (Global Warming of 1.5 Degrees, 8 October 2018) and also irreversible (IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate, 24 September 2019). In the former case, the IPCC concluded that the rate of environmental change exceeded that which followed the interstellar body striking the Yucatán Peninsula, thus driving dinosaurs to extinction. In the latter case, the irreversibility of climate change was attributed to an overheated ocean.
I also suggest: https://guymcpherson.com/