Current climate data, knowledge not enough to predict tipping points: Researchers   

New Delhi, August 5

Current data and understanding of Earth’s climate are not up to the task to accurately predict tipping points, or points of no return, for critical regions including tropical rainforests, according to a new study.

Climate tipping points play out in response to human-caused global warming and are marked by irreversible changes and consequences.

To predict a climate tipping point, scientists use past information to extrapolate or extend the trends into the future.

Citing “huge” gaps in past long-term data and an inadequate understanding of climate-related processes, the study’s authors said that the idea of predicting climate tipping points, while appealing, is “fraught with uncertainties.”

“Our research is both a wake-up call and a cautionary tale,” said Maya Ben-Yami, a doctoral researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), Germany, and lead author of the study published in the journal Science Advances.

“There are things we still can’t predict, and we need to invest in better data and a more in-depth understanding of the systems in question. The stakes are too high to rely on shaky predictions,” said Ben-Yami.

The authors argued that to predict a climate tipping point, along with using past data, “one must make assumptions about the system in question and how it will evolve.”

For example, for a certain component of Earth, such as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation or AMOC, the most fundamental assumption made is that it will experience a tipping point, or a point of no return, for a given level of global warming.

The AMOC, the system of currents in the Atlantic Ocean that influence the planet’s climate, is being widely studied to know if it is slowing down or close to a collapse.

A collapse of the AMOC is known to bring warmth to regions around the world and transport nutrients for sustaining ocean life, therefore, constitutes one of Earth’s climate tipping points.

However, not all of Earth’s components can undergo tipping, and as the methods used for analysis assume a tipping, the results are “susceptible to false positives,” the authors said.

Further, as long-term observations of the Earth’s climate are rare, the data might not represent a component, such as the AMOC or tropical rainforests, they said.

Also, the methods applied to fill “huge” gaps in data sets can introduce errors in the statistics used to predict possible tipping times, the authors said.

“In conclusion, we showed that the uncertainties discussed in this work are too large to allow for reliable estimates of the tipping time of major Earth system tipping elements, including the AMOC, the polar ice sheets, or tropical rainforests, based on extrapolating results from historical data,” the authors wrote.