Researchers studying Earth’s climate have made a grim discovery about the reality of its climate. The planet has passed its first climate tipping point, with relentlessly rising heat temperatures in the oceans pushing corals around the world past their limit. This has caused the unprecedented death of global reefs and has threatened the livelihoods of nearly a billion people, scientists have stated in a new report published October 13.
Even in the most optimistic of future warming scenarios, under which global warming does not exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times, all warm-water coral reefs are virtually certain to pass a point of no return. And researchers believe the loss of corals is just the beginning of ecological losses that humanity will face.
“Since 2023, we’ve witnessed over a year of temperatures of more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial average,” said Steve Smith, a geographer at the University of Exeter who researches tipping points and sustainable solutions, at a press event October 7 ahead of publication. “Overshooting the 1.5 degree C limit now looks pretty inevitable and could happen around 2030. This puts the world in a danger zone of escalating risks, of more tipping points being crossed.”
These tipping points are seen as points of no return, slowly pushing the world over a proverbial peak into a new climate paradigm that would trigger a cascade of events. Depending on the degree of warming over the next few decades, the world could witness a rapid reduction of the Amazon rainforest, the collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, and perhaps most worrying of all, the collapse of a powerful ocean current system known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation.
It has now been ten years since the Paris Agreement, in which nearly all of the world’s nations agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions enough to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius by the year 2100, preferably limiting warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius in order to forestall the worst impacts of climate change.
However, as Tanya Steele, CEO of the United Kingdom office of the World Wildlife Fund, which hosted the press event, stated, “we are seeing the backsliding of climate and environmental commitments from governments, and indeed from businesses as well.”
This report is the second tipping point assessment released by an international consortium of over 200 researchers from more than 25 institutions. The report is released on the same day as ministers from nations across the world arrive in Belém, Brazil, in order to begin negotiations ahead of COP30, the annual United Nations Climate Change Conference.
There is a glimmer of hope, Smith said. “On the plus side, we’ve also passed at least one major positive tipping point in the energy system.” Positive tipping points, he said, are paradigm shifts that trigger a cascade of positive changes. “Since 2023, we’ve witnessed rapid progress in the uptake of clean technologies worldwide,” particularly in electric vehicles and solar photovoltaic (solar cell) technology. Meanwhile, battery prices for these technologies have also been dropping, and these effects “are starting to reinforce each other,” Smith said.
At this point, the challenge is not just about reducing emissions or even pulling carbon out of the atmosphere, says report coauthor Manjana Milkoreit, a political scientist at the University of Oslo who researches Earth system governance. Milkoreit and others write that what is needed is a wholescale paradigm shift in how governments approach climate change and mitigations. The problem is that the current systems of governance, national policies, laws and multinational agreements, including the Paris Agreement, were not designed with tipping points in mind. These systems were meant to encompass gradual, linear changes, not abrupt, rapidly cascading fallout on multiple fronts at once.
