#RunawayClimate
LightNews LightNews
chrizau.bsky.social
#RunawayClimate nachdem wir den "point of no return" überschritten haben - sollten wir vermeiden wenn es vielleicht noch möglich ist, oder?

www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailin...
The “runaway” climate threat now is the danger that today’s accelerated global warming will push Earth past a “point of no return,” with irreversible consequences for today’s young people and their descendants. I described the danger of rapid ice sheet collapse and sea level rise as the “tipping point” in a December 2005 tribute to Charles David Keeling14 and Bill McKibben popularized this a month later in an article15 in the New York Review. However, Lenton et al.16 now use “tipping point” for a broad range of climate feedbacks, many of which are reversible when the climate forcing is removed or replaced with global cooling. Therefore, I prefer “point of no return”1 as terminology for the point of lock-in of unavoidable ice sheet collapse. The danger of passing the point of no return is taboo with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the organization that we should expect to be most protective of the future of young people. This reticence of IPCC is a cause for concern, which deserves to be pointed out and vigorously debated. IPCC relies on models with millennial response times, even when driven by forcings that dwarf any experienced in Earth’s history. Based on paleoclimate data, global modeling, and ongoing ocean and ice sheet observations, we have concluded that shutdown of the ocean’s overturning circulation could occur within decades and this will affect ocean/ice sheet interactions and the rate of sea level rise.17 We will show in later chapters that up-to-date data support these conclusions. Concern about the danger of passing the point of no return is not a reason to panic. The climate system’s delayed response provides time to take preventive actions, if the science is understood well enough to define effective policy actions.
September 18, 2026 at 1:54 PM