CLIMATE HOUR – Tipping points are thresholds at which a tiny change can alter an entire system. A climate tipping point is a critical threshold at which a regional climate system changes from one stable state to another stable state. For example, the state of a region changing from cropland to desert. Or, in the case of today’s topic, the Arctic changing from an ice pack to open ocean.
A study published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, has identified nine global climate tipping points. We’ve already reached two of them. The collapse of the Greenland Ice Sheet, and the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. And continuing business as usual will trigger another four of the world’s remaining climate tipping points. Once we cross a tipping point, we can never go back. And each tipping point crossed accelerates the approach of the next tipping point.
Join host, Bob Grove, and Dr Richard Davy to discuss World Tipping Points: Emerging Collapse Of The Arctic Sea Ice.
Dr Davy is the Senior Researcher in Polar Climate at the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center with the Bjerknes Center for Climate Research in Bergen, Norway. For the last decade, he’s worked on the physics of global climate change to forecast how our climate future.
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