Overshooting tipping point thresholds in a changing climate.
Journal
Nature
ISSN: 1476-4687
Titre abrégé: Nature
Pays: England
ID NLM: 0410462
Informations de publication
Date de publication:
04 2021
04 2021
Historique:
received:
03
04
2020
accepted:
19
01
2021
entrez:
22
4
2021
pubmed:
23
4
2021
medline:
14
5
2021
Statut:
ppublish
Résumé
Palaeorecords suggest that the climate system has tipping points, where small changes in forcing cause substantial and irreversible alteration to Earth system components called tipping elements. As atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations continue to rise as a result of fossil fuel burning, human activity could also trigger tipping, and the impacts would be difficult to adapt to. Previous studies report low global warming thresholds above pre-industrial conditions for key tipping elements such as ice-sheet melt. If so, high contemporary rates of warming imply that exceeding these thresholds is almost inevitable, which is widely assumed to mean that we are now committed to suffering these tipping events. Here we show that this assumption may be flawed, especially for slow-onset tipping elements (such as the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation) in our rapidly changing climate. Recently developed theory indicates that a threshold may be temporarily exceeded without prompting a change of system state, if the overshoot time is short compared to the effective timescale of the tipping element. To demonstrate this, we consider transparently simple models of tipping elements with prescribed thresholds, driven by global warming trajectories that peak before returning to stabilize at a global warming level of 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level. These results highlight the importance of accounting for timescales when assessing risks associated with overshooting tipping point thresholds.
Identifiants
pubmed: 33883733
doi: 10.1038/s41586-021-03263-2
pii: 10.1038/s41586-021-03263-2
doi:
Types de publication
Journal Article
Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
Review
Langues
eng
Sous-ensembles de citation
IM
Pagination
517-523Références
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