Tipping Points - Say Whaaaaaaaaaa?

This is my first foray into the world of blogging, of course the blog itself was strongly suggested as part of my course (a requirement)…. but the topic itself originated as thought due to numerous conversations with some climate sceptic friends. I will be focusing on climatic and ecological ‘tipping points’ (where systems shift radically and potentially irreversibly into a different state). These tipping points are essentially condition thresholds that if crossed could lead to a catastrophic situation for much of the world. Quite sciencey at points but it will mean that we can examine questions like: was the Day After Tomorrow total bulls**t or was there an element of truth in there?

I genuinely don’t mean to be alarmist though (believe it or not given the picture i just inserted) and we aren’t currently at this point of no return, but, we are heading towards a potential disaster at an alarming rate. Thus this blog seems an ideal opportunity to inform those sceptics of the seriousness of the situation we face, a situation I consider the greatest challenge we must all collectively deal with this century.  Of course I hope that anyone else reading this also gains an insight, confirms his or her view or comments on just how wrong I am.

In this first post I will try and put my blog topic in context with a quick introduction to the relevant details of environmental science. Continuing on, I will look more closely at these tipping points, the potential catastrophic situations we face (or just detrimental), as well as try and explain the importance of a switch towards clean or certainly cleaner energy.

In terms of the Earth’s long history (4.54 billion years), the environment has been unusually stable for the last 10,000 years. This era of steady state conditions (or epoch) – which geologists have called the ‘Holocene’ - has allowed, or at the very least aided, civilization to rise, develop and eventually thrive.

Since the industrial revolution, a new era is commonly believed to have arisen, although this isn’t yet agreed upon on a geological timescale. It has been termed the ‘Anthropocene’, essentially meaning a shift in the state of Earth system being dominated by natural processes to being dominated by man. It was the industrial revolution that allowed us to expand our industries and control our landscapes to such an extent and scale that man has been severely impacting on the Earth’s systems around us and on which we depend. This was as I’m sure you know based largely on the burning of and current reliance on fossil fuels. Simplistically the natural cycle adds and removes CO2 to keep a balance; humans add extra CO2 without removing any, so creating a new dynamic. We use atmospheric carbon dioxide as a principal, simple indicator to track the progression of the Anthropocene. There are of course many more impacting factors, which we can talk about, but that’ll have to wait my friends (DUN DUN DUN, to be continued).

This influence on the environment could see the earth leave the stable conditions we have been accustomed to during the Holocene, with consequences, that if pushed past feared environmental thresholds, are detrimental or even catastrophic for large parts of the world. There are many complicating factors due to issues of timescales and regional differences but in essence by 2100 we may be facing anything from inconvenience to disaster if we continue in our business as usual fashion.

To end with I would like to note, that although fascinating, we ought to be doing our utmost to avoid these dangerous situations. Thus we can view these warnings, as recently given by the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (more on this later), as an opportunity to change our operating systems.

I.E. Something like this…?