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OKIsItJustMe

(19,933 posts)
Tue Jul 12, 2016, 09:54 AM Jul 2016

Climate Tipping Points: What Do They Mean for Society?

http://news.rutgers.edu/news/climate-tipping-points-what-do-they-mean-society/20160711#.V4ROe65cMXk
[font face=Serif][font size=5]Climate Tipping Points: What Do They Mean for Society?[/font]

[font size=4]Rutgers and Harvard scientists lay out strategy for investigating societal consequences[/font]

Monday, July 11, 2016
By Todd B. Bates

[font size=3]The phrase “tipping point” passed its own tipping point and caught fire after author Malcolm Gladwell’s so-named 2000 book. It’s now frequently used in discussions about climate change, but what are “climate tipping points”? And what do they mean for society and the economy?

Scientists at Rutgers University and Harvard University tackle the terminology and outline a strategy for investigating the consequences of climate tipping points in a study published online today in the journal Earth’s Future.

“I hear from a lot of people in the general public who wonder whether we’ve passed a tipping point with respect to the climate, but frequently they don’t know precisely what the term means,” said Robert E. Kopp, the study’s lead author and an associate professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Rutgers. “And that’s on the scientific community. Oftentimes, we use the term in a way that doesn’t quite jive with popular understanding.”

“In the climate science world, the consequences of what are sometimes called tipping points may take decades or centuries to play out,” Kopp added. “By contrast, many people think, ‘OK, we’ve crossed a tipping point now, something is going to happen quickly.’ That’s more consistent with the way the term was popularized, before it was adopted by the climate science community, and that’s a terminological confusion we wanted to clarify.”

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