7 Tipping Points That Could Transform Earth

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/12/tipping-elements/

7 Tipping Points That Could Transform Earth

By Brandon Keim | December 23, 2009 | 12:40 pm

When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issue its last report in 2007, environmental tipping points were a footnote. A troubling footnote, to be sure, but the science was relatively new and unsettled. Straightforward global warming was enough to worry about.

But when the IPCC meets in 2014, tipping points — or tipping elements, in academic vernacular — will get much more attention. Scientists still disagree about which planetary systems are extra-sensitive to climate shifts, but the possibility can’t be ignored.

“The problem with tipping elements is that if any of them tips, it will be a real catastrophe. None of them are small,” said Anders Levermann, a climate physicist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.

Levermann’s article on potential disruptions of South Asia’s monsoon cycles was featured in a http://www.pnas.org/content/106/49.toc">series of tipping element research reviews, published December 8 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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[GliderGuider]

1. He mentioned hydrates but omitted permafrost.

IMO the risk posed by melting permafrost is much more immediate than the melting of seafloor hydrates, though it's possible that hydrates could have a larger eventual impact.