Tipping Points

A tipping point is a critical threshold beyond which a system reorganises, often abruptly and/or irreversibly and a tipping element is an Earth system component that is susceptible to a tipping point. Key tipping elements include the collapse of the West Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets, the melting of the Arctic Permafrost, the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation and the dieback of the Amazon Forest. ....

The crossing of climate system tipping points may lead the climate to change regionally or globally, both by substantially affecting the Earth system and as a result of tipping cascades, leading to potentially catastrophic impacts. Tipping points impacts will also cascade through socio-economic and ecological systems over timeframes that are short enough to defy the ability and capacity of human societies to adapt, leading to severe effects on human and natural systems.

 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)  Dec 2022

Note: Global map of candidate tipping elements of the climate systems and potential tipping cascades. Arrows show the potential interactions among the tipping elements that could generate tipping cascades, based on expert elicitation.

Source: (OECD, 2021[5]); (Kriegler et al., 2009[6]; Cai, Lenton and Lontzek, 2016[7]; Wunderling et al., 2021[4])

Global Temperature

The year 2024 is on track to be the warmest year on record after an extended streak of exceptionally high monthly global mean temperatures, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). 

The January – September 2024 global mean surface air temperature was 1.54 °C (with a margin of uncertainty of ±0.13°C) above the pre-industrial average, boosted by a warming El Niño event, according to an analysis of six international datasets used by WMO. 

World Meteorlogical Organization (WMO) Provisional State of the Climate Report 2023.

The WMO provisional State of the Global Climate report confirms that 2023 is set to be the warmest year on record. Data until the end of October shows that the year was about 1.40 degrees Celsius (with a margin of uncertainty of ±0.12°C ) above the pre-industrial 1850-1900 baseline. WMO is a specialized agency of the United Nations.

September 2023 was Earth’s warmest September in 174-year record: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Admininstration (NOAA)

The average global temperature for September 2023 was 2.59 degrees F (1.44 degrees C) above the 20th-century average of 59.0 degrees F (15.0 degrees C), ranking as the warmest September on record. September 2023 saw the highest monthly global temperature anomaly — which indicates how much warmer or cooler temperatures are from the long-term average — of any month on record.

September 2023 marked the 49th-consecutive September and the 535th-consecutive month with temperatures above the 20th-century average.

World Resources Institute National Determined Contributions Plans Tracker.   The Paris Agreement requires countries to submit new Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) every five years, reflecting progressively higher ambition and taking into account each country’s capacity. The new round of NDCs, due in early 2025, will outline countries’ climate actions through 2035 and take into account the Global Stocktake. 

State of Climate Action 2023: World Resources Institute

The State of Climate Action 2023 provides the world’s most comprehensive roadmap of how to close the gap in climate action across sectors to limit global warming to 1.5°C. It finds that recent progress toward 1.5°C-aligned targets isn’t happening at the pace and scale necessary and highlights where action must urgently accelerate this decade to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, scale up carbon removal and increase climate finance. 

Impacts Happening Ahead of Projections or Greater than Projections
Bruce Melton, May 2023

This list of climate change impacts happening earlier or greater than projected includes details, short discussions/summaries, and links to documentation.  The compilations is an ongoing project of Bruce Melton and the Climate Change Now Initiative. If you have citations or interpretations that could be added to this list, please email them to Bruce at the email address provided in the document.

Counting the Cost of Climate Change, Christian Aid, 2022

Christian Aid identifies 20 of the most destructive climate disasters of the year. The ten most financially costly events all had an impact of $3 billion or more. Most of these estimates are based only on insured losses, meaning the true financial costs are likely to be even higher, while the human costs are often uncounted. Among them is Hurricane Ian which struck the US and Cuba in September costing $100 billion and displacing 40,000 people. The drought in Europe heatwave in Europe cost $20 billion while floods in Pakistan killed more than 1,700 people, displaced a further 7 million, and according to World Bank estimates caused $30 billion in economic damage. Due to the difficulty of obtaining insurance, only $5.6 billion of these losses were covered. 

Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters
NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), 

The NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) update to its 2022 Billion-dollar disaster report confirming another intense year of costly disasters and extremes throughout much of the United States. 2022 tied 2017 and 2011 for the third highest number of billion-dollar disasters. 2022 was also third highest in total costs (behind 2017 and 2005), with a price tag of at least $165.0 billion.

2022 was also deadly; the18 billion-dollar disasters of 2022 caused at least 474 direct or indirect fatalities—the 8th most disaster-related fatalities for the contiguous U.S. since 1980. 

The U.S. has sustained 355 weather and climate disasters since 1980 where overall damages/costs reached or exceeded $1 billion (including CPI adjustment to 2023). The total cost of these 355 events exceeds $2.540 trillion. 

Real-time attribution analysis of extreme weather events as they happen around the world.

Extreme Event Attribution was assessed by the US National Academy of Sciences to yield reliable estimates of changing risks of extreme weather casued by climate change. These analyses are carried out by The World Weather Attribution (WWA) initiative, a collaboration among climate scientists at Imperial College London in the UK, KNMI in the Netherlands, IPSL/LSCE in France, Princeton University and NCAR in the US, ETH Zurich in Switzerland, IIT Delhi in India, and climate impact specialists at the Red Cross / Red Crescent Climate Centre (RCCC) around the world.

NET ZERO TRACKER 

The Net Zero Tracker aims to increase transparency and accountability of net zero targets pledged by nations, states and regions, cities, and companies. They collect data on targets set and on many factors that indicate the integrity of those targets — essentially, how serious the entity setting the target is about meaningfully cutting its net emissions to zero.  Net Zero Tracker is a collaboration among four organisations:

• The Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), a non-profit organisation supporting informed debate on energy and climate change issues in the UK. 

• The Data-Driven EnviroLab (DDL), an interdisciplinary research lab headed by Dr. Angel Hsu and based at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

• NewClimate Institute, a non-profit institute established in 2014 that supports research and implementation of climate action around the globe

• Oxford Net Zero, an interdisciplinary research network based at the University of Oxford, that provide expertise and advice on the global race to net zero by national governments, global industry leaders and international organisations.

WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM NET ZERO INDUSTRY TRACKER REPORT 2023

The Net-Zero Industry Tracker report sets the World Economic Forum’s ambition to establish a robust tracking platform that supports the emergence of low-carbon industries by the decade’s end. Industrial sectors account for nearly 40% of global energy consumption and more than 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The transformation of these sectors is pivotal to reaching net-zero emissions by 2050. While efforts are under way and commitments are being made, the reality of net-zero for these industries is lagging and extrapolating from today’s speed of progress will fall far short. It is time to close the gaps with timely and consistent monitoring of industrial decarbonization. 

CLIMATE REANALYZER:  Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine 

Climate Reanalyzer began in early 2012 as a platform for visualizing climate and weather forecast models. Site content is organized into three general categories: Weather Forecasts, Climate Data, and Research Tools. Pages within the first two groups are the easiest to use and include maps, map animations, and interactive time series charts (with data export options). Research Tools include pages for generating custom maps, time series, and linear correlations from monthly climate reanalysis, gridded data, and climate models. Data sources and information are found toward the bottom of each page. 

WORLD METEOROLOGICAL ORGANIZATION

As a specialized agency of the United Nations, WMO is dedicated to international cooperation and coordination on the state and behaviour of the Earth’s atmosphere, its interaction with the land and oceans, the weather and climate it produces, and the resulting distribution of water resources. 

COPERNICUS CLIMATE CHANGE SERVICE (C3S)

Copernicus is the European Union's Earth Observation Programme. It consists of a complex set of systems that collect data from multiple sources: earth observation satellites and in situ sensors, such as ground stations, airborne and sea borne sensors.

BERKELEY EARTH

Environmental science, data, and analysis of the highest quality. Independent, non-governmental, and open-source.

WORLD RESOURCES INSTITUTE: Climate Data For Action - Climate Watch

Open data, visualizations and analysis to help policymakers, researchers and other stakeholders gather insights on countries' climate progress. 

OUR WORLD IN DATA:  Measuring progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are targets for global development that were adopted in 2015. All countries have agreed to work towards achieving them by 2030.

This SDG Tracker presents data across all available indicators from the Our World in Data database, using official statistics from the UN and other international organizations. This free, open-access information tracks global progress towards the SDGs and allows people worldwide to hold their governments accountable for achieving the agreed goals.

Indicators of Global Climate Change 2022: annual update of large-scale indicators of the state of the climate system and human influence

The purpose of this effort, grounded in an open data, open science approach, is to make annually updated reliable global climate indicators available in the public domain (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8000192),Smith et al, 2023a). As they are traceable to IPCC report methods, they can be trusted by all parties involved in UNFCCC negotiations and help convey wider understanding of the latest knowledge of the climate system and its direction of travel. 

SYSTEMS CHANGE LAB: Monitoring, learning from, and mobilizing action towards transformation

To ignite transformational change across our interconnected systems, Systems Change Lab has identified more than 70 shifts needed to protect both people and the planet. Within each shift, we measure how much progress has been made toward 2030 and 2050 science-based targets, as well as enablers and barriers of systems change. 

GLOBAL CARBON BUDGET PROJECT

The Global Carbon Budget Office is led by Professor Pierre Friedlingstein from the University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute with the support of more than 100 people from 70 organisations in 18 countries. 

Global carbon emissions from fossil fuels rose again in 2023 – reaching record levels. The annual Global Carbon Budget projects fossil carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions of 36.8 billion tonnes in 2023, up 1.1% from 2022. Fossil CO2 emissions are falling in some regions, including Europe and the USA, but rising overall – and the scientists say global action to cut fossil fuels is not happening fast enough to prevent dangerous climate change.

ALLIANCE OF WORLD SCIENTISTS: The 2023 state of the climate report: Entering uncharted territory  

The AWS is a new international assembly of scientists, which is independent of both governmental and non-governmental organizations and corporations. We submit, that in order to prevent widespread misery caused by catastrophic damage to the biosphere, humanity must practice more environmentally sustainable alternative to business-as-usual. Our vital importance and role comes from scientists' unique responsibility as stewards of human knowledge and champions of evidence-based decision-making. The main goal of the AWS is to be a collective international voice of many scientists regarding global climate and environmental trends and how to turn accumulated knowledge into action.