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Built for stability

Nature Geoscience volume 4, pages 414–416 (2011)Cite this article

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State-of-the-art climate models are largely untested against actual occurrences of abrupt change. It is a huge leap of faith to assume that simulations of the coming century with these models will provide reliable warning of sudden, catastrophic events.

Critical thresholds may be inherent to the climate system. If so, they could lead to abrupt, and perhaps irreversible, changes to the Earth system. This possibility has caught the imagination of the public — often under the emotive term 'tipping points' — and has led to a huge growth in media and scientific publications on the topic in the past few years1. If we are about to cross such a critical threshold, the implications for climate adaptation strategies could be significant. Likewise, knowledge of thresholds would have a strong influence on mitigation policy, not least by helping to define the meaning of the term 'dangerous climate change'.

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Figure 1: Simulated and reconstructed early Eocene temperatures.

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  1. Paul Valdes is in the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, University Road, Bristol BS8 1SS, UK,

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Valdes, P. Built for stability. Nature Geosci 4, 414–416 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1200

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