<
https://www.positive.news/environment/tim-lenton-positive-tipping-points-climate/>
"Professor Tim Lenton is having a chocka-block afternoon. With back-to-back
interviews, journalists are eager to ask Lenton, who is director of the Global
Systems Institute at the University of Exeter, about one thing. They aren’t
interviewing him for the same reason as I am though, he tells me. They’re eager
to hear about a paper that will be published the following day. “A bad news
paper” Lenton says, holding it up so I can see the title:
Quantifying the
human cost of global warming. Ouch.
Publishing work like this is “something you have to do if you want to avoid the
tyranny of economists telling you that, ‘oh, [climate change] is not a big deal
after all’”, he says.
Scanning a list of his publications over the last few decades, the headlines
don’t get much cheerier: ‘Climate tipping points: too risky to bet against’,
reads one; ‘Pronounced loss of Amazon rainforest resilience since the early
2000s’ another. Lenton is among the original group of concerned scientists that
were sounding the warning bell for climate action back in the early 2000s, and
much of his work has centred around climate tipping points. The concept refers
to what happens when small planetary changes combine to cross a critical
threshold, triggering irreversible consequences. The world may already be on
the brink of crossing some of these, such as the collapse of Greenland’s ice
cap and the loss of the Amazon rainforest.
But the reason I’m speaking to Lenton today is about something that began to
percolate in his mind a decade ago. Something that has become
headline-grabbing, but in a vastly different way: the idea that tipping points
are happening not just within the climate, but within societies and economies,
so-called positive tipping points. “I wrote a tiny bit about it in a book
called
Revolutions that Made the Earth” he recollects, which was published in
2011, “but I wasn’t spending a lot of time researching it.”
Until, that is, it became clear to him that positive tipping points were
actually beginning to happen. “I could see these exponential changes starting
to unfold around me and I thought, people just aren’t realising the potential
here.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
