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March 23, 2021
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These are the ‘positive’ tipping points that could slow global warming
(Credit: Unsplash)
This article is brought to you thanks to the collaboration of The European Sting with the World Economic Forum.
Author: Mark McCord, Writer, Formative Content
An academic paper suggests key tipping points can significantly reduce carbon emissions, which would help to slow global warming.
Government policies are making coal uneconomical.
Electric vehicle pricing structures have helped reduce the number of petrol and diesel cars on the world’s roads.
If chosen properly and applied internationally, such “tipping points” could set off a series of other changes that snowball into a movement with enough critical mass to slow global warming and reduce natural disasters.
The paper, published in the journal Climate Policy, argues that actions taken within each industry created a cascade of further developments that helped reduce their carbon footprints.
“In complex systems – including human societies – tipping points can occur, in which a small perturbation transforms a system,” wrote the paper’s authors, Professor Tim Lenton, Director of the Global Systems Institute (GSI) at the University of Exeter and Simon Sharpe, a Deputy Director in the UK Cabinet Office 26th session of the Conference of Parties (COP 26) unit.
01-15-2021
By
Earth.com staff writer
The world’s oceans have become less resilient to climate change. Global warming depletes the ocean of oxygen, and oceanic anoxia is expected to become more widespread under future climate projections. In a new study from the University of Exeter, however, experts report that oxygen levels in the ancient oceans were surprisingly resilient to climate change.
During the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum about 55 million years ago, the global average temperature rose by more than 5 degrees Celsius.
“The Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) is one of the best studied climate perturbation events in Earth’s history, but the driving mechanisms, environmental consequences, and recovery processes are still debated,” wrote the study authors.
Oxygen levels in the ancient oceans were surprisingly resilient to climate change, new research suggests.
Scientists used geological samples to estimate ocean oxygen during a period of global warming 56 million years ago - and found limited expansion of seafloor anoxia (absence of oxygen).
Global warming - both past and present - depletes ocean oxygen, but the new study suggests warming of 5°C in the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) led to anoxia covering no more than 2% of the global seafloor.
However, conditions are different today to the PETM - today s rate of carbon emissions is much faster, and we are adding nutrient pollution to the oceans - both of which could drive more rapid and expansive oxygen loss.