‘Tipping points’ are fake---framing it as such undermines solvency.

For the set of likely future scenarios we face today, the climate science literature has not identified any approaching global tipping point after which runaway climate change intensifies beyond humanity’s ability to arrest it. While tipping elements of the climate system—like Arctic permafrost thaw and loss of Amazon forest area—do influence total warming, the magnitude of this influence is substantially smaller than the societal factors that will ultimately determine the planet’s climate trajectory.

To you, the reader, the lines above may feel stiff and overly qualified. They, like countless similar sentences in IPCC reports and academic papers, rely on very careful choice of terminology to maintain their accuracy. Yet such care seems increasingly incompatible with a climate discourse that, at times, nurses a weakness for spectacle while trying to satisfy a hunger for clarity about the future that researchers cannot yet provide.

One example that holds fascination for me today, just as it did for my younger novelist self, is the topic of tipping points. More formally called “climate tipping elements,” this subject is a continuously evolving body of knowledge that has been particularly susceptible to confusion and misinterpretation.

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Over the years, groups of earth scientists have offered slightly different definitions of tipping elements, and lists of proposed tipping elements have changed with various additions and removals. Tropical monsoons and abrupt changes in the El Niño cycle have fallen out of many lists, while worry over the East Antarctic ice-sheet’s stability is increasing. Meanwhile, research that presents a range of possible climate impacts after global temperatures cross some theorized tipping point often gets summarized by writers and journalists using upper-end, worst-case potential outcomes.

It is not particularly surprising that when arcane scientific detail meets simplistic reporting, it results in a muddle, and it’s a muddle the term “tipping point” itself—evoking an abruptness and immediacy not necessarily characteristic of most, let alone all, tipping elements—perhaps adds to. Climate tipping points and “runaway climate change” are now common parlance in climate conversations, and while different advocates may mean different things in practice when using these terms, they speak to a broadly shared, yet inaccurate, understanding that the climate system is on the verge of very unstable, self-reinforcing, and abruptly rapid disaster.

It isn’t. And it’s important to understand that it isn’t. Taken at rational face value, the feeling that the planet is just years away from sliding beyond a catastrophic point of no return invites unproductive fatalism. At the same time, the perception of an imminent climate cliff seemingly rules out long-term planning in favor of emergency measures, skewing discussion of climate policies in ways that can be counterproductive.

Looking ahead, the key message that the scientific community and climate advocates should reinforce is that humanity will always have chief agency over the climate. There is no tipping point beyond which Mother Earth wrestles control of the whole climate system away from human beings and proceeds to punish us for our sins.