scispace - formally typeset
Open AccessJournal ArticleDOI

Tipping points: Early warning and wishful thinking

Reads0
Chats0
TLDR
In this article, a high-resolution ice core record was used to identify the most pronounced changes observed, beside the glacial terminations, are the Dansgaard-Oeschger events, which strongly suggest that they are noise induced and thus have very limited predictability.
Abstract
[1] The causes for and possible predictions of rapid climate changes are poorly understood. The most pronounced changes observed, beside the glacial terminations, are the Dansgaard-Oeschger events. Present day general circulation climate models simulating glacial conditions are not capable of reproducing these rapid shifts. It is thus not known if they are due to bifurcations in the structural stability of the climate or if they are induced by stochastic fluctuations. By analyzing a high resolution ice core record we exclude the bifurcation scenario, which strongly suggests that they are noise induced and thus have very limited predictability.

read more

Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI

Anticipating Critical Transitions

TL;DR: How previously isolated lines of work can be connected are reviewed, it is concluded that many critical transitions (such as escape from the poverty trap) can have positive outcomes, and how the new approaches to sensing fragility can help to detect both risks and opportunities for desired change.
Journal ArticleDOI

Early warning of climate tipping points

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors discuss the most promising approaches to early warning of tipping points in a climate system, where an external forcing causes a qualitative change in a system, such as the Greenland ice sheet tipping point.
Journal ArticleDOI

Twenty-three unsolved problems in hydrology (UPH)–a community perspective

Günter Blöschl, +212 more
TL;DR: In this article, a community initiative to identify major unsolved scientific problems in hydrology motivated by a need for stronger harmonisation of research efforts is described. But despite the diversity of the participants (230 scientists in total), the process revealed much about community priorities and the state of our science: a preference for continuity in research questions rather than radical departures or redirections from past and current work.
Journal ArticleDOI

Flickering gives early warning signals of a critical transition to a eutrophic lake state

TL;DR: The results suggest that if environmental regimes are sufficiently affected by large external impacts that flickering is induced, then early warning signals of transitions in modern social–ecological systems may be stronger, and hence easier to identify, than previously thought.
Journal ArticleDOI

Tipping points in open systems: bifurcation, noise-induced and rate-dependent examples in the climate system

TL;DR: This work presents an example of all three types of tipping in a simple global energy balance model of the climate system, illustrating the possibility of dangerous rates of change even in the absence of noise and of bifurcations in the underlying quasi-static system.
References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI

Evidence for general instability of past climate from a 250-kyr ice-core record

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a detailed stable isotope record for the full length of the Greenland Ice-core Project Summit ice core, extending over the past 250 kyr according to a calculated timescale, and find that climate instability was not confined to the last glaciation, but appears also have been marked during the last interglacial (as explored more fully in a companion paper), and during the previous Saale-Holstein glacial cycle.
Journal ArticleDOI

The fluctuation-dissipation theorem

TL;DR: In this article, the linear response of a given system to an external perturbation is expressed in terms of fluctuation properties of the system in thermal equilibrium, which may be represented by a stochastic equation describing the fluctuation, which is a generalization of the familiar Langevin equation in the classical theory of Brownian motion.
Journal ArticleDOI

A High-Resolution Absolute-Dated Late Pleistocene Monsoon Record from Hulu Cave, China

TL;DR: The record links North Atlantic climate with the meridional transport of heat and moisture from the warmest part of the ocean where the summer East Asian Monsoon originates and generally agrees with the timing of temperature changes from the Greenland Ice Sheet Project Two (GISP2).
Journal ArticleDOI

Tipping elements in the Earth's climate system

TL;DR: It is explained how, in principle, early warning systems could be established to detect the proximity of some tipping points, and critically evaluate potential policy-relevant tipping elements in the climate system under anthropogenic forcing.
Related Papers (5)