Showing papers on "Tipping point (climatology) published in 2017"

Academic research in the 21st century: maintaining scientific integrity in a climate of perverse incentives and hypercompetition.

Abstract: Over the last 50 years, we argue that incentives for academic scientists have become increasingly perverse in terms of competition for research funding, development of quantitative metrics to measure performance, and a changing business model for higher education itself. Furthermore, decreased discretionary funding at the federal and state level is creating a hypercompetitive environment between government agencies (e.g., EPA, NIH, CDC), for scientists in these agencies, and for academics seeking funding from all sources—the combination of perverse incentives and decreased funding increases pressures that can lead to unethical behavior. If a critical mass of scientists become untrustworthy, a tipping point is possible in which the scientific enterprise itself becomes inherently corrupt and public trust is lost, risking a new dark age with devastating consequences to humanity. Academia and federal agencies should better support science as a public good, and incentivize altruistic and ethical outco...

A Tipping Point for Measurement-Based Care

Abstract: Objective:Measurement-based care involves the systematic administration of symptom rating scales and use of the results to drive clinical decision making at the level of the individual patient. Thi...

A deforestation-induced tipping point for the South American monsoon system.

Abstract: The Amazon rainforest has been proposed as a tipping element of the earth system, with the possibility of a dieback of the entire ecosystem due to deforestation only of parts of the rainforest. Possible physical mechanisms behind such a transition are still subject to ongoing debates. Here, we use a specifically designed model to analyse the nonlinear couplings between the Amazon rainforest and the atmospheric moisture transport from the Atlantic to the South American continent. These couplings are associated with a westward cascade of precipitation and evapotranspiration across the Amazon. We investigate impacts of deforestation on the South American monsoonal circulation with particular focus on a previously neglected positive feedback related to condensational latent heating over the rainforest, which strongly enhances atmospheric moisture inflow from the Atlantic. Our results indicate the existence of a tipping point. In our model setup, crossing the tipping point causes precipitation reductions of up to 40% in non-deforested parts of the western Amazon and regions further downstream. The responsible mechanism is the breakdown of the aforementioned feedback, which occurs when deforestation reduces transpiration to a point where the available atmospheric moisture does not suffice anymore to release the latent heat needed to maintain the feedback.

Who Can You Trust?: How Technology Brought Us Together and Why It Might Drive Us Apart

Abstract: If you can't trust those in charge, who can you trust? From government to business, banks to media, trust in institutions is at an all-time low. But this isn't the age of distrust--far from it. In this revolutionary book, world-renowned trust expert Rachel Botsman reveals that we are at the tipping point of one of the biggest social transformations in human history--with fundamental consequences for everyone. A new world order is emerging: we might have lost faith in institutions and leaders, but millions of people rent their homes to total strangers, exchange digital currencies, or find themselves trusting a bot. This is the age of "distributed trust," a paradigm shift driven by innovative technologies that are rewriting the rules of an all-too-human relationship. If we are to benefit from this radical shift, we must understand the mechanics of how trust is built, managed, lost, and repaired in the digital age. In the first book to explain this new world, Botsman provides a detailed map of this uncharted landscape--and explores what's next for humanity.

Critical dynamics in population vaccinating behavior

Abstract: Vaccine refusal can lead to renewed outbreaks of previously eliminated diseases and even delay global eradication. Vaccinating decisions exemplify a complex, coupled system where vaccinating behavior and disease dynamics influence one another. Such systems often exhibit critical phenomena-special dynamics close to a tipping point leading to a new dynamical regime. For instance, critical slowing down (declining rate of recovery from small perturbations) may emerge as a tipping point is approached. Here, we collected and geocoded tweets about measles-mumps-rubella vaccine and classified their sentiment using machine-learning algorithms. We also extracted data on measles-related Google searches. We find critical slowing down in the data at the level of California and the United States in the years before and after the 2014-2015 Disneyland, California measles outbreak. Critical slowing down starts growing appreciably several years before the Disneyland outbreak as vaccine uptake declines and the population approaches the tipping point. However, due to the adaptive nature of coupled behavior-disease systems, the population responds to the outbreak by moving away from the tipping point, causing "critical speeding up" whereby resilience to perturbations increases. A mathematical model of measles transmission and vaccine sentiment predicts the same qualitative patterns in the neighborhood of a tipping point to greatly reduced vaccine uptake and large epidemics. These results support the hypothesis that population vaccinating behavior near the disease elimination threshold is a critical phenomenon. Developing new analytical tools to detect these patterns in digital social data might help us identify populations at heightened risk of widespread vaccine refusal.

The Trump phenomenon: An explanation from sociophysics

Abstract: The Trump phenomenon is argued to depart from current populist rise in Europe. According to a model of opinion dynamics from sociophysics the machinery of Trump’s amazing success obeys well-defined counter-intuitive rules. Therefore, his success was in principle predictable from the start. The model uses local majority rule arguments and obeys a threshold dynamics. The associated tipping points are found to depend on the leading collective beliefs, cognitive biases and prejudices of the social group which undertakes the public debate. And here comes the open sesame of the Trump campaign, which develops along two successive steps. During a first moment, Trump’s statement produces a majority of voters against him. But at the same time, according to the model the shocking character of the statement modifies the prejudice balance. In case the prejudice is present even being frozen among voters, the tipping point is lowered at Trump’s benefit. Nevertheless, although the tipping point has been lowered by the ac...

Will productivity growth return in the new digital era

Abstract: It is increasingly acknowledged that we are on the verge of the next technological revolution and the fourth industrial revolution, driven by the digitization and interconnection of all physical elements and infrastructure under the control of advanced intelligent systems. Therefore, there will be a new era of automation that should result in enhanced productivity. However, such productivity enhancements have been anticipated before, particularly during the third industrial revolution commonly known as the ‘information age’, and have failed to materialize. Were the productivity increases observed following the first and second industrial revolutions a one-time aberration that will not be repeated in the new digital age? In this paper, we attempt to address this question by a semi-quantitative analysis of the prior productivity jumps and their physical technological origins, and extend this analysis to the latent set of analogous digital technologies. Using this approach, we project that there will indeed be a second productivity jump in the United States that will occur in the 2028–2033 timeframe when the aggregate of the constituent technologies reaches the tipping point at 51 percent penetration.

Detecting the tipping points in a three-state model of complex diseases by temporal differential networks.

Abstract: The progression of complex diseases, such as diabetes and cancer, is generally a nonlinear process with three stages, i.e., normal state, pre-disease state, and disease state, where the pre-disease state is a critical state or tipping point immediately preceding the disease state. Traditional biomarkers aim to identify a disease state by exploiting the information of differential expressions for the observed molecules, but may fail to detect a pre-disease state because there are generally little significant differences between the normal and pre-disease states. Thus, it is challenging to signal the pre-disease state, which actually implies the disease prediction. In this work, by exploiting the information of differential associations among the observed molecules between the normal and pre-disease states, we propose a temporal differential network based computational method to accurately signal the pre-disease state or predict the occurrence of severe disease. The theoretical foundation of this work is the quantification of the critical state using dynamical network biomarkers. Considering that there is one stationary Markov process before reaching the tipping point, a novel index, inconsistency score (I-score), is proposed to quantitatively measure the change of the stationary processes from the normal state so as to detect the onset of pre-disease state. In other words, a drastic increase of I-score implies the high inconsistency with the preceding stable state and thus signals the upcoming critical transition. This approach is applied to the simulated and real datasets of three diseases, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our method for predicting the deterioration into disease states. Both functional analysis and pathway enrichment also validate the computational results from the perspectives of both molecules and networks. At the molecular network level, this method provides a computational way of unravelling the underlying mechanism of the dynamical progression when a biological system is near the tipping point, and thus detecting the early-warning signal of the imminent critical transition, which may help to achieve timely intervention. Moreover, the rewiring of differential networks effectively extracts discriminatively interpretable features, and systematically demonstrates the dynamical change of a biological system.

Avoiding a crisis of motivation for ocean management under global environmental change

Abstract: Climate change and ocean acidification are altering marine ecosystems and, from a human perspective, creating both winners and losers. Human responses to these changes are complex, but may result in reduced government investments in regulation, resource management, monitoring and enforcement. Moreover, a lack of peoples' experience of climate change may drive some towards attributing the symptoms of climate change to more familiar causes such as management failure. Taken together, we anticipate that management could become weaker and less effective as climate change continues. Using diverse case studies, including the decline of coral reefs, coastal defences from flooding, shifting fish stocks and the emergence of new shipping opportunities in the Arctic, we argue that human interests are better served by increased investments in resource management. But greater government investment in management does not simply mean more of 'business-as-usual.' Management needs to become more flexible, better at anticipating and responding to surprise, and able to facilitate change where it is desirable. A range of technological, economic, communication and governance solutions exists to help transform management. While not all have been tested, judicious application of the most appropriate solutions should help humanity adapt to novel circumstances and seek opportunity where possible.

An evolutionary tipping point in a changing environment.

Abstract: Populations can persist in directionally changing environments by evolving. Quantitative genetic theory aims to predict critical rates of environmental change beyond which populations go extinct. Here, we point out that all current predictions effectively assume the same specific fitness function. This function causes selection on the standing genetic variance of quantitative traits to become increasingly strong as mean trait values depart from their optima. Hence, there is no bound on the rate of evolution and persistence is determined by the critical rate of environmental change at which populations cease to grow. We then show that biologically reasonable changes to the underlying fitness function can impose a qualitatively different extinction threshold. In particular, inflection points caused by weakening selection create local extrema in the strength of selection and thus in the rate of evolution. These extrema can produce evolutionary tipping points, where long-run population growth rates drop from positive to negative values without ever crossing zero. Generic early-warning signs of tipping points are found to have little power to detect imminent extinction, and require hard-to-gather data. Furthermore, we show how evolutionary tipping points produce evolutionary hysteresis, creating extinction debts.

Mitigating global warming: a real options approach

Abstract: Mitigation and adaptation represent two solutions to the issue of global warming. While mitigation aims at reducing CO2 emissions and preventing climate change, adaptation encompasses a broad scope of techniques used to reduce the impacts of climate change once they have occurred. Both have direct costs on a country’s Gross Domestic Product, but costs also arise from temperature increases due to inaction. This paper introduces a tipping point in a real options model and analyzes optimal investment choices in mitigation and their timing.

Potential stabilizing points to mitigate tipping point interactions in Earth's climate

Abstract: ‘Tipping points’ (TPs) are thresholds of potentially disproportionate changes in the Earth's climate system associated with future global warming and are considered today as a ‘hot’ topic in environmental sciences. In this study, TP interactions are analysed from an integrated and conceptual point of view using two qualitative Boolean models built on graph grammars. They allow an accurate study of the node TP interactions previously identified by expert elicitation and take into account a range of various large-scale climate processes potentially able to trigger, alone or jointly, instability in the global climate. Our findings show that, contrary to commonly held beliefs, far from causing runaway changes in the Earth's climate, such as self-acceleration due to additive positive feedbacks, successive perturbations might actually lead to its stabilization. A more comprehensive model defined TPs as interactions between nine (non-exhaustive) large-scale subsystems of the Earth's climate, highlighting the enhanced sensitivity to the triggering of the disintegration of the west Antarctic ice sheet. We are claiming that today, it is extremely difficult to guess the fate of the global climate system as TP sensitivity depends strongly on the definition of the model. Finally, we demonstrate the stronger effect of decreasing rules (i.e. mitigating connected TPs) over other rule types, thus suggesting the critical role of possible ‘stabilizing points’ that are yet to be identified and studied.

Global Warming and a Potential Tipping Point in the Atlantic Thermohaline Circulation: The Role of Risk Aversion

Abstract: The risk of catastrophes is one of the greatest threats of climate change. Yet, conventional assumptions shared by many integrated assessment models such as DICE lead to the counterintuitive result that higher concern about climate change risks does not lead to stronger near-term abatement efforts. This paper examines whether this result still holds in a refined DICE model that employs the Epstein–Zin utility specification and that is fully coupled with a dynamic tipping point model describing the evolution of the Atlantic thermohaline circulation (THC). Risk is captured by the possibility of a future collapse of the circulation and it is nourished by fat-tailed uncertainty about climate sensitivity. This uncertainty is assumed to resolve in the middle of the second half of this century and the near-term abatement efforts, which are undertaken before that point of time, can be adjusted afterwards. These modelling choices allow posing the question of whether aversion to this specific tipping point risk has a significant effect on near-term policy efforts. The simulations, however, provide evidence that it has little effect. For the more likely climate sensitivity values, a collapse of the circulation would occur in the more distant future. In this case, acting after learning can prevent the catastrophe, implying the remarkable insensitivity of the near-term policy to risk aversion. For the rather unlikely and high climate sensitivity values, the expected damage costs are not great enough to justify taking very costly measures to safeguard the THC. Our simulations also provide some indication that risk aversion might have some effect on near-term policy, if inertia limiting the speed of decarbonisation is accounted for. As it is highly uncertain how restrictive this kind of inertia will be, future research might investigate the effects of risk aversion if additional uncertainty about inertia is considered.

Understanding the Social-ecological System of Wetlands

Abstract: The concept of social-ecological system is receiving increasing recognition from the scientific community as a tool for analysing complex phenomena. The wetlands’ social-ecological systems provide valuable economic, social and environmental benefits to society. However, disturbances in wetland system due to human intervention have already led some of the wetlands’ social-ecological system towards the tipping point. Furthermore, in the context of the projected impacts of environmental and climate change, organisms inhabiting and dependent on wetlands, which are at the centre of the social-ecological system, are likely to require greater resilience and innovative coping strategies. The present chapter introduces the concepts of the social-ecological system using real-world case studies from the coastal Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta in Bangladesh in order to facilitate understanding of social-ecological system as well as interactions between ecological factors and human wellbeing. The chapter also discusses the critical issues of managing social-ecological system in order to support sustainable ecosystem management.

Tipping Toward Transformation: Progress, Patterns and Potential for Climate Change Adaptation in the Global South

Abstract: In response to observed and projected climate change impacts, major donors are funding an abundance of climate change research in the global South. The product of these funding schemes is often an abundance of cases with little attention paid to capturing the broader trends and patterns across cases. Furthermore, calls are increasingly being made for both adaptation and mitigation policies that are transformative: strategies that tackle the roots of vulnerability and high carbon development pathways to create a more fundamental shift towards sustainability. In this paper, we assess 54 cases of donor-funded adaptation research in the global South to paint a detailed picture of the types of adaptation options being proposed and implemented, their scope and the intended beneficiaries. We consider these data through the lens of transformation: to what extent do these cases illustrate adaptation actions that might push the social-ecological system over a tipping point towards a more desirable, sustainable state? Ultimately, we find that the adaptation options in these cases focus on educational or behavioral campaigns rather than deeper governance, legislative, or economic shifts. Similarly, the scale of action most often targets communities, rather than ecosystems, watershed, or regional/national scales. Even so, the emergence of resilience thinking in some projects, and the potential for a values shift triggered by these projects may sow the seeds of a longer-term transformation, if more attention is paid to synergies between development objectives and climate change actions.

The tipping point: fateful moments in child protection

Abstract: Social workers working to protect children face the prospect of making very finely balanced judgements, often on the basis of incomplete information. Based on doctoral research into sense-making by social workers, this paper explores aspects of the tipping point, i.e. where the categorization of a child's situation changes, potentially leading to a very different response to their needs. Those aspects include identifying the triggers for, and consequences of, the tipping point, and being aware that the tipping point being reached may have to do with changes in the internal world of the worker as well as changes in the circumstances of the family. This paper stresses the need for a more nuanced understanding of the tipping point, and emphasizes the need to take account of the processes of decision-making, and of looking at both inter- and intra-personal components of those processes. Further, it is argued that a cautious attitude requires to be taken towards technical–rational solutions and that there is a real need to place professional judgement and consideration of the tacit dimension at the heart of the child protection process.

The Concept of Self-Organized Criticality: The Case Study of the Arab Uprising

Abstract: In today’s more connected, interdependent, fast, and highly globalized social world, conventional concepts and approaches for understanding social dynamics and social events have been getting weaker day by day There is a need of more dynamic points of view and new concepts which will help us to grasp the underlying mechanisms of social dynamics and what is really happening beyond the phenomena that we observe as social events Complexity science offers a fresh understanding of real systems, since they are usually complex In the present study, an important concept of complexity science, self-organized criticality, is used gingerly to reinterpret the Arab Uprising, while a former study interpreted the Arab Uprising with the help of the concept “butterfly effect” of chaos theory From chaos theory viewpoint, the starter event of the Arab Uprising which is the protest of a young Tunisian can be interpreted as the initial condition of the whole protest series and social movements Although this approach supplies new ways of interpretations on the social movements, it misses the background state of the society Self-organized criticality concept takes into account the whole society as a system and interprets the event not as an initial condition, but rather as a tipping point where the system which has reached a critical state begins to reorganize itself into a new state—a phase transition takes place Has the Arab Uprising or as formerly so-called the Arab Spring finished? Was it a “spring” that the following days will bring the summer, or was it a “fall” that will bring the winter? Although the answer depends on one’s point of view, it will be understood only when the phase transition process is completed Hence, the important thing, for everyone, is to understand the state of the society and the intentions of the organization of the society That’s why this study seeks to explain dynamics of the Arab Uprising phenomenon with critical self-organization property of complexity theory as an alternative approach

The Sustainability Tipping Point in Electricity Markets

Abstract: Energy markets are currently in a state of uncertainty and flux, with the ongoing integration of volatile renewable energy sources. Where renewable resources provide sustainable benefits to achieve political targets, their recent sharp increase has pronounced challenges for efficient market integration in the electricity system. These wicked problems are of complex nature, where Green Information Systems help in analytically evaluating the supply chain performance from an efficiency and environmental perspective. We propose a multi-stage competitive equilibrium model with suppliers producing under heterogeneous operational constraints, allowing us to compare sequential market strategies of conventional and renewable producers. We find a tipping point in market efficiency while increasing the share of renewable energy resources and conduct a large scale simulation analysis. This allows to investigate the behavior of the tipping point, in terms of market efficiency and heterogeneous risk related market participant behavior, and evaluate sustainable operations of future electricity markets.

Adaptation to Climate Change: Decision Making

Abstract: In spite of the recent global effort in mitigating greenhouse gases, the temperature of the earth continues to increase because we are already committed past emissions. Therefore, adapting to the changing climate is an immediate challenge that requires choosing a successful strategy. This chapter reviews classical decision-making methods and discusses their limitations when applied to climate change adaptation planning. Three novel decision-making methods, robust decision making (RDM), real option analysis (ROA), and dynamic adaptive policy pathways (DAPP), are discussed, and their applications are then introduced in water resources planning under different climate change scenarios. Such methods should be either “robust” or “adaptive” for decision makers to capture the nonstationary and uncertain characteristics of climate change. As its name indicates, the RDM method focuses on the “robust” perspective and chooses an alternative that performs satisfactorily over a wide range of scenarios. In contrast, both the ROA and DAPP methods focus on the “adaptive” perspective and have a decision tree framework where risk is spread over time. ROA allows decision makers to delay or abandon the chosen alternative rather than just implementing it without modification, while DAPP introduces the tipping point concept that offers a systematic way of when to switch between alternatives. However, these advanced decision-making methods are resource intensive; thus, a continuous administrative effort and institutional as well as technical supports are required for their success in the climate change era.

Banks, births, and tipping points in the historical demography of British banking: A response to J.J. Bissell*

Abstract: In this paper we respond to the useful comments made by J. J. Bissell 2017, on our paper Garnett et al 2015. We use this opportunity to explain in more detail our use of agent based modelling of historical processes, and how it can raise interesting and thought provoking questions that could be answered by additional historical research. In this case, questions around the possible relationship with the size of the British banking sector and the formation of new banks. We also take the opportunity to present further data on on the possible reasons for the rise and fall in the population of British banks, and suggest that the 'tipping point' might not have been such a radical change.

Has Corpus-Based Instruction Reached a Tipping Point? Practical Applications and Pointers for Teachers.

Abstract: This article provides an easy introduction into corpus-based instruction by explaining what the approach entails. It also presents key terms and discusses key theoretical concepts drawn from the literature; from these, practical applications and pointers are offered for those practitioners wishing to use corpus data or implement corpus-based instruction in their classroom.

The commercial tipping point.

Abstract: RNA-based therapeutics are poised to become successful commercial products, but wide adoption across the biopharmaceutical industry will likely take a few more years.

Dento-legal considerations about an MI approach

Abstract: Over the years there have been many conceptual changes in how dental disease is prevented and managed. What is now the norm and standard practice was at some earlier time considered to be at best pioneering, and at its worst, heresy or negligent. When we look, for example at how we conservatively manage periodontal disease when less than a generation ago we were wielding surgical knives far more frequently than we do now, we can see how research and evidence-based dentistry has influenced our thinking. We are very much at that tipping point now with minimum intervention (MI) dentistry. This article will discuss the impact of MI dentistry from a legal viewpoint, covering such aspects as consent and record-keeping.

Patronage, state capture and oligopolistic monopoly in South Africa: the slide from a weak to a dysfunctional state?

Abstract: The aim of the article is to investigate the phenomenon of state capture from a political perspective. In the literature, discussions around state capture areprincipally done from an economic context, not from a political perspective. The viewpoint in the article is that a more multi-faceted political approach is necessary, because the eroding of the role of the state is essentially a political problem. The phenomenon of state capture should therefore receive more scholarly attention within the political sciences, so the focus of this article is on addressing the problem of state capture within a political context. Here, the link between corruption and state capture is outlined and the difference between the two concepts is shown to be only a matter of degree.In the case of corruption the outcome is uncertain, while in the event of state capture the outcome is more definite as a result of the control an external agent exerts over a political functionary. The article also addresses the important tipping point, when a weak state – with high levels of corruption – lapses into a dysfunctional state. The finding is that the degradation from a weak to a dysfunctional state occurs during state capture when resource allocation – a core function of government – is controlled by outside agents. In the concluding section reference is made to the Public Protector’s report and its alignment with the theoretical features of state capture.