A snippet from the article. I removed some content for brevity.

For decades, climate change has proceeded at roughly the expected pace, says David Armstrong McKay, a climate scientist at the University of Exeter, in England. Its impacts, however, are accelerating—sometimes far faster than expected.

For a while, the consequences weren’t easily seen. They certainly are today. The Southwest is sweltering under a heat dome. Vermont saw a deluge of rain, its second 100-year storm in roughly a decade. Early July brought the hottest day globally since records began—a milestone surpassed again the following day. “For a long time, we were within the range of normal. And now we’re really not,” Allegra LeGrande, a physical-research scientist at Columbia University, told me. “And it has happened fast enough that people have a memory of it happening.”

...a growing number of climate scientists now believe we may be careening toward so-called tipping points, where incremental steps along the same trajectory could push Earth’s systems into abrupt or irreversible change—leading to transformations that cannot be stopped even if emissions were suddenly halted. “The Earth may have left a ‘safe’ climate state beyond 1°C global warming,” Armstrong McKay and his co-authors concluded in Science last fall. We don’t really know when or how fast things will fall apart.

Some tipping points will interact, worsening one another’s effects. When melt from Greenland’s glaciers enters the ocean, for example, it alters an important system of currents called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. Right now it’s the feeblest it’s been in more than 1,000 years.

A shutdown of that ocean current could dramatically alter phenomena as varied as global weather patterns and crop yields. If the temperature of the sea surface changes, precipitation over the Amazon might too, contributing to its deforestation, which in turn has been linked to snowfall on the Tibetan plateau.

One grim paper that came out last year, titled “Climate End Game,” mapped out some of the potential catastrophes that could follow a “tipping cascade,” and considered the possibility that “a sudden shift in climate could trigger systems failures that unravel societies across the globe.”

Chris Field, the director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and a contributor to several IPCC reports, warned that “at some point, the impacts of the climate crisis may become so severe that we lose the ability to work together to deliver solutions.”

  • JuneFall [none/use name]
    ·
    1 year ago

    Assuming plenty tipping points are reached and Earth will heat up by much more than the 2°C target due to it (instead of due to emissions which come on top), even then it would be good to do what could be done against the climate catastrophe - including reducing emissions.

    Why? Cause even in that Earth that is much less livable and which carrying capacity without new technologies and such would reduce itself hefty, it would profit from a reduction in heating up due to emissions. Tipping points are not a reason to stop action.

    • DiltoGeggins [none/use name]
      hexagon
      ·
      1 year ago

      Right. Totally agreed. I almost didn't post the article because of that point. But its good info, and it doesn't say that nothing should be done. The message I got from the article is that we need to proceed with more caution, perhaps be more selective about what we pursue, because we are entering a time of unintended consequences, unforeseen results.