Climate scientists have a heavier responsibility to get it right than most scientists because what’s at stake may be almost everything we care ...
A worker is pictured at the natural Ashaafean park, Libyan's first and only UNESCO listed biosphere reserves, which local conservators say is threatened by increasing wildfires, pollution, war, and overall neglect, in Msallata, Libya, November 9, 2021. Picture taken November 9, 2021.
Steffen’s greatest skill was bringing other scientists together in that enterprise. The informal, gradually expanding group that he and a few colleagues created has given us the concept of planetary boundaries and identified the tipping points that may overwhelm our efforts to limit the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
“I had eight years working with the best ecologists around the planet and, quite often, we’re talking about abrupt shifts in ecosystems,” Will Steffen told me last year. “If the Amazon rainforest shifted due to a combination of heat and drought, it wouldn’t be a smooth process. It would be droughts, fires, a lot of CO2 emitted and then a slow rebuild of a new ecosystem.
All the founder members – Will Steffen, Johan Rockström, Katherine Richardson, Tim Lenton, Hans Schellnhuber, Jim Hansen, Paul Crutzen and 22 others – were involved in writing the influential 2009 paper “That paper broached the notion of specific thresholds in the Earth System that might trigger abrupt and radical climate change, if crossed.
The group’s 2018 paper, “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene,” nailed the new perspective down at all four corner. Tipping points are now widely identified as the most dangerous aspect of the warming problem. That’s deeply discouraging because we still don’t know exactly where they all are — but, far better to know about them than not.
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