This article describes different feedback loops that contribute to climate change and whether they will ultimately lead to a tipping point or point of no return. Overall, the article asserts that there is not a point that the climate can’t bounce back from, but it will become difficult to live in. Even though the article has a primarily positive tone, talking about tipping points and feedback loops may make students feel powerless, overwhelmed, or anxious. The Climate Emotions Wheel may help students identify and process heavy emotions they experience when discussing these topics. The video, What Will Earth Look Like When These 6 Tipping Points Hit? can help students understand how the tipping points will impact the world around them.
Written By: MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative
The MIT Climate Change Engagement Program, a part of MIT Climate HQ, provides the public with nonpartisan, easy-to-understand, and scientifically-grounded information on climate change and its solutions.
The basic mechanics of climate change are familiar: Burning fossil fuels increases the amount of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, causing the planet to retain more heat. However, the climate system is complex, and changing the planet’s temperature can also change the natural world in ways that release still more greenhouse gases. These are feedback loops, or ways that global warming can accelerate itself in a vicious cycle.
Is it possible these feedback loops could send us past a point of no return—a tipping point where humans no longer have the power to slow climate change? Not exactly, says Andrei Sokolov, MIT research scientist and an expert on climate sensitivity. Over longer time periods, he says, the Earth will balance itself out through corrective measures, such as the ocean absorbing carbon dioxide from the air. In the short term, though, the warming effects of feedback loops may make our planet a decidedly unpleasant place to live.
What are these climate feedback loops? One example is the loss of ice cover as higher temperatures melt glaciers and reduce the amount of ice that forms in the Arctic each winter. Ice reflects lots of sunlight back into space and helps to cool the planet (the “albedo effect”), but when ice turns to darker seawater, that effect is diminished. Another example is water vapor: higher global temperatures make more water evaporate from oceans, lakes, and rivers, which means more water vapor is in the atmosphere trapping heat. And climate change already is causing more major wildfires, which release the carbon stored in trees.
