Climate Tipping Points “May Already Have Arrived” Claims New Report – Just in Time for COP30

Writing in the Spectator last week, the Daily Sceptic’s Esteemed Editor-in-Chief Lord Tobes noted that eco-activists were fond of plucking numbers out of the air and claiming that’s how long we have left to save the Earth. But, he added, “it looks like they are now facing a ‘tipping point’ of their own”. Also last week, the Guardian commented on the Green Blob-funded ‘Global Tipping Points Report 2025’ and reported its contention that the planet’s first catastrophic climate tipping point had been reached with “coral reefs facing widespread dieback”. About time too, Guardianistas might have felt. In June 1999, the newspaper’s veteran eco loon George Monbiot wrote that “the imminent total destruction of the world’s coral reefs is not a scare story but a fact”.

Toby went on to observe Sun Tzu’s maxim that you should never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake, “but I’m beginning to feel sorry for the climate hysterics”. There is none more hysterical (G. Monbiot excepted) than the annual ‘Global Tipping Points Report’, which is primarily bank-rolled by the Bezos Earth Fund. Along with numerous other scare reports, it is timed to lift mass climate psychosis ahead of the annual COP conference. Humanity will soon be in a danger zone where “multiple climate tipping points pose catastrophic risks to billions of people”, it wails. Already warm water coral reefs are crossing their “thermal tipping points”, it is claimed.

The work is headed by Professor Timothy Lenton from the University of Exeter and is said to draw on research from scientists across the world. In fact the agitprop is mostly climate-catastrophising codswallop produced by wishful thinking activists consulting their modern day crystal balls, otherwise known as climate computer models. In the case of the coral reefs, the scare is risible. Tropical coral has existed for millions of years in waters between 24°C-32°C. Small local increases in temperature can lead to a natural process called bleaching, but there is solid scientific evidence that recovery is rapid when temperatures stabilise. Despite significant bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef over the last two decades, coral cover is currently at its fourth highest level since serious observations began about 40 years ago.

The so-called “central estimate” of coral’s “thermal tipping point” is claimed to be 1.2°C of global warming and this threshold is now said to have been passed. There is nothing right about this claim given the wide range of current temperatures that coral grows in today. In fact coral grows faster in warmer waters as evidenced by comparing growth near the equator and the southern Great Barrier Reef. Sceptics might also ask how such temperature tipping point precision is available given what is now known about the lamentable state of much Government-organised meteorological measurement activity.

Net Zero is dying in many parts of the world, but the politically-motivated settled science crowd is desperate to keep the fantasy alive by holding up the pseudoscientific results of computer models as some kind of convincing evidence. However the report is not just about what is incorrectly referred to as ‘the’ science. High politics is on show with the COP30 President Designate André Aranha Correa do Lago writing the foreword and claiming: “United, we can reverse the dangerous trend towards a sequence of systems collapse in domino effect”. There is something for m’learned friends as well with the report suggesting: “Tipping points science should be used to strengthen future litigation efforts related to human rights.” Similar ambitions are shared by single weather ‘attribution’ agitators using computer model findings to pump up the claims in climate lawfare cases.

The report observes that climate communications can be instrumental in generating political momentum, particularly when targeted to policy advocacy and “trusted messengers”. Few messenger are trusted more than the BBC and its fellow climate bedwetters at the Guardian. In July 2023, Georgina Rannard of the BBC reported that “scientists say” a weakened Gulf Stream, which is a major part of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), could collapse by 2025. Most people are aware of the film The Day After Tomorrow when such a collapse caused the onset of Arctic weather conditions across the northern hemisphere. The AMOC collapse remains the gold standard of climate fearmongering. Computer models are worked hard to produce the often outlandish claims.

“We cannot exclude that an AMOC tipping point may already have been passed,” states the report. Many computer models are said to predict the AMOC declining to a weak state by 2050. The tipping brigade’s answer to imaginary global disaster is of course to shorten Net Zero timelines, “and the immediate investment in the developing and scaling of sustainable carbon removal technologies”.

Meanwhile back in the real world, where unlimited pots of money are not available for ridiculous schemes like carbon capture and where the product of agitprop-narrated computer models is taken with a large pinch of salt, there is good news on the Gulf Stream. A group of scientists recently found that the AMOC had shown no decline since at least the 1960s. In a paper published recently in Nature, the scientists noted that many of the AMOC observations arise from examining sea-surface temperature anomalies, but these records “are not long enough to differentiate between low-frequency variability and long-term trends”. In other words, much alarmists copy is little more than opinions based on short-term variability.

In the detailed body of the ‘tipping points’ report, a median AMOC temperature tipping point of 1.8°C is established based on the latest computer modelling incorporating reduced overturning strength. Another tempting story here for the BBC/Guardian perhaps. Admittedly it comes with “low confidence”, but “scientists say” their scenario indicates imminent collapse of the AMOC from 2025 onwards.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.