“Early warning of climate tipping points”

CITATION:
Timothy M. Lenton. 2011. Nature Climate Change 1, pp. 201-209.
ON-LINE AVAILABILITY:
ABSTRACT:
A climate ‘tipping point’ occurs when a small change in forcing triggers a strongly nonlinear response in the internal dynamics of part of the climate system, qualitatively changing its future state. Human-induced climate change could Continue reading

Are we the walrus?

This post was supposed to be about the People’s Climate March.  As I sat down to draft it, however, a headline about a different climate-related gathering caught my eye: tens of thousands of Pacific walruses have again Continue reading

A discourse on habitability: The Anthropocene as ecological dyad

The Holocene, as depicted in Figure 1 below, is formally the current geological epoch and represents the previous ∼11,500 calendar years to present. During the Holocene, environmental change occurred naturally and Earth’s regulatory capacity maintained the conditions that enabled human development. Regular temperatures, freshwater availability and biogeochemical flows all stayed predominately in a narrow range. Now, in the primeval stages of the Anthropocene, human activities have reached Continue reading