Write a commentLast year, burning fossil fuels pushed global temperatures past 1.5°C. 2024 was the warmest year on record globally. Irreversible climate tipping points, unstoppable processes, were set in motion.
Tropical coral reefs crossed their tipping point. Scientists coined a new term to describe what they witnessed between January 2023 and March 2025 in the world's oceans. The new term was super marine heatwaves, and it caused a mass coral bleaching and unprecedented dieback of tropical coral reefs. The New York Times wrote, "About 84 percent of reefs worldwide experienced bleaching-level heat stress at some point." The new normal for coral reefs is mass mortality events.
Billions of people are at risk because human-induced global warming breached irreversible climate tipping points. The Global Tipping Points Conference stated, "[What is] particularly alarming is the risk of collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which would plunge northwest Europe into prolonged severe winters, while radically undermining global food and water security."
The U.S. free press provided minimal coverage of the issue. However, British news outlets—The Economist, Reuters, and The Guardian— acknowledged that irreversible climate tipping points left some climate scientists with a fatalist disposition. The Economist wrote that one specific tipping point was the "Amazon dieback." The Amazon was one of Earth's lungs because it acted as a carbon sink. The Amazon absorbed the carbon dioxide emitted from fossil fuels. However, deforestation and an increase in fossil fuel emissions turned chunks of the Amazon that were a carbon sink into a carbon net emitter.
From 2001 to 2020, the Brazilian Amazon emitted more carbon dioxide than it absorbed. In twenty years, the Brazilian Amazon "lost 350,000 square km," from deforestation, while "net emissions from the Brazilian Amazon exceeded those of Argentina or Pakistan." The apocalyptic trend of carbon sinks being transformed into net carbon emitters extended to the Arctic Tundra. The Arctic was a carbon sink for millennia. Global warming thawed permafrost and increased emissions from wildfires. NOAA wrote that it allowed "stored carbon dioxide and methane to be released into the atmosphere," and turned "the Arctic tundra from a net carbon sink into a source [of CO₂]."
The World Bank, in a 2012 report, warned that global warming would trigger climate tipping points, which included the Amazon dieback. The World Bank also warned that global warming would trigger other climate tipping points like "the disintegration of the West Antarctic ice sheet." This was the same conclusion Roger Revelle reached in the 1980s when he warned that the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet would inundate major coastal cities.
The implications for hundreds of millions of people were unfathomable. Climate displacement and migration were already issues that didn't receive enough attention. The New York Times wrote, in 2023, "2.5 million people were forced from their homes in the United States by weather-related disasters." In the next decade, "at least 55 million Americans are expected to migrate within the country," because of climate chaos.
