I have been receiving reports from the reinsurance industry for the last fifteen years. Reinsurers underwrite insurers and are on the frontline of taking risks of all kinds, including risks from climate change and the weather. It is the policies reinsurers issue to insurers that lead to the ones the latter give to businesses, homes and individuals. The reinsurers are the ultimate risk takers for our global economy, underwriting capitalism. When reinsurers are no longer willing to accept risks, the last resort becomes governments.
Reinsurers have been acutely aware of climate change risks. Covering climate risk has become increasingly expensive for them and is reaching a point where what they charge insurers makes the policies the latter issue prohibitively expensive.
Today, weather-related insurance policies either come with big annual premiums or don’t get issued at all. This is increasingly true for homeowners along America’s Eastern Seaboard, where rising sea levels and storm surges are posing an existential risk.
Capitalism has always been about investing capital in new and often risky ventures. No risk, no return. What happens when insurers won’t take on the risk? Historically, it has been insurance companies like Lloyds of London who took on the capital risk of merchant ships hauling cargo between the United Kingdom, China and India. Maritime disasters happened and cargos were lost. There was, however, enough traffic, cargo and profit to withstand the risks and losses.
Rising global temperatures, predicted to well exceed the 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) lower threshold aspiration of the Paris Climate Agreement, however, represent unknown levels of risk. The result: insurers are bugging out.
Donald Trump describes climate change as a hoax and a “green scam.” He has taken the United States out of the Paris Climate Agreement. America, the world’s second biggest polluting nation by volume, is no longer in the climate change mitigation game. Its withdrawal will mean at least a four-year delay in efforts to turn the emissions curve downward even if other countries pick up the slack. This isn’t a timeout from fighting global warming that humanity can afford. That’s because current trends, according to the Climate Action Tracker, predict atmospheric mean temperatures to rise between 2.2 and 3.4 Celsius (4 to 6.1 Fahrenheit) above pre-Industrial Revolution level by 2100.
This is where the conversation about climate tipping points begins. Here are the likely outcomes:
Günther Thallinger sits on the board of Allianz SE, a large insurance provider. He describes the crisis from an insurer’s perspective.
“Heat and water destroy capital. Flooded homes lose value. Overheated cities become uninhabitable. Entire asset classes are degrading in real time…The math breaks down: the premiums required exceed what people or companies can pay…Entire regions are becoming uninsurable.”
Thallinger describes what is happening leading to “a climate-induced credit crunch.” The crunch will apply to agriculture, industry, homes, infrastructure, transportation and more.
Thallinger notes, “The economic value of entire regions – coastal, arid, wildfire-prone – will begin to vanish from financial ledgers. Markets will reprice, rapidly and brutally. This is what a climate-driven market failure looks like.” He cites Australia as a case example where between 2017 and 2023, disaster recovery spending has increased 700%.
At 3 Celsius (5.4 Fahrenheit), Thallinger asserts that no insurer or government will be able to handle the risk costs. “That means no more mortgages, no new real estate development, no long-term investment, no financial stability. The financial sector as we know it ceases to function. And with it, capitalism as we know it ceases to be viable.”
The cost of not tackling carbon emissions, Thallinger concludes, will mean the end of capitalism. Some readers may think Thallinger is “crying wolf.” Capitalism, after all, has created a world rich with invention and technological progress. Humans live longer than at any time in our species’ existence. We have traveled to the Moon and back. How could the growth in CO2 molecules in the atmosphere tear the whole thing down?
As noted above, tipping points are consequences of ignoring the propensity of that molecule to take light energy from the Sun and turn it into heat, adding it to the atmosphere and the world’s oceans. To follow Trump is to ignore the science and an end to the world we know. It is a step into a painful future, whether rich or poor, whether in the Global North or South.
There is a cost to adaptation and mitigation. It doesn’t come cheap, but if we begin immediately, the accumulated capital we have is enough to effect the transition to a better and more sustainable quality of life this century and beyond. We have to ask ourselves:
Janos Pasztor, a former UN Assistant Secretary-General for Climate Change, describes the insurance industry as the “canary in the coalmine when it comes to climate impacts.” Ignore it at our peril.
]]>The movie dramatizes the consequences of ignoring tipping point signals and may be the inspiration behind a U.K. initiative allocating £81 million to create an early warning climate change system.
The Advanced Research and Invention Agency or ARIA is Britain’s equivalent to America’s DARPA and was inspired by the latter. Created from 2021 legislation and officially launched in 2023, ARIA is receiving government financial backing for U.K. researchers in academic and private enterprise to invent transformative technologies covering several fields including:
The government provided £800 million to get ARIA operational with current projects including:
For the last topic, ARIA hopes to see the development of advanced warning tipping point detection systems to improve the ability to mitigate and adapt to changing climate by being forewarned. States Sarah Bohndiek, Program Director at ARIA, “Finding early warning signals for climate tipping points is like searching for a needle in a haystack.”
The 5-year funded program is focusing on two particular tipping points:
What does ARIA want to see come from its investment in the development of tipping point tools and technologies to address these two?
Bohndiek wants the money spent by ARIA to produce confident predictions of when a tipping point will happen and the potential consequences. How the U.K. government reacts with policy, notification and intervention strategies represents another story. Those interested in receiving grants to finance solutions that meet the tipping point criteria should apply no later than September 23, 2024.
]]>How did such a large expanse of the African continent become such a barren place? Researchers studying climate tipping points have developed a statistical method looking at external influences that can eventually push an environment beyond a critical point. They applied their methodology to Sahara climate simulations and point to around 6,000 years ago when North African conditions were far different.
Andreas Morr and Niklas Boers, two researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) created a methodology for advanced detection of potential tipping points in natural systems. Before the formation of the desert when North Africa was greener than it is today, Morr notes in a TUM news release, “Our findings suggest that the abrupt end of the African Humid Period was likely caused by a weakening of the system’s stability as the orbital configuration of the Earth changed, gradually pushing the system toward a tipping point.”
Boers describes how the advanced detection method they created allows for the monitoring and response to potential future tipping points affecting the natural world. He states, “Our results suggest that large-scale climate tipping events such as this can in principle be anticipated, hopefully enabling timely interventions.”
The published results of their work appeared in the June 4, 2024 edition of the journal of the American Physical Society, Physical Review X. The paper describes bifurcations and dimensional changes to stable equilibria in the natural world. As a read, it is a tough sledding. What it does point to, however, is that things can be going along smoothly in the natural world and then suddenly reach a critical point of climate forcing that leads to significant alterations. They construct a statistical model to describe a phenomenon they call critical slowing down or CSD which leads to “the vanishing of a stable equilibrium point.” In the paper, they apply their model to a physical candidate: the real-world transition that occurred in the Western Sahara 6,000 years ago.
The Western Sahara before that “tipping point” was from the late Pleistocene to the mid-Holocene a savannah with lush vegetation. An external variable is seen as responsible for an abrupt climate change. In their paper, they write:
“Before 6 thousand years ago, the increased summer insolation in the Western Sahara facilitated the green Sahara via the following feedback mechanism: The vegetation in the region had a lower reflectivity than the desert and hence absorbed more solar energy, which can fuel convective systems and even cause a northward extension of the West African summer monsoon system.”
This humid period appeared to end abruptly which Boers describes as happening because “the orbital configuration of the Earth changed.”
What Boers is referring to when talking about orbital changes are the Milankovitch Cycles which are long-term variations that occur in our planet’s orbit around the Sun combined with the axis tilt. These cycles come in three flavours:
There are other potential causes of the Sahara going from green to arid. These too could be factored into the critical climate-forcing model that Morr and Boers have developed. One is a 20,000-year periodicity that goes between a green and dry Sahara with the strengthening of the North African monsoon responsible for the former. In their paper, the authors refer to African Humid Periods of which the latest peaked around 10,500 years ago creating a savannah of lush grasslands and forests with lakes and rivers running through what today is an arid desert. Today, the evidence of these former lakes and rivers can be found in the subterranean world under the Sahara’s dunes.
There could be other factors to explain the desertification of North Africa. Some researchers point to anthropogenic causes with the natural world reacting with the growth of human pastoralism that led to goats and cattle causing negative vegetation feedback and an increase in dust in the atmosphere.
The CSD that Morr and Boers describe involves the vanishing of a stable equilibrium and a sudden tipping point and can be validated by the evidence of both the Milankovitch Cycles and anthropogenic activities.
Can the methodology help us to find and anticipate climate tipping points in the future? Boers believes so and suggests that their methodology could be used as an early warning system to address the consequences of human activity or other physical observations as we live through the changes to the climate and the Earth in the 21st century.
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The smoke hitting the shores of Lake Ontario and places far to the south was coming from forest fires hundreds of kilometres to the north and east. These fires were burning more than the trees. Remote farms and homes, debris on forest floors, farm equipment, trucks, cars and many unknown things were being burned and going up in smoke as well.
Fire season had erupted far earlier than in the past because of prolonged drought in many areas of Canada’s boreal forest region that spans much of the country. Meteorologists, climatologists, and foresters all had the same explanation – climate change. The new state of normal included the term fire weather.
Today as I look out over the lake, the smoke is gone. The sky and lake are blue. But over the last almost two weeks since we moved here, the smoke has come back several times. Forecasters expect it to be a chronic problem for the rest of this summer, and likely well into the future.
Following on the heels of the wood smoke came an early summer heatwave with temperatures and humidity well above seasonal averages. Again, the explanation given by meteorologists and climatologists was simple – climate change.
The new normal includes wildfire seasons that span from spring through to the fall, and heat domes that persist for days. Some scientists are referring to this as the first climate change tipping point, long predicted by those paying attention to rising carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and other human-activity-generated greenhouse gas emissions.
Why now? There are lots of reasons but the one that climatologists are zeroing in on is diminishing polar land and sea ice. The polar ice caps in the Arctic and Antarctica are seeing record melts. In June, the Greenland Ice Sheet recorded one of the largest melts ever seen. And the month turned out to be the hottest ever measured, beating the previous record set in 2019 by 0.16 Celsius (0.29 Fahrenheit).
Every continent on the planet experienced new heat records. Texas and Florida were roasting, as was much of Mexico. A mountain heatwave in Iran saw temperatures at 1,500 metres (approximately 5,000 feet) hit daytime highs of 49 Celsius (120 Fahrenheit). In Puerto Rico, the heat index reached 51.9 Celsius (125 Fahrenheit).
Some of the record heat could be explained by the beginning of the next Pacific Ocean El Niño 2-to-7 year cycle that has boosted global average temperatures by as much as 0.2 Celsius (0.36 Fahrenheit).
The combination of El Niño, extended fire seasons, polar ice melt, and heat domes is expected in the next year to push global mean temperatures 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) higher than pre-Industrial Revolution records.
The cost of these recent extremes goes beyond the damage to forests, oceans, lakes and other ecosystems. The high temperatures are also taking a toll on human health. In the U.S. alone, a recently published policy report coming from the Center for American Progress estimates a rise in healthcare-related costs of $1 billion this year from rising atmospheric temperatures. The report estimates an increase of 235,000 in hospital emergency room visits and 56,000 additional admissions. It states,
“The growing threat of extreme heat requires all levels of government and the private sector to confront the fundamental crisis of climate change by taking action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to pursue policies that mitigate the effects of extreme heat and the emergencies it creates.”
It calls for immediate action to:
The saying “ignorance is bliss” doesn’t apply when responding or not to climate change. A better phrase to describe what is the current state of response is “ignore at your peril.” That applies to all of us as the primary agents of climate change and stewards of the planet.
]]>“Stretching the mind across time—even in the most speculative ways—can help us become more responsible planetary stewards: It can help endow us with the time literacy necessary for tackling long-term challenges such as biodiversity loss, microplastics accumulation, climate change, antibiotic resistance, asteroid impacts, sustainable urban planning, and more.”
Ialenti worked on a 32-month study for Finland’s nuclear industry which was building a waste disposal facility some 450 metres below the seabed in the Gulf of Bothnia. The waste being disposed of included Uranium 235 with a half-life of 700 million years. The questions being asked included:
What could potentially disturb this nuclear waste site, not ten thousand, or one hundred thousand, but millions of years into the future?
What changes to the waste site could occur from climate, continental shifts, earthquakes, and other geological events during the eons of time that would pass and what would be the impact on human, animal, and plant populations?
An exercise of this scope, Ialenti says fosters “empathy across generations.”
We don’t have to look so far into the future to develop responsible policies that lead to positive outcomes for future generations. Climate change is not a consequence for us hundreds of millions of years into the future. But it is of consequence to those who follow us for millennia.
Today, we are dealing with the latest news from the IPCC that points to a “code red” moment for humanity and the planet. Climate scientists are telling us we are reaching a point where the goals set by the Paris Climate Agreement are no longer attainable; that we will blow past an atmospheric temperature rise of 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) well before 2050, even possibly by the end of this decade. In addition, we will have set off environmental tipping points that will bequeath to those who follow us, a much different and less desirable world. Some of these consequences will last multiple generations if not thousands of years into the future.
A research article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) this week, is entitled “Economic Impacts of Tipping Points in the Climate System.” It is authored by researchers at the London School of Economics, the University of Delaware, and New York University, and points out that we are still infants when it comes to understanding the consequences of climate change inaction. The authors have attempted to synthesize the literature around eight climate tipping points, looking at near-future economic and social impacts. In their analysis they attempt to establish a social cost of carbon (SCC) while providing unified estimates of the economic impact from eight climate change tipping points:
The research reviews 21 articles in the literature with coverage over180 countries. It notes that there is no one assessment model to determine the SCC and that the consequences of the tipping points described above have not been fully researched from an economic impact perspective. Collectively, however, the research concludes that tipping points are likely to more than double global economic and societal risk.
The SCC calculation the researchers are using is based on the economic impact of each additional ton of carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted into the atmosphere over and above what is already present. The combination of these eight tipping points, they conclude, is expected to increase SCC by 24.5% over existing carbon pricing modelling, not including two wildcards, melting permafrost methane (CH4) release in the Arctic, and large-scale release of the same from melting hydrates on the ocean floor. These latter two, the study estimates, could add an additional 10% to the SCC. The authors see this research as a good starting point for determining a true cost for carbon pollution for the purpose of policy development.
The authors conclude that the economic impact of climate tipping points poses an increase in the level of risk for the entire global economy along with a high social cost. It also puts financial markets further at risk because of higher unanticipated and difficult to calculate economic costs.
Planners of climate policy take note. Using market mechanisms, such as pricing carbon pollution and carbon exchanges to combat climate change, need to consider tipping point impacts.
Around the world today we have examples of SCC pricing:
You can bet, in all of these pricing determinations, none have considered climate tipping points in coming up with their SCC. And in each policy decision, the attempt to be responsible planetary stewards seems wanting. Our current leadership has yet to exhibit the empathy across generations Ialenti describes. What that means for humanity and the planet’s future is consequential and frightening.
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What’s so important about the 1.5 number? Climate scientists have explained to the public that beyond 1.5 and approaching a 2.0 Celsius rise will cause a chain of events that have become known as tipping points. This term, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell, in his book “How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference,” illustrated the concept using marketing examples. But today, tipping points have become part of climate change vernacular and refers to a small change, a threshold passed, or a moment in time that upsets the balance of a system leading to much larger changes.
Gladwell is no climate scientist. In fact, he isn’t a scientist of any description, but climatologists have embraced his terminology in their latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. This sixth edition that describes the current and future state of the world’s climate presents the physical findings of climate change gathered from around the world, describes the certainty of human influence, and projects possible climate futures.
In its Summary for Policymakers it states:
“It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred.”
The report documents the rise of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O in the atmosphere and ocean with a particular focus on the last six decades. It states that the last four decades have each been successively warmer than the previous ones, noting that larger increases are happening over land and lesser ones over the ocean. In fact, atmospheric temperatures over land surfaces are well above the mean 1.1 Celsius rise, hitting 1.59 Celsius (2.86 Fahrenheit) while the atmosphere over oceans has risen 0.88 Celsius (1.58 Fahrenheit). The drivers for this rise are largely human-caused. The report weighs human against natural causes at 97.27% attributable to the former rather than the latter.
There are other notable physical changes we humans have influenced:
The scale of these changes, when matched against paleoclimate records, is unprecedented. Atmospheric CO2 is higher than at any time in the past 800,000 years. The changes being observed are greater than paleoclimate records of the last warming period of significance, 125,000 years ago. Glacier and sea ice retreats are unprecedented for at least the last 2,000 years. Sea-level rise is at a faster pace than in any preceding century over the past 3,000 years with ocean warming faster than at any time since the end of the last Ice Age, 11,000 years ago. And surface water ocean acidification hasn’t been matched in the last 2 million years.
Where are the tipping points? The most notable include sea-level, atmospheric temperature rise, and compounding events of extreme heat, drought and wildfire on continental landmasses becoming far more frequent.
That takes us to page 12 of this 42-page IPCC Summary for Policymakers document. Tomorrow, we will continue and look at what the document says about the extent of the human reach of climate change across the globe and what are our possible climate futures.
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December 31, 2016 – With the year coming to an end it seems appropriate to look at the issue of climate change and evidence and events we witnessed in 2016 that may be tipping points for the planet:
Tipping points represent the unforeseen consequences of external human acts. They tend to confound and complicate already difficult issues. In some cases through counteractions we can reverse their impacts but this usually takes much more time than the amount we used to create them. In the case of point 5 one can only hope that the consequences of this one election is reversible in four years.
