Here is how worried scientists are about tipping points: 160 scientists from 23 countries just released “The Global Tipping Points Report 2025”. Planetary shifts already in motion. Dr. Steven R. Smith, research Fellow at the Global Systems Institute on planetary-scale risks. Then provocative Swedish intellectual Professor Andreas Malm on his new book “The Long Heat”. Surprise, surprise: geoengineering will NOT save us from climate catastrophe.
Answers from the edge – it’s Radio Ecoshock.
Listen to or download this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (57 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)
TIPPING POINTS:
CLOSER AND MORE ALARMING THAN EVER
STEVEN SMITH
We all have our breaking points. So do natural systems. From the sea currents that warm the UK and north Europe, to the Amazon rainforest, things may head into a decline with no recovery, faster than expected. Media call them “tipping points”. Scientists now call them “tipping elements”.
The first Global Tipping Points Report was launched December 2023 for COP28 in Dubai. The second report just came out, ahead of COP30 in Brazil. This big report has worrying news about disastrous changes on a planetary scale – and ways to reduce the risk.
Here to explain is Dr. Steven R. Smith, research Fellow at the Global Systems Institute, University of Exeter, and University of Surrey. He specializes in Green Futures Solutions.
Listen to or download this 24 minute interview with Steven R. Smith in CD Quality or Lo-Fi
Outside North America, European scientists and media in Europe warn about the fate of the Gulf Stream, technically called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation or AMOC. It is strange to think the UK, Scandinavia and north Europe could get substantially colder while the rest of the world continues to set new heat records. Steve Smith tells us “and the difference in temperatures might be as much as 10 degrees C”! Models suggest that could mean 3 months of ice in London and ice forming part way down the North Sea.
Steve also says AMOC weakening would cause sea levels to rise along the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S. An AMOC change could also affect the Monsoons in Africa and India as well, despite being an Atlantic phenomenon AMOC is part of a global heat and precipitation network. It even affects ice sheets at both Poles. Tipping points are still not included in financial risk assessments by business or governments. Did scientists and big government-advisory bodies like the IPCC leave out tipping points to sound more “authoritative” and avoid being labeled “alarmist”?
According to historical evidence, a change in AMOC could develop within a couple of decades, which is very abrupt by geological standards.
Aside from AMOC, scientists have identified another fifteen tipping elements, so far. One of those lines of irreversibility may already have been crossed for warm water coral.
SOCIAL TIPPING POINTS FOR THE SAVE?
The interview and report also consider human “tipping points”. Societies can appear relatively stable while building up steam of malfunction and discontent that “suddenly” breaks out in big changes. The French Revolution is a classic case. Unlike ocean currents or glaciers, human tipping toward good or ill can develop not in years but days, maybe hours. For example, financial markets could crash or revolutions break out.
It is just as important Smith says, for governance to promote positive social tipping points as it is for governments to regulate prevention of negative tipping points (like riots or looting Alex thinks, for example).
There is a new climate movement now spreading from Brazil. It is called “e Global Mutirão“. “Mutirão” translates to “collective effort” or “joint effort” from Portuguese and Tupi-Guarani. It refers to a community-based event where people work together on a common task, such as building a home, cleaning up a neighborhood, or planting crops, often with a celebratory feast afterward. The term is used in Brazil to describe this type of collective community work.
NEGATIVE SOCIAL TIPPING POINTS
While this report has a chapter on positive social tipping points that might enable climate action, they do not discount negative social tipping points either. One section summary says:
“Such tipping points could encompass a breakdown in social cohesion known as anomie, manifesting as a loss of shared values and norms. This, in turn, could foster radicalisation and polarisation, driving societies ideologically further apart. Destabilisation caused by environmental shifts could lead to societies tipping into anomie, radicalisation, widespread displacement of populations, conflict over limited resources, and economic instability.
Negative social tipping points could reinforce each other in domino-like cascades, creating systemic risk, amplifying impacts and potentially accelerating climate change. These social tipping points and cascades mean the future will not adhere to ‘business as usual’; rather, it will be defined by either constructive mitigation and adaptation to climate change or negative social change impeding the realisation of sustainable futures.
Confidence in many impacts is presently low, due to the lack of systematic assessments and the difficulty of forecasting social change. Investments are urgently needed to better understand potential impacts and negative social tipping, anticipate them through early warning systems, and develop actions to mitigate them.”
I would go much further on negative social tipping points. For example, the election of Donald Trump in the United States reflects a social tipping point that disabled environmental protections, defunded alternative energy, and vigorously attacked climate science and scientists, firing many. Similar negative tipping points, some which reflect total capture of governments by fossil fuels, are active or possible in many countries.
THIS GLOBAL TIPPING REPORT WAS FUNDED BY BEZOS EARTH FUND!
How likely are they to get funding next year, now that Bezos is supporting Trump and MAGA? Witness the journalistic death of the Washington Post for example, under Jeff’s ownership. We don’t need Amazon Prime as much as we need Climate Prime – access to a human and species-friendly climate for everyone on this planet. Can that be delivered in two days?
TIPPING IS NOT INSTANTANEOUS COLLAPSE
The tipping should therefore not be conflated with instantaneous collapse: it does not necessarily happen all at once, in a flash. Some systems take time to undergo the full response to a forcing.90 For a while, it lives on borrowed time; it has passed on, but its bodily functions have not yet accepted the change, and so, zombie-like, it keeps stumbling forward.
The point about the tipping is not velocity as such but the crossing of the nodal line beyond which disintegration proceeds towards a terminus – reached within a day, a decade, a century, a millennium, or more – and can no longer be stopped. An essential component of the process, in other words, is irreversibility.
Once a glacial lake has burst, that unit is gone; same with the ice age, even if it took three millennia to wind down. Not even the spasm of cooling 8,200 years ago brought glaciers back to northern continents. The climate of the Earth had settled into an alternative stable state, like a boulder fallen into a crater.
Two decades ago a handful of scientists concerned themselves with tipping points, but it was a sideline. The 2004 movie “The Day After Tomorrow” brought the North Atlantic current collapse to the public, but sped up for entertainment. Even a few years ago I could name the specialists working on tipping points. We had a few of the new young scientists like Johannes Lohmann and Levke Caesar. In the UK, Tim Lenton of Exeter has been a driver in the field, and Stefan Rahmsdorf in Germany more and more an spokesperson alarmed for the future of Europe.
But this 2025 report has 160 scientific contributors from 23 countries. This is an emergency movement of science. They have seen large icebergs out ahead of the Titanic civilization. Will captains of industry and big money pools keep ordering full speed ahead on fossil fuels?
Maybe “experts” meeting at COP30 in Brazil will use this report to help make policy. It would be great if COP and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change take off their blinders and include tipping risks in everything. I don’t plan to give the COP much coverage. Thirty big climate meetings so far, since 1990, and emissions just keep growing. The rest is noise.
Maybe tipping points will penetrate deeper into public consciousness. That will depress some people, but the only real road to public health is living in reality. Perhaps with every climate or weather related story, media could start to include something like “of course this does not include the growing risks of passing tipping points that threaten civilization.” We can dream.
The alternative is an economic circus wobbling along through a series of disasters until a kind of climate earthquake strikes. Even then, it won’t be a single year where the Amazon dies, or the UK and Ireland freeze over. It is instead the opening of a time when a new system arrives and is unstoppable. Sadly, physically and economically humans evolved with the old climate. So did all our animal friends and plants we depend on. Insects reproduce fast enough and in numbers where evolution to meet the heat is possible. We, on the other hand, have to fight off this deadly hot future with everything we can muster.
I’m Alex Smith. This is Radio Ecoshock.
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THE LONG HEAT – NO EASY WAY OUT
ANDREAS MALM
“Climate breakdown, put differently, is the collision between a society that cannot bring itself to change course and a nature that cannot withstand the resultant pressure.”
Warming is accelerating, along with increasing disasters. Can technology turn down the heat? Can climate change be reversed? The new book “The Long Heat” delves into carbon capture schemes and into minds unable to steer away from catastrophe. The book is from Radio Ecoshock guest Wim Carton and well-known European human ecologist Andreas Malm. Both work at Lund University in Sweden.
Andreas Malm authored more than ten books including “Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming” and “Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown”. Let’s talk about “The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It’s Too Late”.
Listen to or download this 29 minute interview with Andreas Malm in CD Quality or Lo-Fi
Some greens reject any form of geoengineering as unnatural and doomed because of our record of making things worse. Do you think this is a mistake – should progressives hold out hope for technical help in a damaged atmosphere?
Malm and co-author Wim Carton evaluate a number of geoengineering plans. One of the best hopes was direct capture of carbon dioxide from the air. The Financial Times published this on September 27 (paywall): “Direct carbon capture falters”. I am not surprised but I am not cheering either. Another reports says “Carbon capture too expensive, takes too long to build”.
EVEN IF WE REMOVE CARBON –
WE HAVE TO REMOVE EVEN MORE AND MORE
“Removal would set off a process of outgassing, from oceans and forests and other spheres: sinks would somersault into sources. ‘The temporary balance of opposing forces’, to speak again with Levins and Lewontin, would turn upside down, the buffer becoming an outflux, just as and because humanity wipes away CO2 from the atmosphere. The more that is removed, the more will be outgassed; the faster the take-out, the faster the replenishment.
The more that is removed, the more must be removed, lending this project, too, a Sisyphean character. The more effective it is, the more of the weight of the carbon amassed in the various spheres on Earth will fall back on it.”
– The Long Heat
Regarding Andreas warning a big financial melt-down may not lead to a better world or more climate action. For more on this see my show “Can We Count on Catastrophe?” October 19, 2016, with broadcaster and author Eddie Yuen.
WHO CONTROLS THE SUN?
The authors say radiation management is far more likely to come as a last ditch effort by established power to keep their control – than by rebels, revolutionaries or citizen groups below.
“It is axiomatically more plausible that geoengineering is initiated by representatives of capital than by an indigenous nation whose lands have been burnt to ashes or by villagers threatened by glacier lake outburst floods. The most advanced technologies are in the hands of the former not the latter.”
There are lots of other problems with solar radiation management. Some of them are covered by this new study released October 21, 2025 in Nature (Open Access): “Engineering and logistical concerns add practical limitations to stratospheric aerosol injection strategies”.
WAR IN THE STRATOSPHERE
Experts even study counter-geoengineering, like wars in the stratosphere. As Andreas and other note, geoengineering almost requires a single power to control “stratospheric violence” or climate control coercion. The situation and this solution, like shading the Sun, lends itself to authoritarian structures, not a more democratic plural world.
Andreas says there is a lot of very optimistic language in pro-geoengineering literature about cooperative behavior and democratic controls that seem unlikely in the current world power systems. He considers Donald Trump with geoengineering is like a weapon.
In the interview, Andreas says the only country wanting to stop fossil fuels, to leave them in the ground, is Colombia. That might change in next year’s elections. But is that anti-fossil fuel policy the real reason U.S. President Trump suddenly turned on it’s ally Colombia, and threatened big trade sanctions?
Andreas and Wim ask a question in the Preface that still bothers me. It is: “Can we live with the crisis that was not stopped?” What do you think?
There are more reasons than temperature at stake here. For example, if solar geoengineering has a side-effect of changing the timing of monsoon rains, another country needing that rain for agriculture may launch counter-geoengineering. If such technologies exist to counter geo controls, it is conceivable a billionaire or even a well-funded NGO could object to tinkering sunshine and try to stop the solar program. Would this counter technology include purposefully injecting more warming gases into the atmosphere?
It’s all here: “Stopping Solar Geoengineering Through Technical Means: A Preliminary Assessment of Counter-Geoengineering” A. Parker, J. B. Horton, and D. W. Keith Augus 13, 2018
WHITE SKIN BLACK FUEL
We can’t leave this without a mention of Malm’s book “White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism”. He suggests the rise of the far right can be understood as a reaction to the climate crisis. That was in 2021. Now with Trump returned to power and right wing parties in Europe, that book seems almost prophetic.
The publisher’s book description says:
“The first study of the far right in the climate crisis, White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism presents an eye-opening sweep of a novel political constellation, and reveals its deep historical roots. Fossil-fueled technologies were born steeped in racism. None loved them more passionately than the classical fascists. As such forces rise to the surface, some profess to have the solution – closing borders to save the climate. Epic and riveting, White Skin, Black Fuel traces a future of political fronts that can only heat up.”
After mentioning “White Skin Black Fuel”, Andreas tells us he is not working on that right now, but rather on a historical project. However the Zetkin Collective did a follow-up book “The Great Driving Right Show – Cars, Climate Collapse and the Inverted Crisis”, expected in May 2026.
The book description says: “In The Great Driving Right Show, the Zetkin Collective unpacks the origins of these conflicts and shows how, as the climate crisis worsens, the political right has inverted the narrative, treating solutions as more threatening than the crisis itself. This eventually evolves in attacks on Electric Vehicles, increased oil production and attacks on minorities.”
Meanwhile, Malm is preparing a book on the environmental history of the Middle Ages. He assumes that history always tends to look for what we can learn about our present or future from the past. He does not expect to find direct causes of influences on climate change in the Middle Ages. It is not as simple as that. Yet there are glimpses of how big systems work, and how humans work, that can help us think the current crisis through.
Following this interview, I play “Shades of the Sun”, lyrics Alex Smith, AI music 1 min 38 sec. Creative Commons License. Download it here for your program, presentation or podcast on Geoengineering.
PREVIOUS INTERVIEW WITH WIM CARTON
Last year I talked with Malm’s co-author Wim Carton about the new book “Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown. “
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ALEX SAYS
Just for depressing fun, you may want to follow Professor Eliot Jacobson on BlueSky. He’s a retired professor of mathematics and computer science. Eliot’s been a casino consultant, and wrote 3 books on casino games. Now he posts about the odds of compounding climate disasters as a climate casino. He doesn’t like our odds. Eliot is an unapologetic doomer.
Last week he re-posted a global heat map generated though the U.S. NOAA service. The main site there says it is CLOSED and will not be updated. But some of the data machinery is still operating, if you know where to find it.
This latest map shows Earth is 1.9 degrees C hotter than the 1850-1900 IPCC pre-industrial baseline – already close to the much-feared 2 degree “limit” agreed in Paris in 2015. Of course, that is just for one day, October 25th. That is how it starts. A few days here and there, then week, then a few years. 2024 was the first full year over 1.5 degrees C of warming. If we get a few years in a row, we are there, already in the danger zone.
Find Eliot Jacobson here on BlueSky.
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New science finds extreme weather and climate extremes are increasingly occurring in the Arctic. We just saw that when the remains of a Typhoon Halong swept into Western Alaska’s Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta on Oct. 12, 2025. The storm surge flooded villages as far as 60 miles up the river. Some people were washed away in their houses. Giant airforce jets airlifted the survivors to safety. All this year and last, strange atmospheric rivers traveled up to the Arctic where there were seldom seen, and deep into Antarctica.
That paper was published: 21 October 2025: “Weather and climate extremes in a changing Arctic”.
In another telling headline: “Climate experts in Switzerland: 1.5°C target is out of reach”. Way to predict the present!
Finally, scientists are painfully aware greenhouse gases are still growing, and so is sea level rise. What happens if we manage to keep burning fossil fuels? A new study from Austrian scientists projects the sea level cost of continuing to change the atmosphere. They predict, within a few millimeters the true cost of profits over at Aramco, Exxon/Mobil and the whole fossil kingdom. Just in case anyone wants to know.
“Multi-century global and regional sea-level rise commitments from cumulative greenhouse gas emissions in the coming decades” Alexander Nauels at al Open access Published: 24 October 2025.
NEXT WEEK:
SUPER STORM MELISSA AND JAMAICA
Next week I’ll cover the giant hurricane that hit Jamaica. Guests include Dr. Jeff Masters and John Morales. Our expert guests have been warning about this for years: super hurricane fueled by abnormally hot sea surface temperatures.
Will some places become unlivable, or at least not with developed society? Would that include Houston?
We are out of time – for this week. I’m Alex Smith. Thank you for listening, and caring about our world.
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