“Earth on verge of five catastrophic climate tipping points, scientists warn.” So declared the fearful headline of the article by Ajit Niranjan, European environment correspondent for The Guardian on December 5. A dire subtitle was added for further effect: “Humanity faces ‘devastating domino effects’ including mass displacement and financial ruin as planet warms.” On December 13, the day after the close of the United Nations’ big COP28 climate summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Forbes correspondent Ken Silverstein offered an urgent appeal to readers under the title, “How to Avert a Climate Tipping Point.”
“Tipping points” are always a big thing with climate alarmists, as we show below. We have reported many times over the years on tipping-point claims by Al Gore, Prince (now King) Charles, Stephen Schneider, Michael Mann, Stephen Hawking, Bill Nye, John Kerry, et al. (See, for instance, here, here, and here.)
Perpetual Panic
The purveyors of perpetual panic never tire of inventing a new computer-generated scenario that predicts the end of the world as we know it unless taxpayers fork over trillions of dollars to the political classes and UN bureaucrats who will save us from ourselves and our nasty meat, oil, and coal consumption. And with the UN COP28 climate confab underway in Dubai, what better time to uncork a new panic-porn tipping-point report?
The Climate Cult Chorus seems not to care that they might lose total credibility by crying “wolf!” too often. It was only a year ago that the enviro-leftists at The Guardian issued a nearly identical warning of an impending apocalypse. The title then was “World on brink of five ‘disastrous’ climate tipping points, study finds,” by environment editor Damian Carrington. It was accompanied by a subtitle lamenting that “Giant ice sheets, ocean currents and permafrost regions may already have passed point of irreversible change.” The source of the high anxiety for that Guardian article was a report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published in Science, a once-authoritative science journal that has become a leading voice of the climate doomsayers.
The recent Guardian article by Niranjan is peddling the fears of a group of “scientists” paid to operate as panic prognosticators for the Bezos Earth Fund, the $10 billion eco-plaything of Amazon gazillionaire Jeff Bezos. Reading beyond the heated headlines and fever-swamp subtitles one finds that the “tipping points” are not quite as imminent and apocalyptic as they are made out to be. Carrington admits that “The tipping points would take effect on timescales varying from a few years to centuries.” He also admits that “current estimates [remain] highly uncertain.” But what he is certain about is that you and I should be very, very worried. He quotes one of the authors of the report, Professor Thomas Stocker of the University of Bern, who said: “The science on tipping points is far from done – it has barely begun – and much better models are needed to address the question [of] what warming level is critical for which tipping point.” Sounds a bit sketchy, doesn’t it? But, good enough for an end-of-the-world headline, right? Just give them more money so they can do more “science” to scare us into abject submission. Likewise, the Niranjan piece loses some of the ominous impact intended by its title when all the article’s hedging rhetoric is considered. There are lots of “ifs” and “mays” as in: if-this temperature-occurs-then-this-tipping-point-may-occur. And it may occur in a decade, a century, or a millennium. Or may not happen at all!
The Guardian is far from alone in this Chicken Little “the sky is falling!” media routine. You’ve undoubtedly seen and heard dozens of similar reports.
Here’s a Politico headline for December 6: “Catastrophic climate ‘tipping points’ may be imminent.” And, again, a fright-inspiring subtitle: “In a sweeping new report, hundreds of scientists warn that the world must rapidly phase out planet-warming emissions to avoid crossing dangerous thresholds.” However, like the Guardian articles, if one reads beyond the headlines, it becomes obvious that the prophets of doom are basing their predictions on highly speculative theories and dodgy computer models that have time and again proven to be spectacularly wrong.
After definitely attempting to scare readers with the impending terror of tipping points, the Politico writer says: “None of them [tipping points] is definite yet. And not all would happen quickly: The collapse of the Greenland ice sheet could take hundreds or thousands of years to unfold.” Thousands of years — if they “unfold” at all.
The Tipping Point Chorus
Meteorologist Anthony Watts, who runs the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com, wrote a superb takedown of the tipping point scam for climaterealism.com titled “Media Can’t Agree on the Number of Climate Tipping Points, Much less When.”
“It seems there is always a climate tipping point in our future, and they never seem to happen,” Watts notes. “Every year we are treated to a fresh set of dire predictions, with the goal posts for when they will occur, always somewhere in the future, but never certain.”
Watts observes that a quick Google search yields well over a hundred tipping point stories and he cites just a few of them:
- “Global Warming Tipping Point Close?”— ClimateArk.com, Jan. 27, 2004
- “Warming Hits ‘Tipping Point’“ — The Guardian, Aug. 11, 2005
- “Earth at the Tipping Point: Global Warming Heats Up” — Time, March 26, 2006
- “Global Warming ‘Tipping Points’ Reached, Scientist Says” — National Geographic.com, Dec. 14, 2007
- “Twenty Years Later: Tipping Points Near on Global Warming” — Huffington Post, June 23, 2008
- “Global Warming: Those Tipping Points Are Closer Than You Think” — Wall Street Journal, April 29, 2009
- “Must-Read Hansen and Sato Paper: We Are at a Climate Tipping Point That, Once Crossed, Enables Multi-Meter Sea Level Rise This Century” — ThinkProgress.org, Jan. 20, 2011
- “Earth: Have We Reached an Environmental Tipping Point?” — BBC, June 15, 2012
Many more could be shown from The New York Times, The Associated Press, Bloomberg, Reuters, The Washington Post, USA Today, Newsweek, PBS, NPR, CBS, NBC, and the rest of the Fake News industrial complex. These articles and others like them have cascaded untold millions of times through thousands of publications, broadcasts, alternative media websites, and social media accounts. The impact of this nonstop fright-peddling disinformation is incalculable. This we know from the history of the past two decades: No matter how many times the climate cultists are exposed and discredited by their own bogus science, they will continue to keep flogging new equally bogus “tipping point” propaganda. And the lying media will continue to push it.
Related articles:
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Prince Charles Sets Yet Another Climate-change “Tipping Point”
Climate Alarmists Caught Manipulating Temperature Data Yet Again
Climate Alarmists Go Hysterical as Their Theory Melts Down
Climate-change Computer Models Fail Again — and Again, and Again
Study: World Has Less Than 10 Years of “Carbon Budget” Until Climate Catastrophe
Climate Hysteria and Methane Madness: Belching Cows, Fracking, and Obama’s EPA Mandates
UN Warns of Climate Crisis Unless Drastic Action Is Taken — Again
