There is a new paper on climate tipping points by Wang et al (2023),
"Mechanisms and Impacts of Earth System Tipping Elements", described on Twitter by the lead author here.
This paper struck me as interesting fort wo reasons and I would be curious for comments from climate scientists as I see the paper as a downwards-update on the uncertainty and relevance of tipping points:
(1) It stated rather confidently that "The studies synthesized in our review suggest most tipping elements do not possess the potential for abrupt future change within years,"
(2) It sought to quantify the relative impact of tipping points vis-à-vis climate sensitivity and emissions uncertainty finding that tipping points are quite a small source of variation (esp. see Panel D below, tipping points broaden the uncertainty by ~ 0.5C or so for SSP2-4.5 in 2100 compared to a climate sensitivity uncertainty ranging w/o tipping points of about ~2.5C for SSP-2-4.5 in 2100):
To make more explicit, what kind of questions I have:
1) How trustworthy do you find this paper?
2) How does this relate to other estimates? In my experience, people are quite unwilling to put probabilities / quantifications on tipping points, so i found this useful, but am also unsure.
etc.
Thanks, Sanjay!
Yes, the messaging of the papers is certainly vastly different.
That said, I think there is also a meaningful substantive difference, e.g. Wang et al suggests pretty minimal additional uncertainty through tipping points (less than 0.6 degrees by 2100 on net on plausible emissions pathways).
Would SoGive be interested in looking at these papers comparatively?