Climate change will surprise us, but so-called 'tipping points' may lead us astray

With the world already experiencing dangerous climate change, decarbonization and climate adaptation are urgent challenges. The potential for even more rapid and irreversible changes augments this urgency. To emphasize the need for rapid climate action, some researchers have labeled such potential changes as "tipping points." But the increasingly broad application of this term across biogeophysical and social phenomena muddles its meaning, and its use can conceal the multidimensional complexity of processes that can drive rapid change. The term is better viewed as a metaphor than as describing a technically defined class of processes. This metaphor is not risk-free, however, and should be employed with caution. For example, many people confuse the 1.5 degrees Celsius milestone for global warming established by the Paris Agreement as a physical tipping point, which it is not. That confusion poses risk to the credibility of the scientific community, and it can harm climate action by encouraging both risky "emergency" techno-fixes and despondent doomism.