Tipping elements and climate-economic shocks: Pathways toward integrated assessment
📝 Abstract
The literature on the costs of climate change often draws a link between climatic ’tipping points’ and large economic shocks, frequently called ‘catastrophes’. The use of the phrase ’tipping points’ in this context can be misleading. In popular and social scientific discourse, ’tipping points’ involve abrupt state changes. For some climatic ’tipping points,’ the commitment to a state change may occur abruptly, but the change itself may be rate-limited and take centuries or longer to realize. Additionally, the connection between climatic ’tipping points’ and economic losses is tenuous, though emerging empirical and process-model-based tools provide pathways for investigating it. We propose terminology to clarify the distinction between ’tipping points’ in the popular sense, the critical thresholds exhibited by climatic and social ’tipping elements,’ and ’economic shocks’. The last may be associated with tipping elements, gradual climate change, or non-climatic triggers. We illustrate our proposed distinctions by surveying the literature on climatic tipping elements, climatically sensitive social tipping elements, and climate-economic shocks, and we propose a research agenda to advance the integrated assessment of all three.
💡 Analysis
The literature on the costs of climate change often draws a link between climatic ’tipping points’ and large economic shocks, frequently called ‘catastrophes’. The use of the phrase ’tipping points’ in this context can be misleading. In popular and social scientific discourse, ’tipping points’ involve abrupt state changes. For some climatic ’tipping points,’ the commitment to a state change may occur abruptly, but the change itself may be rate-limited and take centuries or longer to realize. Additionally, the connection between climatic ’tipping points’ and economic losses is tenuous, though emerging empirical and process-model-based tools provide pathways for investigating it. We propose terminology to clarify the distinction between ’tipping points’ in the popular sense, the critical thresholds exhibited by climatic and social ’tipping elements,’ and ’economic shocks’. The last may be associated with tipping elements, gradual climate change, or non-climatic triggers. We illustrate our proposed distinctions by surveying the literature on climatic tipping elements, climatically sensitive social tipping elements, and climate-economic shocks, and we propose a research agenda to advance the integrated assessment of all three.
📄 Content
Tipping elements and climate-economic shocks: Pathways toward integrated assessment
Robert E. Kopp1,2*, Rachael Shwom2,3, Gernot Wagner4, Jiacan Yuan1
1 Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences and Institute of Earth, Ocean & Atmospheric
Sciences, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA
2 Rutgers Energy Institute, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA
3 Department of Human Ecology, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA
4 Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Cambridge, MA, USA
Corresponding author: Robert E. Kopp (robert.kopp@rutgers.edu)
Key Points: • Potential state shifts in climatic and social systems play an important role in estimates of climate damages. • ‘Tipping points’ as broadly understood involve positive feedbacks and abrupt change, but not all climatic thresholds cause abrupt change. • Some possible climate-economic shocks, whether or not they can be called ‘catastrophes’, involve tipping points; not all do.
Published in Earth’s Future. doi:10.1002/2016EF000362.
KOPP ET AL.
doi:10.1002/2016EF000362
2
Abstract The literature on the costs of climate change often draws a link between climatic ‘tipping points’ and large economic shocks, frequently called ‘catastrophes’. The phrase ‘tipping points’ in this context can be misleading. In popular and social scientific discourse, ‘tipping points’ involve abrupt state changes. For some climatic ‘tipping points,’ the commitment to a state change may occur abruptly, but the change itself may be rate-limited and take centuries or longer to realize. Additionally, the connection between climatic ‘tipping points’ and economic losses is tenuous, though emerging empirical and process-model-based tools provide pathways for investigating it. We propose terminology to clarify the distinction between ‘tipping points’ in the popular sense, the critical thresholds exhibited by climatic and social ‘tipping elements,’ and ‘economic shocks’. The last may be associated with tipping elements, gradual climate change, or non- climatic triggers. We illustrate our proposed distinctions by surveying the literature on climatic tipping elements, climatically sensitive social tipping elements, and climate-economic shocks, and we propose a research agenda to advance the integrated assessment of all three. 1 Introduction Whether labeled ‘tipping points’ [Lenton and Schellnhuber, 2007; Lenton et al., 2008], ‘large-scale singular events’ [O’Neill et al., in rev.; Smith et al., 2001, 2009; Oppenheimer et al., 2014], or ‘abrupt impacts’ [National Research Council, 2002, 2013], large-scale, non-linear shifts in the Earth system are often identified as a reason for concern about climate change [Oppenheimer et al., 2014] and a potential trigger of major economic losses, often described as ‘economic catastrophes’ [Nordhaus and Boyer, 2000; Wagner and Weitzman, 2015]. Yet – as the multiple, nearly synonymous phrases suggest – the language used to describe such shifts is unsettled, and the link between physical changes and their socio-economic consequences is often unclear. To enhance cross-disciplinary communications between natural and social scientists working to assess the risks posed by climate-related tipping points and associated costs, this paper seeks to clarify terminology, critically review the underlying literature, and identify research directions in the integrated assessment of these large-scale changes. The phrase ‘tipping point’ appears to have originated in industry, where it referred literally to the point at which an engineered system, such as a rail wagon of coal in a Yorkshire foundry [Burnley, 1871] or a cup in a tilting water meter [Hoadley, 1883], tipped over and emptied its contents. The earliest use of the term in academic research occurred in the social sciences. In a Scientific American article, the political scientist Morton Grodzins [1957] applied the phrase ‘tip point’ to a critical proportion of non-whites in a neighborhood, above which the fraction of whites precipitously declines to zero. ‘Tip point’ and especially its variant ‘tipping point’ spread rapidly through the academic and policy literature on neighborhood segregation. (See the growth in the frequency of the phrase in the 1960s and 1970s shown in Figure 1a). Schelling [1971] introduced mathematical models of stability points in neighborhood segregation and discussed the conditions that could lead to the development of tipping points. Malcolm Gladwell popularized the term ‘tipping point’ in a New Yorker article [1996] and in his book The Tipping Point [2000], which identified several other examples, including the sudden increase in popularity of Hush Puppies shoes in 1995 and the sharp decline of crime in New York City in the mid-1990s. Gladwell [2000] summarized the characteristics of tipping KOPP ET AL.
doi:10.1002/2016EF000362
3 points as (1) being contagious and (2)
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