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2025-10-12 23:01:12

Earth’s Climate Has Passed Its First Irreversible Tipping Point and Entered a ‘New Reality’

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Climate change has pushed warm-water coral reefs past a point of no return, marking the first time a major climate tipping point has been crossed, according to a report released on Sunday by an international team in advance of the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP30 in Brazil this November.

Tipping points include global ice loss, Amazon rainforest loss, and the possible collapse of vital ocean currents. Once crossed, they will trigger self-perpetuating and irreversible changes that will lead to new and unpredictable climate conditions. But the new report also emphasizes progress on positive tipping points, such as the rapid rollout of green technologies.

“We can now say that we have passed the first major climate tipping point,” said Steve Smith, the Tipping Points Research Impact Fellow at the Global Systems Institute and Green Futures Solutions at the University of Exeter, during a media briefing on Tuesday. “But on the plus side,” he added, “we've also passed at least one major positive tipping point in the energy system,” referring to the maturation of solar and wind power technologies.

The world is entering a “new reality” as global temperatures will inevitably overshoot the goal of staying within 1.5°C of pre-industrial averages set by the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, warns the Global Tipping Points Report 2025, the second iteration of a collaboration focused on key thresholds in Earth’s climate system.

Warm-water corals are rich ecosystems that support a quarter of all marine life and provide food and income to more than a billion people. These vital reefs have experienced “diebacks” for years as rising marine temperatures produce mass-mortality bleaching events. But the severe marine heat waves of 2023 were particularly devastating, and the corals are now reaching their thermal threshold. The report concludes that they are virtually certain to tip toward widespread diebacks, though preventive actions can mitigate the extent of loss and secure small refuges.

“The marine heat wave hit 80 percent of the world's warm-water coral reefs with the worst bleaching event on record,” said Smith. “Their response confirms that we can no longer talk about tipping points as a future risk. The widespread dieback of warm-water coral reefs is already underway, and it's impacting hundreds of millions of people who depend on the reef for fishing, for tourism, for coastal protection, and from rising seas and storm surges.”

The report singled out Caribbean corals as a useful case study given that these ecosystems face a host of pressures, including extreme weather, overfishing, and inadequate sewage and pollution management. These coral diebacks are a disaster not only for the biodiverse inhabitants of the reefs, but also for the many communities who depend on them for food, income, coastal protection, and as a part of cultural identity.

“The Caribbean is in a particularly precarious situation,” Melanie McField, founder and director of the Healthy Reefs for Healthy People Initiative at the Smithsonian Institute, told 404 Media during the briefing. "We are very concerned about the Caribbean, but it's actually all of these warm-water reefs. They're all facing the same thing.”

McField added that the actions needed to bolster the corals’ defense against rising temperatures are clear, and include better sewage treatment, the creation of marine preserves, and more strident efforts to tackle overfishing.

“We've been saying the same things,” she said. “We haven't done them. Those are things that are completely in the power of national and local regulators.”

To that end, the report emphasizes that new governmental frameworks and institutions will need to be formed to tackle these problems, because the current system is clearly not up to the task. Avoiding future tipping points will not only require a doubling-down on decarbonization, but also demands major progress toward carbon removal technologies.

“We need to rapidly scale and take seriously the need for sustainable and equitable carbon removal technologies,” said Manjana Milkoreit, a postdoctoral researcher of sociology and human geography at the University of Oslo. “Carbon removal is now the only way to bring global temperatures back down after overshoot—to achieve net negative, not just net zero emissions. That requires serious and sustained investment, starting now.”

“We are currently not preparing for the distinct impacts of tipping points, and we do not have the capacities to address the cascading effects of tipping points,” she concluded. “The key message here is: Do not assume that we already know what to do, or we're already doing everything we can. It's not just more of the same. A different approach to governance is needed.”

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Resources - Global Tipping Points

Tipping Points Briefing Papers Download the Tipping Points Policy Brief here. Download A positive tipping cascade in power, transport and heating Download the study here.

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