From Climate Risks to Opportunities: Critical Transitions in the Earth System

by Nico Wunderling (PIK Potsdam)

Tuesday Jun 27, 2023, 2:15 PM → 3:45 PM Europe/Berlin

H10 (UHG)

With progressing global warming, there is an increased risk that one or several climate tipping elements such as the Greenland Ice Sheet, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation or the Amazon rainforest might cross critical thresholds (tipping points), resulting in severe consequences for the global climate, ecosystems and human societies. However, detailed Earth system models such as GCMs (Global Circulation Models) have only been partially able to include nonlinear phenomena like tipping elements either due to a lack of process understanding or computational constraints.

In this talk, I will outline how methods from complex systems and nonlinear dynamics can build the basis for a new class of Earth system models that is (i) able to take into account all relevant uncertainties in tipping points, interaction strengths and structure, and (ii) act as a comprehensive risk assessment tool. Building on previous work and a rigorous uncertainty analysis (Python package PyCascades: https://github.com/pik-copan/pycascades), I will propose to develop a physics-informed tipping risk emulator that is able to better quantify probabilities for climate tipping events and cascades under global warming.

Furthermore, while humans largely determine the extent of climate change, only very few climate models include them as a dynamic component. Therefore, I will put forward first results of a coupled human-Earth system model using a dynamical systems approach. On the basis of these findings, I will outline how future research can determine how strong (or even if) humans react to existential threads resulting from exceeding critical thresholds in the Earth system.

2023-06-27_NicoWunderling.pdf