Last Born In The Wilderness

In this episode, I speak with Timothy Lenton, director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom. We discuss his research into climate tipping points presented in the article ‘Climate tipping points — too risky to bet against’ published at Nature. To adequately comprehend global climate change and how its impacts will play out in the near and distant future, identifying various tipping points in the Earth’s intersecting systems, and how crossing them will amplify and accelerate global warming, needs to be more seriously understood. “Politicians, economists and even some natural scientists have tended to assume that tipping points in the Earth system — such as the loss of the Amazon rainforest or the West Antarctic ice sheet — are of low probability and little understood. Yet evidence is mounting that these events could be more likely than was thought, have high impacts and are interconnected across different biophysical systems, potentially committing the world to long