Climate science is all about tipping points. Dozens of them lurking out there waiting to plunge us inexorably into inescapable doom one after another. And thus it is that another alert viewer asked us to respond to a video from last year about climate tipping points that we decided was worth it, partly because the channel in question has very nearly three quarters of a million subscribers and the video in question over 635k views so someone’s finding it persuasive, even impressive. But it seems to us that they shouldn’t, and not only because the presenter starts by showing us 16 such points after demonstrating with a couple of cups of blue stuff on a teeter-totter that tipping is binary. If there are more than a dozen, they should be called “things that could go wrong”. Also, all these things are highly speculative and not accidentally. And finally, the narrator quickly reveals that he has no idea what a “tipping point” even is and, given the positive response, that his audience doesn’t either.

To dispose of the point about speculation first, because climate alarmism is weirdly committed to the idea that climate was stable until the internal combustion engine, and to CO2 being the driver, they have trouble acknowledging our actual historic/prehistoric knowledge of real climate tipping points. And when they do acknowledge it, they offer a monocausal explanation. So they have essentially no real-world information to offer on actual tipping points.

For instance this presenter, Simon Clark, lists “Boreal Permafrost Abrupt Thaw” as one of his host of tipping points. (Another being “Boreal Permafrost Collapse” so look out.) But since we know the Eemian interglacial was warmer than the Holocene, along with its three predecessors, how is it that this particular nightmare wasn’t triggered then, but might be now at lower temperature? Or, if it was triggered, why didn’t the climate tip into a new state and stay there instead of just fluctuating as it has for hundreds of millions of years? Can it be that tip doesn’t mean what he thinks it does?

Yes. Pretty bad, huh? But it gets worse, because the narrator then asks “but did you know there are also climate tipping points that scientists want us to hit?” Ah, so you admit that in complex systems not all feedbacks are “positive gain” and accelerate the process that triggered them? You admit that there are things in the vastly complex system called “climate” that might tend to tamp down disturbances not amplify them?

Ah but nay. Instead the video brings in a scientist who says, to say “they’re called positive tipping points, where a small change can have a disproportionate effect after which the system becomes self-propelling.” Um yeah wouldn’t that be the positive ones you were nattering about?

Again, nay. Instead the narrator resumes “To be extremely clear, these tipping points are not physical like the circulation in the Atlantic or the Amazon rainforest dying back. Instead these are social or technological tipping points” and then it splices in mid-sentence back to the scientist who says “so for instance if one more person buys an electric vehicle that creates a positive interaction with other people making this the dominant technology”.

Um that’s not a tipping point. It’s just a guy showing people a car they might like. And indeed the presenter, in front of his greenscreen (we don’t know why) immediately but wrongly says:

“A really good example, not that long ago there were barely any electric vehicles on the road, and so when somebody, which used to be rare so when someone bought one and drove it around, it showed other people that these things existed, but also that they were cheap to run, that they didn’t produce any tailpipe emissions and that they were quiet and that made other people more likely to buy one and that effect only became more pronounced the more people bought electric cars.”

Right. So not a tipping point. And nothing to do with the lavish subsidies and onerous sales mandates that governments brought in to force a reluctant public to buy the things. And we won’t get sidetracked by whether just driving an EV around shows people that they’re cheap, because there’s far worse to follow.

Specifically, he immediately drew a chart showing the usual S curve, starting slow, accelerating then tapering off. And “if that sounds ridiculous to you, you might want to look at Norway” which now has more EVs than ICE cars. Yes, but only because Norway implemented the most lavish EV subsidies in the world and bribed the population.

This person has no idea what a tipping point even is. Picture piling straws onto a camel’s back until it suddenly collapses, an actual tipping point, and you don’t get an S curve or anything remotely similar. Or someone smoking for years and the gradual impact of the carcinogens abruptly causes a malignant cancer. Or an apparently stable crack in a dam suddenly propagating and the whole thing collapses. Or the “Sitzkrieg” or “Phoney War“ from September 1939 into early April 1940 after which the Blitzkrieg suddenly swept the Allies from the continent in mere weeks. Tipping points are real and common and can be disturbing. But they don’t look anything like an S curve (the conquest of France, like the death of a patient, doesn’t taper off). And if you don’t know it, you shouldn’t make videos about them.

Alas, he did. And it continues “Scientists have identified several key systems relevant to climate where change can be modeled as an S curve” which again proves that he knows not whereof he speaks because those aren’t tipping points. Then he cites a paper that interviewed the experts who say and they identified six though he notes in puzzlement that “the paper doesn’t call them tipping points, they instead call them social tipping elements because Academia”. Ha ha. But also duh duh.

Here we should interrupt our critique briefly to praise the narrator for including the links in the text below the video, including this one with the social tipping thingies. Authored by the social science thingies? At any rate author Ilona M. Otto “holds the Professorship in Societal Impacts of Climate Change at the Wegener Center for Climate and Global Change, University of Graz” and “is a social scientist by training”.

At least she’s an econometrician not a sociologist. No, wait. She’s also a sociologist. To be fair, the next guy’s a theoretical physicist. Followed by “a complex systems scientist and heterodox global change economist integrating human-Earth interactions across systems and scales into modular quantitative tools” with a “Dr. rer. nat.” (“doctor rerum naturalium” or “Doctor of Natural Sciences”) in “Climate Change Economics” which maybe you thought wasn’t so much an academic field as a kind of polemics and which certainly is not a natural science. Those are things like physics and geology and chemistry.

There are 11 more authors. Eleven. With a range of degrees in we-are-all-going-to-die-from-CO2 from a mix of chemistry and public administration science to an architect, a philosopher, an agri-technology consultant and so forth.

Now at CDN we are believers in the educated lay person, and we’re happy if they’re highly educated in some particular field and we’re also happy if they just pay attention and think sensibly. But it’s an odd as well as bloated team to assemble to say that if a lot of people change their behaviour, you get a lot of people changing their behaviour as if it were a novel insight, never mind a tipping point. (We also note acerbically that we hear that “More than half of adults in US say they lack basic statistical understanding” we feel that instead of lamenting the situation or blaming their high school math teacher they should get active fixing it, not least because if they did there’d be fewer videos like this one racking up views and a lot less foolishness generally.)

The whole venture, here meaning this video, the paper and climate alarmism generally, also shows a weird obsession with the world as being simpler than it is, with a host of nasty bad tipping points out there in the world, and a host of nice good ones here in our shops. But no standard accumulation, no negative feedback loops, no complex mix of different sorts of causation interacting. Just a bunch of tipping points that aren’t.

That they don’t seem to know what a tipping point is rather calls into question their further opinions on the subject, lay or expert. An S curve is, to repeat, the normal kind of process you get when there isn’t a tipping point. Like when people start drinking latte, or stop believing climate alarmists, or switch from horses to cars, or from cassette tapes to VHS to DVDs to streaming services.

Also as here. Because, to return to this wretched video:

“these tipping points were more information becoming available about our carbon footprint, increased awareness and understanding of climate change (oh hey, that’s what I do), public opinion turning against fossil fuels (hey that’s what), withdrawal of financial support for fossil fuel extraction (I made a whole video about that), cities becoming carbon neutral (I just made a video about this) and low carbon energy yielding higher financial returns for producers than energy produced by burning fossil fuels. That last one is seen as particularly important because energy literally underwrites civilization. Unfortunately, however, we are still a way off that tipping point PSYCH We’re already there. This paper was published in 2021…”

Um no. It was published in 2020. Hence the “January 21, 2020” plainly visible on the online version, and the journal date “February 4, 2020” visible in his screenshot. But who needs accuracy when churning out planet-saving videos?

Well, here we do, since he goes on to quote the paper that even then renewables already were more cost-effective in many places, before citing the IEA that this year, of the $3 trillion that would be spent on energy, $2 trillion would be spent on renewables. Which tells you nothing whatsoever about comparative costs, especially because governments in the grip of Net Zero fantasies are overinvesting in things that aren’t working very well.

No matter. See “the positive Tipping Point in energy has been reached”. The point where more people use it, not where a sudden discontinuity takes us willy-nilly and helter-skelter from one stable state to another.

Now we’re only 4 minutes 40 seconds into an 18 minute video and we won’t drag you through the rest. Why would we, when the whole premise is wrong because the presenter and his large audience don’t even understand what a tipping point is.

They love the metaphor, apply it widely in inappropriate contexts with insufficient data, then cry “Gotcha!” Which is, as Artemus Ward may once have said but Abraham Lincoln did not, “For people who like that kind of thing, this is the kind of thing they like.”

Especially as the narrator then calls for governments to “accelerate our progress… down the S curve” whereas the whole point about tipping points is that after tipping you fall rapidly and unstoppably by your own momentum.

Otherwise a fine video.