Jean-Marc Jancovici

It looked like snow under water: white, endless, and still. The reef, my friend Lisbeth said, was “the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.” For a second, I almost agreed. Then, I stared at it for a long time before replying. She wasn’t wrong about its beauty. But she was also showing me death. Bleached coral isn’t a kind of coral. It’s the moment just after the funeral, what’s left when life is gone. A cathedral of bone-white skeletons stretching over an empire of calcified death. From above, it glows like marble. Up close, it’s a graveyard.

Four key parts of the Earth’s climate system are destabilising, according to a new study with contributions from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). Researchers analysed the interconnections of four major tipping elements: the Greenland ice sheet, the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), the Amazon rainforest and the South American monsoon system. All four show signs of diminished resilience, raising the risk of abrupt and potentially irreversible changes.