Jean-Pascal Van Ypersele

I’m used to environmentalists and futurists writing about The Limits to Growth. I’m less used to seeing investment writers mention research that’s linked to The Limits of Growth. But that’s what Joachim Klement did in his daily newsletter recently. Of course, anyone who writes about Limits of Growth has to do all the usual disclaimers first. This is because the combination of the words “limits” and “growth” in the title produced a lot of critical responses, on a range from straight-up hatchet jobs which misrepresented the book, to people who didn’t appear to understand the systems dynamics model that sat behind it.

Tipping elements within the Earth system are increasingly well understood. Scientists have identified more than 25 parts of the Earth’s climate system that are likely to have “tipping points” – thresholds where a small additional change in global warming will cause them to irreversibly shift into a new state. The “tipping” of these systems – which include the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the Amazon rainforest and the Greenland ice sheet – would have profound consequences for both the biosphere and people. More recent research suggests that triggering one tipping element could cause subsequent changes in other tipping elements, potentially leading to a “tipping cascade”. For example, a collapsed AMOC could lead to dieback of the Amazon rainforest and hasten the melt of the Greenland ice sheet.

Researchers say Aardvark Weather uses thousands of times less computing power and is much faster than current systemsA single researcher with a desktop computer will be able to deliver accurate weather forecasts using a new AI weather prediction approach that is tens of times faster and uses thousands of times less computing power than conventional systems.

In thinking about the war being waged against life on Earth by Donald Trump, Elon Musk and their minions, I keep bumping into a horrible suspicion. Could it be that this is not just about delivering the world to oligarchs and corporations – not just about wringing as much profit from living systems as they can? Could it be that they want to see the destruction of the habitable planet?

Antarctica's remote and mysterious current has a profound influence on the climate, food systems and Antarctic ecosystems. Can we stop it weakening by 2050?

The abrupt loss of many species from a system is generally attributed to a breakdown in ecological functioning. As species are sequentially knocked out, the whole community becomes unstable, and it all comes crashing down. Another mechanism that may be at play. My colleagues and I argue that despite the fact life on Earth displays such great variety, many species that live together appear to share remarkably similar thermal limits. That is to say, individuals of different species can tolerate temperatures up to similar points.

The average size of monitored wildlife populations has shrunk by 73% since 1970.

Under current emission trajectories, temporarily overshooting the Paris global warming limit of 1.5 °C is a distinct possibility. Permanently exceeding this limit would substantially increase the probability of triggering climate tipping elements. Here, we investigate the tipping risks associated with several policy-relevant future emission scenarios, using a stylised Earth system model of four interconnected climate tipping elements.

An international research team has established a link between aquatic deoxygenation and the general stability of terrestrial systems, which should lead to the inclusion of deoxygenation as the tenth planetary boundary. This study also proposes to improve tools for monitoring and predicting aquatic systems, and oxygen in particular, by developing numerical models of improved accuracy and setting up a global database of the highest quality.

Anthropogenic emissions drive global-scale warming yet the temperature increase relative to pre-industrial levels is uncertain. Using 300 years of ocean mixed-layer temperature records preserved in sclerosponge carbonate skeletons, we demonstrate that industrial-era warming began in the mid-1860s, more than 80 years earlier than instrumental sea surface temperature records. The Sr/Ca palaeothermometer was calibrated against ‘modern’ (post-1963) highly correlated (R2 = 0.91) instrumental records of global sea surface temperatures, with the pre-industrial defined by nearly constant (<±0.1 °C) temperatures from 1700 to the early 1860s. Increasing ocean and land-air temperatures overlap until the late twentieth century, when the land began warming at nearly twice the rate of the surface oceans. Hotter land temperatures, together with the earlier onset of industrial-era warming, indicate that global warming was already 1.7 ± 0.1 °C above pre-industrial levels by 2020. Our result is 0.5 °C higher than IPCC estim