Boulder is a Stoopid Place

The Earth is reaching a “tipping point” in climate change that will lead to increasingly rapid and irreversible destruction of the global environment unless its forces are controlled by concerted international action, an international group of scientists warns.

“The science tells us that we are heading toward major changes in the biosphere,” Barnosky said in an interview this week. “And given all the pressures we are putting on the world, if we do nothing different, I believe we are looking at a time scale of a century or even a few decades for a tipping point to arrive.”

The scientists concede there is “considerable uncertainty” that these forces will inevitably lead to such a rapid and radical transformation of the world’s environment – a “state shift,” as they call it – but they argue such a shift is “highly plausible” and may have already begun.

Slowing or reversing that transition will require international cooperation to slow population growth, curb dependence on fossil fuels, increase the efficiency of food production, and manage both lands and oceans as reservoirs of biodiversity, the scientist say.

Richard Lindzen, a climate scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has been a vociferous skeptic on the urgency of global warming, called the warnings by Barnosky and his colleagues “highly implausible.”

“Even if their models of the future were correct, what’s crucial is the time frame, and no one thinks that something terrible will happen in anything like the future they see,” Lindzen said. “Their population predictions are extremely unlikely, and their climate predictions are always hypothetical.”