Predicting tipping points: The many shades of non-equilibrium and catch-22s of early-warning

Abstract: The potential of crossing climate tipping points (TP) has reached the attention of many researchers and the general public. On the one hand, the basis for this concern is strengthening, with simulations showing that abrupt transitions might occur even for moderate emission scenarios. On the other hand, our understanding of what constitutes such transitions mathematically is becoming more nuanced. This leads to challenges for the fidelity of early-warning signals (EWS), which accompany bifurcations in systems that closely track a slowly changing steady state. Different kinds of out-of-equilibrium dynamics in a rapidly changing climate, as well as chaos, blur the critical tipping threshold and imply limits in predictability. Using EWS to detect loss of local stability from data requires careful evaluation in the high-dimensional system, and may have limited predictive power in a highly multistable climate, where there is more than a single, well-known alternative state. This calls for new methods using non-equilibrium statistical mechanics and dynamical systems to efficiently probe the global stability properties of climate models and observations.