TiPES Final Meeting

There is rising concern that several subsystems of the Earth may respond highly nonlinearly at critical future levels of anthropogenic forcing; these levels have recently been associated with tipping points (TPs). It is paramount to identify safe operating spaces for humanity and the planet in terms of these critical forcing levels in order to prevent harmful transitions to alternative, undesirable states of the Earth system. The mechanisms leading to such abrupt transitions are only partly understood, and further research in this regard is urgently needed. State-of-art Earth System Models appear to respond too smoothly at TPs and have difficulties in simulating abrupt transitions that occurred in the planet’s history. TiPES is a Horizon 2020 (H2020) funded project that has run from September 2019. Its main object is to better quantify the tipping elements that are present in the climate system and to ensure that climate projections also include these. In this final meeting, the main conclusions and results of the project will be presented, and interactions with other EU H2020 projects tackling similar problems will be highlighted.