Some irreversible climate harms are already happening to the planet, researchers are warning ahead of this year’s global climate summit.
In a new report, a group of researchers said that between 2023 and 2025, coral reefs saw their worst bleaching on record and that reefs’ estimated temperature “tipping point” has been crossed.
Climate scientists often refer to “tipping points” as the level of warming at which irreversible damage occurs — as reefs can’t be revived and ice sheets can’t be re-formed, for example.
For reefs, the report says that “even under the most optimistic emission scenarios … warm-water coral reefs are virtually certain … to tip.”
The researchers said ice sheets are also on their way to “irreversible collapse, locking in long-term multi-metre sea level rise.”
Their report also says Antarctic sea ice “may have a tipping point that could already be underway” although it describes this as “highly uncertain.”
The report comes from an organization called Global Tipping Points, which is made up of 160 researchers from 23 countries. It’s led by Tim Lenton at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom.
The report is being published about a month before the start of COP30, this year’s global climate summit, which will take place in Brazil.
“The time to act is now. United, we can reverse a dangerous trend toward a sequence of systems collapses in a domino effect. Let us build on and support each other to prevent a potentially devastating chain-reaction,” COP30 President André Aranha Corrêa do Lago said in a forward accompanying the report.
The report’s release comes as the Trump administration has moved away from Biden-era policies aimed at combatting climate change and instead toward embracing planet-warming fossil fuels.
