Are we doomed,yet?! Climate tipping points twenty years later

Abstract

In this article, I discuss the limitations of tipping points as a framework for communicating risks and vulnerabilities created by climate change. In doing so, I expand on the genealogical account of Anders Hansson, Jonas Anshelm, and Simon Haikola and their claims about the salience of apocalypse and doom in climate communication. I suggest that the communication of vulnerabilities to climate change, including catastrophic risks, should not seek to manage public emotion or invite billionaires to prescribe policy and governance frameworks for climate change.

Tell me, how do I feel

Tell me now, how do I feel

(New Order, 1983)

Twenty years ago, a small group of scientists began issuing public warnings of climate change danger. These warnings used a culturally resonant metaphor, “tipping point,” to foreground dynamic changes characterized by thresholds, irreversibility, non-linearity, and positive feedback. The metaphor caught on. Public debates became more alive to the possibilities of catastrophic change, and the gradualist assumptions shaping climate policy and governance throughout the 1990s were challenged.

To my mind, this was a positive development. It catalyzed discussions about the temporal assumptions that dominant institutions had internalized about climate change. However, tipping point proponents had larger ambitions. The metaphor inspired a scientific concept and was promoted as a worldview on climate change (van der Hel et al., 2018). It was not enough to consider the risks and vulnerabilities created by abrupt, non-linear, feedback and threshold-based changes. Some wanted to reorganize climate policy and governance around tipping points more generally (Lenton and Schellnhuber, 2007).

In my opinion, the evidence, arguments, and ethical reflection needed to justify these larger claims were surprisingly thin. Legitimate concerns about the dynamics of abrupt change were tethered to a GAIA-inspired vision that generated confusion about vulnerabilities to climate change and how to address them. It was reckless—and remains so—to claim dangerous changes that may (or may not!) result from tipping points are best addressed by triggering cascades of social tipping points.

Anders Hansson, Jonas Anshelm, and Simon Haikola deserve praise for examining this idea of climate action as a “race” between physical and societal tipping points (Hansson, Anshelm, and Haikola, 2025: 1). Their findings echo previous concerns about the inflated scope of the tipping point concept and illustrate how concepts integral to climate policy and politics (transition, agency, and social change) are handled in simplistic and often confusing ways (see Kopp et al., 2025). In addition, they situate this tendency within the historical arc of dynamic systems approaches and question the significance of apocalypse and fear in climate discourse.

I want to expand on these last two points.

First, the “brief genealogy” of tipping points shared by the authors is too narrow (Hansson, Anshelm, and Haikola, 2025: 2). It overemphasizes the contributions of Schellnhuber, an admittedly influential perspective, but one distinguished by a GAIA-oriented worldview not as dominant in North American discussions. On this approach, sustainability and earth systems changes are approached as a control problem (Schellnhuber, 1999). Geophysical dynamics are integrated at a global scale to identify control knobs for managing the earth. The importance of “Gaia-type metaphors” for shaping perception of these knobs as leverage points was previously acknowledged (Schellnhuber and Held, 2001: 18). Initially called choke and switch points, these opportunities for leverage were rebranded as tipping points and viewed as part of an intellectual revolution affording geo-cybernetic control of the earth.

Leaving aside the significance of James Hansen's invocation of climate tipping points to challenge the US government's approach to climate change in the 2000s, which drew significant attention to the concept, the approach of ecosystem researchers working in North America was very different. It emerged from practical efforts at adaptive management during catastrophic changes to forests in Canada (resulting, in part, from the application of control paradigms to these environments) (Russill, 2015). C. S. Holling and William Clark, for instance, integrated science, policy, and management perspectives in the context of understanding epidemic and catastrophic risks (Clark, 1985). A key figure in the translation of this approach to climate policy and governance, or “the CO2 question” as it was then called, was Thomas Schelling (Russill, 2015: 427). Schelling argued that geophysical science was not a sufficient basis for assessing the relationship of climate policy and societal outcomes, a claim Clark built upon to recast the discussion “as a problem of risk assessment and risk management” (Clark, 1985: 36).

The point is that the holism of dynamic systems thinking, its “ambiguous systems ontology” if you will, takes different forms of institutional and cultural expression that affects how it handles questions of scope and scale (Hansson, Anshelm, and Haikola, 2025: 9). In adaptive management approaches, abrupt or surprising changes were assessed in terms of perturbations affecting stability, resilience, persistence, and temporal features of an environment that one might adaptively and cooperatively manage. It was not a question of identifying on/off switches, a master principle for earth's management, or racing to control thresholds to irreversible change. Instead of promoting a geo-cybernetic control problem, science, policy, and governance are brought together in the context of risk management problems. Unfortunately, those “racing” to tip societies appear caught up with legacies of social control they often fail to realize or acknowledge.

Secondly, there is Hansson, Anshelm, and Haikola's important discussion of apocalypse and doom. It seems that alarmist, fatalist, or even terror-inducing connotations of tipping points are not as salient or unambiguous as sometimes suggested. While the significance of public emotion in climate communication is now widely acknowledged, high profile efforts to manage emotion around the risks and vulnerabilities of climate change have complicated if not politicized the question.

Let's try to unpack this a bit.

First, should we agree that “[i]f natural, climate tipping points connote apocalypse” (Hansson, Anshelm, and Haikola, 2025: 2)? Apocalyptic and eschatological language does not animate the science or synthesis reports on abrupt change. It is not part of risk management or emergency response frameworks that integrate this knowledge. It is not at all necessary to conceive vulnerabilities to climate change through such discourse. Yes, many of us doomscroll such content, but that is life in an information environment organized by systems designed to amplify emotionally intense content. In this respect, the association of catastrophe with apocalypse is a consequence of cultural mediations, and, as Bellamy (2023) notes, is shaped by questions of worldview. In my opinion, the conflation of catastrophe and apocalypse is unnecessary. It was elevated by a small set of voices, amplified by book publishers and social media, and seized on by people hoping to move climate discourse into philosophical or religious registers (see Latour, 2017). Those opposed to apocalyptic content in climate communication should not cast aside the need to assess vulnerabilities to climate impacts in the process (see Morris, 2025; Skrimshire, 2014).

Second, the consequences of apocalyptic or doomer content are often evoked in evidence-free and exaggerated ways. As the authors note, some assume resignation, fatalism, and despair (Hulme, 2023), while others project a hopeful awakening to possibilities of transformational change (Hansson, Anshelm, and Haikola, 2025: 2).

The involvement of billionaire technologists with opinions on this question has not helped. Bill Gates (2025), for instance, evoked concerns with “a doomsday view on climate change” to propose a “strategic pivot” for policy and governance (encouraging the UN system to align with positions popularized by his foundation) (Gates, 2025: np). Instead of locating his perspective as a contribution to assessments of risk and vulnerability, Gates exaggerated the importance and consequences of doomerism as well as the novelty of his “new way to look at the problem” (Gates, 2025: np). Peter Thiel has gone further in linking apocalyptic discourse to the arrival of the AntiChrist: “The way the Antichrist would take over the world is you talk about Armageddon nonstop.” (Thiel, 2025: np).

A similar desire to distance from doomer discourse explains the strange incongruity between planetary tipping points (dangerous to trigger!) and societal tipping points (hopeful to activate!). As Milkoreit observed, “there is a curious degree of confidence” in claims one can initiate and control social tipping processes (Milkoreit, 2023: 4). The curiosity lies in the lack of evidence and ethical reflection usually found in these claims. It is perhaps unfair to suggest this is characteristic of the public claims of technology companies as well, but the promotion of positive tipping points in climate communication by Bezos Earth Fund appears consistent with this trend. The promise of tipping points to unlock societal pathways to transformational change is framed as hopeful, as counterbalancing negative feelings, and as giving policymakers a basis for setting ambitious timelines and deadlines. But does it actually offer a credible account of societal transformation? Or do desires to manage public emotion drive public discourse on positive tipping points?

Hansson, Anshelm, and Haikola suggest we have overindexed on fear and doom in discussing the politics of tipping points. I agree. It is possible that heightened public interest in social tipping points has offset negative or doomerist connotations. It is possible that the association of tipping points with apocalypse was overblown and unnecessary from the start. Either way, the authors encourage us to evaluate how risk is managed by the institutions structuring our political conversations.

This conclusion returns us to the original impetus of tipping point warnings of climate danger two decades ago. Scientists foregrounded possibilities of catastrophic change not visible in the narratives shaping dominant institutions. These threats were potentially unmanageable given approaches that simply failed to account for our vulnerabilities to such changes. The invisibility of these vulnerabilities to unknown, high-impact events resulted from failures to integrate risk-assessment frameworks when climate policy and governance institutions were first established in the 1980s. The heightened concern, or alarm if you will, was rooted in this failure to account for such changes, not to prescribe an emotional response for climate communication more generally. Tipping points were most compelling when used to illuminate dynamics of complex systems change—it does not make sense to assume such changes prescribe negative or positive emotional responses.

Of course, a lot has changed since then.

Hansson, Anshelm, and Haikola bring us full circle by asking whether risk-oriented approaches—or the approach to risk represented by tipping points—lends itself to the managerial politics animating current debates over globalism, elitism, and post-politics. Do social tipping points frame climate change as a manageable problem that our political systems can solve in relatively quick and painless ways? This was a promise that made Malcolm Gladwell's (2000) writing on the subject so appealing in the first place. The hard work of navigating political differences could be transcended by designing policy to manage tipping points.

It appears, following Hansson, Anshelm, and Haikola, that the depoliticization strategies characteristic of managerial politics rest not on fear, but on efforts to manage public emotion more broadly. Such emotions are a site of intense struggle among those pursuing populist and authoritarian approaches to politics as well. In addition, the traditional role played by regulatory, diplomatic, legal, and state-led actors has been undermined by corporate actors interested in shaping policy and governance on climate change. While this is perhaps obvious in cases of corporate greenwashing, the delusional ravings amplified on Elon Musk's X, or Gates’ work, the importance of Bezos Earth Fund in promoting positive tipping points in climate communication should hardly be discounted as a challenge to conventional forms of state-led governance.

In this respect, a politics more responsive to climate risks has become challenging to pursue. As impacts become more salient and visible, and as vulnerabilities to catastrophe are politicized by those fearful of public emotion, it will be so hard to say what we need to say. But I’m quite sure they’ll tell us just how we should feel today.