Striking study finds a climate tipping point in clouds

Enlarge / Stratocumulus clouds, like those in the lower two-thirds of this image, are common over the oceans. (credit: NASA Earth Observatory)

The word "hysteresis" doesn't immediately seem threatening; it hints at a portmanteau of "history" and "thesis"-a dense read, perhaps, but those never killed anyone. But that's not what the word means. Hysteresis is a profound behavior some systems can display, crossing a sort of point-of-no-return. Dial things up just one notch, and you can push the system through a radical change. To get back to normal, you might have to dial it down five or six notches.

Earth's climate system can provide examples. Take the conveyor-belt-like circulation of water in the Atlantic Ocean. Looking back at the past, you can see times that the circulation seems to have flipped into an alternate pattern regarding climatic consequences around the North Atlantic. Switching from one pattern to the other takes a significant nudge, but reversing it is hard-like driving up to the top of a ridge and rolling down into the next valley.

A new study led by Caltech's Tapio Schneider may have identified a disturbing hysteresis in Earth's climate-a shift in cloud patterns in response to warming that could quickly heat the planet much further. If we were to continue emitting more and more greenhouse gas, we'd eventually end up running this experiment for real. (Let's not, please.)

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