Tipping points in open systems: bifurcation, noise-induced and rate-dependent examples in the climate system

By Peter Ashwin, Sebastian Wieczorek, R. Vitolo, P. Cox. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 2011

599 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Tipping points associated with bifurcations (B-tipping) or induced by noise (N-tipping) are recognized mechanisms that may potentially lead to sudden climate change. We focus here on a novel class of tipping points, where a sufficiently rapid change to an input or parameter of a system may cause the system to ‘tip’ or move away from a branch of attractors. Such rate-dependent tipping, or R-tipping, need not be associated with either bifurcations or noise. We present an example of all three types of tipping in a simple global energy balance model of the climate system, illustrating the possibility of dangerous rates of change even in the absence of noise and of bifurcations in the underlying quasi-static system.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8a174c7ce24667bb72aaa9a99d8fcc615debab5d

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In Atmospheric Science

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Citations in the corpus

• The physics of climate variability and climate change (2019, background): “Following Ashwin et al. (2012), one distinguishes among three kinds of tipping points, as shown in Table II.”