Swedish teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg (R) and German climate activist Luisa Neubauer (L) at a student-led climate change rally in Berlin in March 2019.
Credit: Carsten Koall/Getty

Often, the news relating to climate change is unrelentingly bleak. The world appears to be hurtling toward a climate-warmed future riddled with hurricanes, floods, droughts, famines, heat waves, forest fires, rising sea levels, and vanishing ice caps.

But just as natural systems appear to have “tipping points” in which positive feedbacks can accelerate the rush toward such disasters, it may be that human socio-economic systems may also have tipping points that can help ward them off.

In the natural world, these points include factors such as the loss of sunlight-reflecting snow and ice, or the release of planet-warming methane gas from melting permafrost, both of which can accelerate the rate of global warming.

In the socio-economic world, “good” tipping points would be ones that might induce corporations and individuals to rapidly increase activities that help prevent climate change, even if political institutions are still dragging their […]