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tipping points
Scientists Warn 'Garbage' Models Underestimate Risk of Economic Collapse From Climate Crisis
Current models "assume the future will behave like the past, even as we push the climate system into uncharted territory," said the lead author of a new report that's based on input from dozens of experts.
Feb 05, 2026
In a report published Thursday, UK experts highlighted the "growing gap between real-world climate risk and the economic analysis used to guide policy, supervision, and investment," while also warning that because the "window for preventing catastrophic warming" is narrowing, ambitious action "cannot await perfected models."
Various scientific institutions concur that 2025 was among the hottest years on record—and the ongoing failure of governments across the globe, particularly the Trump administration, to enact policies that would significantly cut planet-heating emissions from fossil fuels is pushing the Paris Agreement's 1.5°C and 2°C goals for this century further out of reach.
The new report from the University of Exeter and the think tank Carbon Tracker Initiative, titled Recalibrating Climate Risk, incorporates the expert opinions of 68 climate scientists from Australia, Austria, Canada, China, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
"Our expert elicitation reveals a fundamental disconnect: Climate scientists understand that beyond 2°C, we're not dealing with manageable economic adjustments," said Jesse Abrams, lead author and senior impact fellow at Exeter's Green Futures Solutions, in a statement.
"The climate scientists we surveyed were unambiguous," he explained. "Current economic models systematically underestimate climate damages because they can't capture what matters most—the cascading failures, threshold effects, and compounding shocks that define climate risk in a warmer world and could undermine the very foundations of economic growth."
Abrams said that "for financial institutions and policymakers relying on these models, this isn't a technical problem—it's a fundamental misreading of the risks we face, which current models miss entirely because they assume the future will behave like the past, even as we push the climate system into uncharted territory."
Current economic models miss the mark on climate risks, warning that catastrophic tipping points and extreme weather could crash the global economy, far worse than 2008.As said many times before delaying action will be far costlier than cutting emissions now.www.theguardian.com/environment/...
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— Ian Hall (@ianhall.bsky.social) February 5, 2026 at 12:46 AM
Communities around the world are already contending with devastating droughts, fires, and storms—and, as another report from researchers at Exeter and the UK's Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFOA) pointed out last month, "above 1.5°C, we enter the danger zone where multiple climate tipping points may be triggered, such as the collapse of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, permafrost melt, Amazon dieback, and changes in ocean circulation."
The IFOA report "warned that when cascading and systemic risks are taken into account, warming of 2°C by 2050 could result in a 25% hit to projected GDP, rising to a halving of projected economic growth between 2070 and 2090," BusinessGreen editor-in-chief James Murray reported Thursday. "Similarly, a report from consultancy Boston Consulting Group calculated a third of the global economic output could be lost under a scenario where temperatures reach 3°C above preindustrial levels by 2100."
"The studies stand in stark contrast to some mainstream economic models that have suggested warming of 2°C or more will only reduce projected economic growth by a few percentage points—analyses that have been seized upon by opponents of climate action to argue that decarbonization policies can be dropped or delayed," Murray noted.
Abrams told the Guardian that some current economic models "are saying we'll have a 10% GDP loss at between 3°C and 4°C, but the physical climate scientists are saying the economy and society will cease to function as we know it. That's a big mismatch."
Your periodic reminder that the economic models that suggest climate change will knock a couple of percent of future GDP - models that are used widely by governments, investors, and businesses - are almost certainly complete garbage. www.businessgreen.com/news/4525211...
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— James Murray (@james-bg.bsky.social) February 5, 2026 at 7:08 AM
Laurie Laybourn, a Carbon Tracker board member and executive director of Strategic Climate Risks Initiative, cited another recent report that provides a bleak picture of the current moment and what lies ahead.
"As the UK government's landmark security assessment of ecosystem collapse showed last week, we are currently living through a paradigm shift in the speed, scale, and severity of risks driven by the climate-nature crisis," she said. "Yet, beyond this report, there has not been a corresponding paradigm shift in how regulators and government as a whole assess these risks."
"Instead, they're routinely underestimated if not missed entirely, meaning many regulations and government action are dangerously out of touch with reality," she continued. "This threatens disaster when that reality catches up with us. So, it's critical that policymakers change course, providing clear signals and guidance to markets that these risks should be priced accordingly, rather than downplayed."
And, as the experts emphasized Thursday, it's not just policymakers—investors are also still relying on "flawed economic advice," said Carbon Tracker founder and CEO Mark Campanale. The result is "widespread complacency... with many investors viewing climate scenario analysis as a tick-box disclosure exercise."
"Until the gap between scientists and economists' expectations of future climate damages is closed and government bodies act to ensure the integrity of advice upon which investment decisions are made," he added, "financial institutions will continue to chronically underprice climate risks—meaning that pension funds and taxpayers will remain dangerously exposed."
Hetal Patel, head of sustainable investment research at Phoenix Group, the UK's largest and retirement and savings business, said that her firm "supports the report's call for a more robust and coordinated approach to climate‑risk modeling. Underestimating physical risk doesn't just distort financial analysis and investment decisions, it underplays the real‑world consequences that will ultimately affect customer outcomes and society as a whole."
The new report stresses that addressing the "fundamental disconnect between what climate scientists understand about climate impacts and how these impacts are represented in economic models" would require "research investments spanning years," but rather than simply waiting for better modeling, decision-makers "must proceed on the basis of precautionary risk management, physical climate science, and observed impacts."
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'Our New Reality': Planet Reaches First Climate Tipping Point With Coral Reef Dieback
“We can no longer talk about tipping points as a future risk,” said one researcher. “This is our new reality.”
Oct 13, 2025
Less than two years after researchers at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom warned that the world was nearing numerous climate tipping points, a report out Monday warns that one such "point of no return" has already been reached, with warm-water coral reefs "experiencing unprecedented dieback."
Surging global temperatures, especially in recent years, have pushed the world's coral reefs into a state of widespread decline, with the worst bleaching event on record taking place since 2023. More than 84% of the world's reefs have been impacted.
In the Global Tipping Points Report 2025 released Monday, the researchers warned that "the central estimate" of coral reefs' "tipping point of 1.2°C global warming has been crossed," with planetary heating now at about 1.4°C above preindustrial levels.
The warming waters have caused widespread bleaching of coral reefs, which impacts the nearly a million species of marine animals and organisms that rely on them to support some of the planet's most diverse ecosystems.
“Unless we return to global mean surface temperatures of 1.2°C (and eventually to at least 1°C) as fast as possible, we will not retain warm-water reefs on our planet at any meaningful scale,” the report says. Minimizing non-climatic stressors, particularly improved reef management, can give reefs the best chance of surviving under what must be a minimal exceedance of their thermal tipping point."
The decline of coral reefs also leaves coastal communities without natural barriers against storm surge, compounds the overfishing crisis by depriving fish of a habitat in which to reproduce, and impacts thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in reef tourism each year.
"As we head into the COP30 climate negotiations it’s vital that all parties grasp the gravity of the situation."
"We can no longer talk about tipping points as a future risk,” Steve Smith, a social scientist at the University of Exeter and a lead author of the report, told Nature. “This is our new reality.”
The arrival of the tipping point necessitates immediate, significant reductions in fossil fuel emissions that are driving planetary heating in order to return to a global mean surface temperature of 1.2°C over preindustrial temperatures, but climate scientist Bill McGuire did not mince words Monday regarding the likelihood of mitigating the damage already done to coral reefs.
"We won't reduce temps to 1.2°C as soon as possible, so this is the death knell for most of the world's stupendous reef communities," said McGuire. "Other tipping points will follow."
The report notes that the world is still headed toward other climate tipping points, namely the "large-scale" degradation of the Amazon rainforest, which is projected to "weaken global climate regulation" and accelerate biodiversity loss; the melting of mountain glaciers like Áakʼw Tá Hít in Alaska; and for the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which regulates the climate by transporting warmer waters from the tropics to the northern Atlantic Ocean, whose likelihood of reaching a tipping point "increases with global temperature" rise.
Without rapid cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, the Global Tipping Points report says, the upper threshold of global temperature rise for coral reefs of 1.5°C is likely to be reached within 10 years.
“We are going to overshoot 1.5°C of global warming probably around 2030 on current projections,” Tim Lenton of the University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute told The Guardian.
Manjana Milkoreit, a co-author of the report and political scientist at the University of Oslo, told Nature that "we have the knowledge regarding how to stop the Earth from reaching more tipping points."gr
“What we need is a kind of governance that matches the nature of this challenge," she said.
The report also acknowledges "positive tipping points" that could have runaway impacts on the ability to rapidly draw down greenhouse gas emissions, such as the widespread adoption of regenerative agricultural practices and an acceleration in the transition toward electric vehicle and solar power use.
"Solar PV panels have dropped in price by a quarter for each doubling of their installed capacity. Batteries have improved in quality and plummeted in price the more that are deployed," reads the report. "This encourages further adoption. The spread of climate litigation cases and nature positive initiatives is also self-amplifying. The more people undertaking them the more they influence others to act."
Lenton told The Guardian that "the race is on to bring forward these positive tipping points to avoid what we are now sure will be the unmanageable consequences of further tipping points in the Earth system."
As Common Dreams reported last week, global progress toward transitioning away from fossil fuels and expanding the use of renewable energy is surging worldwide—but the US has been left out this year under President Donald Trump, with a major spending bill imposing new fees on solar and wind development and boosting drilling on public lands while the US Department of Energy is investing $625 million in coal.
The Global Tipping Points report was released four weeks before global leaders are set to meet in Belém, Brazil for the 30th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP30), where policymakers will be asked to contribute to a Granary of Solutions: "a reservoir of concrete tools and initiatives—scalable, replicable, and aligned with the Paris Agreement—that connect ambition with implementation" in order to trigger "positive tipping points of transformation leveraging solutions that already exist."
"As we head into the COP30 climate negotiations it’s vital that all parties grasp the gravity of the situation,” Mike Barrett, chief scientific adviser at the World Wide Fund for Nature in the UK and a co-author of the report, told Yale Environment 360. “Countries must show the political bravery and leadership to work together and achieve them.”
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Trump Is Turning the US Into the Planet's Rogue Nation
Globally, fossil fuel emissions for producing electricity plateaued—even fell slightly—over the first half of the year. It’s an epochal moment for the planet, but US emissions still rose.
Oct 08, 2025
Tuesday was one of those days when you can feel the world shifting. The think tank Ember reported that for the first half of 2025 renewable energy produced more electricity than coal. More to the point, solar and wind grew so fast that they covered all the growth in demand for electricity so far this year, with room to spare.
That means that fossil fuel emissions for producing electricity plateaued—even fell slightly—over the first half of the year. It’s an epochal moment: It demonstrates that the clean energy transition is not destined to be the slow, dragged-out affair that most analysts would have predicted even five years ago.
“The fall overall of fossil may be small, but it is significant,” said one of the Ember researchers. “This is a turning point when we see emissions plateauing.” Fossil fuel use for electric generation fell 2% in China, and dipped in India as well.
We are allowed to celebrate good news—indeed, in the shadow of our disintegrating democracy it’s necessary that we celebrate what we can when we can. But not because this is a fait accompli—instead, because celebrations along the way give us new strength to push harder for faster change. Which we desperately need to do.
The bewildering disgrace of America’s conduct in the world—a disgrace due entirely to the Trump administration, which continues to dismember the Biden-era efforts to compete with China in the clean energy field—is outweighed by the good news from the rest of the world.
Because we we got new data about the Earth this week too, and it’s epochal as well. And also bad. A study in Nature looked at four of the largest systems on Earth—the Greenland ice sheet, the Atlantic currents, the South Asian monsoon, and the Amazon rainforest—and found that in each case “the stability of these four tipping elements has declined in recent decades, suggesting that they have moved towards their critical thresholds, which may be crossed within the range of unmitigated anthropogenic warming.”
Another way of saying this is: The damage from the carbon and methane trapping heat in our atmosphere has now reached the most critical systems for supporting life on our planet. We have very little time, if any.
And the other caveat to today’s good news is that it didn’t apply to the US—growth in electric demand outpaced new renewable supply in this country, meaning that we poured more, not less, carbon into the air in the first half of the year. Which is hardly surprising, given the Trump administration’s all out war on clean energy. We are quickly emerging as the planet’s rogue nation, determined to deny climate and slow the energy transition as best we can, all in the name of selling more fossil fuel. As Mitchell Beer writes:
“The forecast for the United States is revised down by almost 50%” from a year ago, the report states, after the Trump administration phased out federal renewable energy tax credits ahead of schedule, imposed severe import restrictions on renewables industries, suspended new offshore wind leasing, and curtailed wind and solar leasing on federal lands.
That sets up the third piece of epochal news, this one more about economics and hence politics. Though not many people paid too much attention, new data this week showed that China is now exporting more clean energy than the US is exporting dirty energy:
The US, which has positioned itself as a major fossil fuel exporter, sold $80 billion in oil and gas abroad through July, the last month with data available. China exported $120 billion in green technology over the same period.
With that number, you can feel world leadership passing from Washington to Beijing. It’s even more remarkable because the thing that China is mostly exporting—solar panels—keeps getting cheaper and cheaper:
Dollars only tell part of the story. The price of solar panels is falling, which means that China is exporting more of them per dollar earned. August’s solar export revenue was nowhere near the high set in March 2023. But the 46,000 megawatts of power capacity shipped abroad set a record.
As Edward White writes in the Financial Times:
While US President Donald Trump calls climate change a con, China is offering new technology and products to countries to develop green energy and to prepare for increasingly frequent and intense storms, floods, and droughts.
Two days after our Changsha trip I attended a meeting in Beijing of Chinese officials and representatives of climate-vulnerable nations, a group that includes 74 nations with more than 1.8bn people.
Liz Thompson, a former UN assistant secretary-general and now climate change ambassador for Barbados, said just as climate-vulnerable states are hit by more disasters, they are hampered in their response because of a lack of access to technology and financing. “These challenges provide compelling reasons to work more closely with China,” she said.
Chinese officials and business leaders are keen to oblige. Zhang Shiguo, executive director of China New Energy International Alliance, an organisation backed by government associations and renewable companies, said the country’s green products had already reached 170 countries. “The reason China’s new energy sector has done well is the determination to act,” Zhang added.
The bewildering disgrace of America’s conduct in the world—a disgrace due entirely to the Trump administration, which continues to dismember the Biden-era efforts to compete with China in the clean energy field—is outweighed by the good news from the rest of the world: The atmosphere doesn’t care which nation the carbon dioxide comes from. But it should be one more spur—alongside the sickening pictures from Chicago—for all of us to do what we can to restore the rule of reason in our country. No Kings Day is October 18. Here’s a guide that we at Third Act have put together for finding the demonstration near you.
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