Original title: Predicting tipping points: The many shades of non-equilibrium and catch-22s of early-warning
Johannes Lohmann · September 2026
Earth's climate may hit tipping points, which are sudden, dramatic shifts into completely different states. Scientists worry because climate simulations show these abrupt shifts might happen even under moderate emissions. Researchers study early-warning signals to spot these transitions before they occur. These signals work by tracking warning signs that appear when a system slowly loses stability near a critical threshold. However, this paper explains that real-world climate changes complicate this warning system. A rapidly changing climate produces out-of-equilibrium behavior and chaos. These effects blur tipping thresholds and limit our ability to predict them. Furthermore, having multiple possible future states weakens early warnings. To fix this, scientists need new tools from physics and mathematics to evaluate global stability across climate models and observational data.
You are trying to tell if a friend is about to lose their temper. Normally you watch for small signs like a raised voice or a clenched jaw, and these work well when the conversation is calm. But if the room is noisy and your friend is also distracted, those signs become hard to read. In this paper, the climate system is like that noisy room: rapid changes and chaos blur the usual early-warning signals for tipping points.
If early-warning signals are unreliable, societies may be caught off guard by sudden climate shifts like ice sheet collapse or ecosystem dieback. This affects everyone who relies on climate predictions for planning, from farmers to coastal cities. The paper calls for new mathematical approaches to better understand when and how these tipping points occur.
The abstract does not present a new method or quantify the limits of predictability. It only highlights the challenges and calls for future work. The analysis is conceptual, not experimental.
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Predicting tipping points: The many shades of non-equilibrium and catch-22s of early-warning — Johannes Lohmann
Abstract licence: CC0
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.