How Close Are We to a Climate Tipping Point?

The Gulf Stream keeps Denmark mild. But the climate doesn’t always change slowly: Greenland’s ice shows that it has flipped in the past, sometimes within a few decades. Could the ocean currents that warm Northern Europe switch off again, and how would we see it coming? Climate physicist Peter Ditlevsen explains what tipping points are, what early-warning signals tell us, and how close we might be. About Peter Peter Ditlevsen is a professor of climate physics at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen. He studies abrupt climate change and the early-warning signals that come before it. In 2023, he co-authored a widely discussed study warning that the Atlantic current system could collapse this century.