Here's Dan Rather warning us that Florida is doomed ... 43 years ago:
Then there was TIME Magazine 20 years ago, telling us that Earth was at the "tipping point" of climate change.
Now, two decades later, it's so nice to see that very little has changed, per USA Today:
Thanks to the dire condition of the Earth's coral reefs, the planet has now reached its first tipping point for human-caused climate change, according to a new report by scientists in Europe.
The second Global Tipping Points Report, released Oct. 13, said warm-water coral reefs - on which nearly 1 billion people and a quarter of all marine life depend - are "passing their tipping point."
The planet has been stable on that "tipping point" for so long I think I'm officially relaxed about it!
Exeter Professor Tim Lenton, who authored the latest iteration of the panic, said that the planet is "rapidly approaching multiple Earth system tipping points that could transform our world, with devastating consequences for people and nature."
One thing's for certain: The new talking points have officially gone out.
Folks in the comments were quick to note the, ah, rather cyclical nature of these predictions:
The climate contrarian blog Watts Up With That, meanwhile, has a slightly more sober look at the data, if you're interested. One key point:
The asteroid which killed the dinosaurs failed to destroy the coral reefs, as did the 5-8C of rapid warming the Earth experienced during the [Paleocene - Eocene thermal maximum] - but a few tenths of a degree of additional anthropogenic global warming will achieve what the greatest mass extinction event in the last hundred million years failed to accomplish.
I think after decades of warnings about "tipping points," the Earth's ecosystem is trying to tell us something:
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