Now There's the Climate Tipping Point That Isn't

In this conference, there will be any amount of shouting that our climate has reached a tipping point, that disaster is about to ensue unless we immediately surrender our modern, energy-intensive lifestyles. But a big part of this year's panic, though, may come from the general public's realization that the climate scolds have been selling a bill of goods, and that there's no reason to panic - or to subsidize a bunch of bureaucrats and activists to trek to Brazil, just to panic-monger.

In fact, you might say that the climate scolds have reached a tipping point of their own.

Writing in the Spectator last week, the Daily Sceptic’s Esteemed Editor-in-Chief Lord Tobes noted that eco-activists were fond of plucking numbers out of the air and claiming that’s how long we have left to save the Earth. But, he added, “it looks like they are now facing a ‘tipping point’ of their own”. Also last week, the Guardian commented on the Green Blob-funded ‘Global Tipping Points Report 2025’ and reported its contention that the planet’s first catastrophic climate tipping point had been reached with “coral reefs facing widespread dieback”. About time too, Guardianistas might have felt. In June 1999, the newspaper’s veteran eco loon George Monbiot wrote that “the imminent total destruction of the world’s coral reefs is not a scare story but a fact”.

I suspect that "veteran eco loon" George Monbiot has a very tenuous grasp of the meaning of the word "fact." In fact, there's a new "Global Tipping Points Report" in which the authors seem to be channeling their inner Kenny Loggins, because they are claiming we're in the Danger Zone.

Toby went on to observe Sun Tzu’s maxim that you should never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake, “but I’m beginning to feel sorry for the climate hysterics”. There is none more hysterical (G. Monbiot excepted) than the annual ‘Global Tipping Points Report’, which is primarily bank-rolled by the Bezos Earth Fund. Along with numerous other scare reports, it is timed to lift mass climate psychosis ahead of the annual COP conference. Humanity will soon be in a danger zone where “multiple climate tipping points pose catastrophic risks to billions of people”, it wails. Already warm water coral reefs are crossing their “thermal tipping points”, it is claimed.

Here's the thing: We're not. Despite what anyone might piously proclaim at COP30, we just aren't.

Read More: COP30 Climate Conference Is Destroying the Amazon to Save It

Here are a couple of data points sure to come up at COP30: Corals, and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which is the warm/cold water conveyor in the Atlantic that brings warm water north and cool water south.

First, corals. The climate scolds have long maintained that warming ocean waters are harmful to corals. They are right to point out that coral reefs provide valuable habitat for a huge variety of ocean species, and that coral reefs are among the largest non-human constructs on the planet. But what they aren't right about is their claim that the common number you see bandied about, a 1.5-2.0 degree increase in average water temperature, will adversely affect the growth of these animals. In fact, corals do very well in warmer waters, as one recent study has shown. One of the primary conclusions of this study involves Australia's famous Great Barrier Reef, and the growth thereof:

The data does not support the proposition that there has been a major loss of coral around the world over recent decades. It indicates that the GBR, for which there is the most consistent and longest record, has never been in better shape, despite suffering four supposedly catastrophic bleaching events in the last six years. 

As for the AMOC, there has been a lot of data gathered and crunched, but this study, once you drill down through all of the data, concludes "we don't know enough to make any predictions."

Observational-based estimates have limitations as the available observations of atmospheric and sea surface temperatures lead to large uncertainties of the observation-based air-sea heat flux products. These uncertainties are most pronounced in the early part of each timeseries. As a result, the uncertainties of the reconstructed AMOC anomalies are relatively large (±2 Sv; 2-σ range). Within these uncertainties, the reconstructions of the AMOC based on ERA5 and JRA-55 are in agreement although decadal trends of the best estimates vary between both products (Fig. 9). However, a decline of the AMOC over the last 60 years appears to be unlikely given the increasing trend of the AMOC in both products since around 1990. Furthermore, additional air-sea heat flux from atmospheric warming would bias the reconstructed AMOC from ERA5 and JRA-55 towards too low anomalies since 1990 (Fig. 8 and Supplementary Fig. 6), which makes a decrease in the AMOC over the last three decades even more unlikely.

And, finally, the various NetZero campaigns are collapsing of their own economic weight; Japan is just one of the many nations recently realizing that these schemes just don't work.

Read More: Land of the Setting Sun: Japan's Green Energy Failures

COP30 will no doubt go off as planned. The activists and bureaucrats will no doubt enjoy that broad new highway through the rain forest, which they will zip along while viewing the remaining rainforest from air-conditioned comfort. And yes, they will engage in their usual panic-mongering, which the legacy media will keep repeating. But those of us who understand how data-gathering should happen, and how science actually works, are realizing that with each new study, with each new set of measurements, there is no reason to panic, and certainly no reason to give up our modern lifestyles. The Earth will tick on as it always has, warming and cooling in its own cycles. And we can go on and live our lives, sanely ignoring the panic-mongers.