A team of influential scientists has warned that the world faces the risk of “an existential threat to civilization” due to mounting evidence that tipping points in the climate and nature are likely to be breached. Eleven years ago the group cautioned against the dangers of critical thresholds in Earth’s systems being passed and systems tipping into a potentially dangerous state. These include the runaway collapse of ice sheets and Amazon deforestation reaching a level that leads to the drying of the area and death of the entire rainforest. “We are now a little over 10 years on. The nasty surprise for me was a lot of the things we identified as potential tipping points that many would have thought were far in the future now show evidence of already being active,” says Tim Lenton at the University of […]