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The UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria) has given 27 teams a total of £81 million to determine signals that would warn us of imminent climate collapse and catastrophes.
A new, ambitious climate change project has received a sizeable sum of cash to get the ball rolling.
The UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria) financially backs high-risk, high-reward projects. It has just awarded £81 million to 27 teams that will focus on finding warning signals to anticipate impending climate catastrophes or ‘tipping points’.
The programme will specifically look at two tipping points which are most likely to be triggered. These are the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet and the collapse of crucial ocean currents in the Northern Atlantic.
Up until now, scientists have detected signals indicating that vital systems – like the Amazon rainforest and the west Antarctic ice sheet – are becoming less stable.
They have also identified at least 16 dangerous tipping points that vary considerably. Understanding when a tipping point will actually be reached is impossible right now, however, and we are unable to accurately predict behaviours for the long-term future.
The first five years of the Aria programme will be spent trying to conclude whether this is a possible goal. In order to accurately predict tipping points, we will need much greater ocean and ice data, both in the present day and the past, as well as more advanced computer models.
