How we track climate tipping points

What the dashboard shows, where the numbers come from, and what they can’t tell you.

The short answer

Some parts of the climate system can change abruptly and stay changed once warming passes a threshold: ice sheets, ocean currents, forests, coral reefs, frozen ground. Scientists call these tipping elements. The dashboard compares today’s global warming with the temperature range at which each of 16 tipping elements could tip, and counts how many are already inside their range.

An element counts as “in its warning band” once warming passes the lowest temperature at which it might tip. That does not mean it has tipped. It means scientists can no longer rule it out. The 2025 Global Tipping Points Report concluded that one element, warm-water coral reefs, has already crossed its threshold.

How we know

The 16 elements and their thresholds come from Armstrong McKay and colleagues (2022) in Science, the most widely used assessment. For each element it gives a lowest, a central and a highest temperature at which tipping could happen. These are fixed reference values, not measurements, and they carry real uncertainty: AMOC collapse, for example, is placed anywhere from 1.4 to 8 °C.

Today’s warming comes from NASA’s global temperature record, GISTEMP. NASA measures temperature against its 1951–1980 average, so we convert it to the 1850–1900 baseline used for the Paris Agreement by adding 0.19 °C. That is NASA’s own conversion: it reported 2024 as 1.28 °C above the 1951–1980 average and 1.47 °C above 1850–1900. The dashboard shows the average of the months published so far this year.

Observed signals. For some elements the gauge also shows a measurement from another dashboard on this site, such as coral heat stress, Greenland’s ice loss or the Atlantic overturning. These show what is happening, but they are not the threshold test itself. Where no measurement is wired up, the gauge shows a reference note from the IPCC instead.

Why the elements are connected

Tipping elements affect each other. Greenland’s meltwater freshens the North Atlantic and can weaken the Atlantic overturning; a weaker overturning shifts tropical rainfall belts that the Amazon and the West African monsoon depend on. Wunderling and colleagues have mapped these links, first in 2021 and in a broader review in 2024. The cascade diagram on the dashboard is a simplified picture of those published links. It is not a forecast or a simulation.

How current each part is

• Global temperature: NASA updates GISTEMP once a month. We check every night.
• Thresholds: Armstrong McKay et al. (2022). They change only when a new assessment is published.
• Observed signals: as current as the dashboard they come from; each gauge shows its date.
• Recent research list: checked every night against OpenAlex, an open catalogue of scholarly papers; journal articles only.

What the dashboard can’t tell you

It cannot give a date for collapse. Passing a threshold can commit a system to change that then plays out over very different timescales: a coral reef can die within a few hot seasons, the Greenland ice sheet would take thousands of years to melt away.

The count is a warning score, not a probability. An element in its warning band is not one that is about to collapse; it means warming has reached the range where scientists can no longer rule them out.

And the thresholds are a snapshot of one assessment. Some are well constrained, others are wide guesses with few observations behind them, and new research keeps refining them.

Where the idea came from

Timothy Lenton and colleagues set out the idea of climate tipping elements in 2008. A year later, Johan Rockström and colleagues placed climate change among a wider set of “planetary boundaries”. Armstrong McKay and colleagues reassessed the evidence in 2022, adding some elements and dropping others, such as Arctic summer sea ice, where they found no clear threshold.

Further reading

• Armstrong McKay et al. (2022), Science: exceeding 1.5 °C of global warming could trigger multiple climate tipping points. The thresholds used here. doi.org/10.1126/science.abn7950
• Global Tipping Points Report 2025, led by the University of Exeter: the latest broad assessment, including the finding on coral reefs. global-tipping-points.org
• Wunderling et al. (2024), Earth System Dynamics: a review of how tipping elements interact. esd.copernicus.org/articles/15/41/2024
• Wunderling et al. (2021), Earth System Dynamics: interacting tipping elements increase the risk of climate domino effects. doi.org/10.5194/esd-12-601-2021
• Lenton et al. (2008), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: the original tipping-elements paper. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0705414105
• Rockström et al. (2009), Nature: a safe operating space for humanity (planetary boundaries). doi.org/10.1038/461472a
• NASA GISTEMP: the global temperature record behind the warming dial. data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp

Credits

The thresholds come from Armstrong McKay and colleagues, the temperature record from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the interaction research from Wunderling and colleagues, and the observed signals from the agencies behind the other dashboards on this site. This dashboard collects and presents their work.