A tipping point is where a small nudge to a system has a huge outcome. It changes the state or the fate of that system. Tipping points are happening in the whole of the Earth’s climate system, or “Earth system”.

The most powerful thing humans can do to reverse climate change or limit how extensive it is – and avoid the worst of climate tipping points – is to flip the idea of tipping points around. We need to find positive tipping points in our own societies and relationships with technology that can help trigger a transformative rate of change in which we globally transform sources of energy for human civilisation to be dominated by renewable sources.

We’re currently heading towards more than three degrees of global warming, even if nations that have signed the Paris climate agreement meet their voluntary commitments to that agreement. We know we need to limit warming to well below two degrees. It requires a phenomenal rate of change in our societies and technology to turn a trend of increasing greenhouse gas emissions into a steep, declining trend. Now, as we contemplate how to do that, many people feel powerless. They think that the only people who can make any difference to this are those in power, and that “If I do something, it’s not going to matter.”

The Gaia hypothesis

The Gaia hypothesis, which came from the remarkable British scientist-inventor James Lovelock and the American biologist Lynn Margulis, is the proposition that life is intertwined with the chemistry and the physics of our planet and its climate in a way that it’s acting to regulate the composition of the atmosphere, aspects of the climate, recycling of all the elements it needs on a global scale. This has been pivotal to the persistence and the flourishing of life for over three and a half billion years on Earth.

Now, the Gaia hypothesis had many critics, but with several decades of work behind it, we’ve been able to show that these properties that Lovelock intuited now have serious scientific evidence behind them. What’s amazing about Gaia is that it happens automatically. We see what we describe as feedbacks that can stabilise aspects of things like the oxygen content of the atmosphere, and they involve living and non-living things such as fires, and vegetation on the land. But the regulation, the stabilisation of conditions, happens automatically. And there’s been some kind of grand filtering of the different so-called feedback mechanisms that have arisen between life and the non-living environment in a way that the stabilising and persistent mechanisms and feedbacks have tended to dominate in the end or live on.

The power to change the course of the planet

It’s crucial to realise that we’ve all got the agency to make a difference and also to learn a lesson from Earth history, if you like, or from Gaia.

And it’s that kind of action, that kind of agency, that kind of thinking that we need in order to completely transform the trajectory we’re on at the moment, not only as a species but as a whole biosphere in our system.

Right now we’re on a collision course with disaster, but we could turn this into a trajectory towards a positive and quite a revolutionary change for ourselves and for the Earth system in the biosphere as a whole, in which we become a partner in Gaia rather than a perturbation of Gaia.

Gaia 2.0: a radical new stage

What’s happening with us humans is something new. We can only be here because of this prior Gaia that created an oxygen-rich atmosphere and stabilises it still today because we need that to breathe. We also need the equable climate that past and present life forms are helping to maintain. But now we’ve come on the scene with some kind of self-awareness: many of us know that individually and collectively we’re transforming this beautiful planet of ours in quite a bad direction, in what we’re dubbing the Anthropocene.

We could use this collective self-awareness of our effects on the world as the basis of a new kind of feedback, where we regulate and change our own actions and collective behaviours to guarantee ourselves a flourishing and long-term future on this planet. If we were to achieve that, if we were to add a little self-awareness to the Earth’s automatic self-regulation, we would reach “Gaia 2.0.” – a radical new stage in the history and the future of our planet.

Changing technology

The good news is that there are some concrete examples in the world today. Quite a lot of this is about changing technology.

One of the areas in which we need to change is how we move around personal mobility. Lots of good things are happening, including in the automobile sector. In Norway, thanks to some cleverly designed policy intervention, there’s already been a tipping point in the uptake of electric vehicles, electric cars. They’re more popular now than petrol or diesel vehicles, and there’s probably no way that this is going to reverse because the more electric vehicles produced, the better the cost becomes through economies of scale.

Over in the UK we’ve seen a tipping point in electricity generation. Specifically, we’ve seen coal power being shut out of electricity generation in the UK, which is fairly extraordinary because it used to be a key part of what powered the country.

Valuing our life support system

So, on the level of individuals and communities, we also need to think about the agency we have to take positive change. For many of us, the ground zero aspect of the climate problem that we’re in is that we’ve got to change our value system or our priorities. Essentially, we need to value our life support system in a way we’re not doing as a civilisation at the moment.

There are many ways we can reconnect with nature, or put a value on our life support system, but much of that would naturally start at local scales and in communities, as we appreciate the living world around us. We have seen some of that positive change happening in the coronavirus crisis, where “nature” has been given a bit of breathing space. And we’ve all begun to appreciate its existence. We now need to do something more with that. We need to say this is our life support system.

Smart enough to revert climate change?

We often pride ourselves as humans being a super smart species, but I would argue that we’re not as clever as the biosphere in our relationship with energy and materials. We’re still powering the majority of our civilisation on a finite reserve of fossil fuels, the toxic by-products of which are causing global climate change. And yet, we have renewable sources of energy that are already getting a lot cheaper and we should be shifting to those much faster than we are. On top of that, we think we are great at engineering, but in terms of our relationship with materials, we just basically dig stuff out of the ground or fix nitrogen from the atmosphere and chuck our waste products.

And that’s why we’re suffering climate change, ocean acidification, the plastics problem and a whole raft of others. It is because we have a very stupid relationship with materials, whereas the biosphere as a whole, for three and a half or more billion years, has become absolutely brilliant, recycling all the materials it needs because it operates on the fact that it is the basis of all of its flourishing. We need to get smarter and do exactly the same. So, I am putting it out there as a challenge to all my fellow science and engineering friends. Of course, it’s a governance challenge as well. It’s about having the right value system to support what might at first seem to be a technological challenge.

More than a drop in the ocean?

Many of us have had those moments where we feel powerless because we think that our individual actions on climate change or anything else are negligible compared to the size of the problem. Of course, at a mathematical level, there’s some truth in that. But in the history of our planet, everything that ever changed the world started at the tiniest scale. So, once upon a time, 2.7 billion years ago, an invisible micro-organism, a thing we call a cyanobacterium, solved the problem of doing photosynthesis. It could use water and carbon dioxide and make sugars, and it spat out a tiny little bit of oxygen as a waste product.

Any alien observing at the time would have said that one organism has a negligible effect on the planet – and that would have been mathematically true. But that one cyanobacterium ended up becoming billions of cyanobacteria, and that tiny release of oxygen ended up becoming a massive flux of oxygen that ultimately gave us an oxygen-rich atmosphere and irreversibly changed the whole planet.

So, we can look at our individual actions and say: “My actions are negligible.” Or, we can look at it and say: “But if I network together and my actions are infectious and other people join in, it will have the potential to escalate into global transformation.”

Discover more about

Gaia and Gaia 2.0

Lovelock, J., & J. E. Lovelock, (2000). Gaia: A new look at life on earth. Oxford Paperbacks.

Lenton, T. M., & Latour, B. (2018). Gaia 2.0. Science, 361(6407), 1066-1068.

Revolutions that made the Earth