Hazard Risk Resilience Magazine Volume 1 Issue1 | Seite 13

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The Earth’s atmosphere and oceans
interact forming one complex system
that influences climate (photo: NASA).

Climate-changealcoholism-ocean-atmosphere
There are potentially many physical and
biological systems that involve some kind of
tipping point. Stringing the names of some
these together (like the heading above) makes
for an amusing play on words. It doesn’t seem
difficult to connect tipping points in climate
change with tipping points in the oceanatmosphere system, as both are linked already,
but how can these tipping points possibly be
related to a tipping point of alcoholism? Could
climate change be causing polar bears to hit
the bottle? No, it’s not that these systems
need to be directly related in order for there
to be a tipping point, but that they may share
something much more fundamental that can
be explained mathematically. Tipping points
may occur in very different ways for physical,
biological or social systems, but they may
also express something similar or the same in
mathematics. In order to explore this notion
further Prof ɥ