About the project
Climate tipping points, made easier to track.
The worst risks associated with global warming are connected to tipping elements: parts of the climate system that could quickly and all but irreversibly enter new states. Tipping elements have the potential to dramatically transform regional environments on human timescales. They could rapidly accelerate global warming. And because many are connected, triggering one could increase the risk of activating another.
This website provides an easy way to track new research on tipping points: the critical moments when tipping elements in the climate system could move to fundamentally different states. Tipping points are not simple switches that, when activated, change the planet. Nor do they work the same way for every tipping element. Most are poorly understood. Scientists can’t be sure at what level of warming they could occur, or how quickly they could happen, or how exactly they could influence one another.
That’s why this website is needed. It provides a quick overview of the newest research. It’s intended for use by scholars, students, journalists, policy professionals, and anyone who cares about the future of climate change.
Creator
Dagomar Degroot
The creator of this website, Dr. Dagomar Degroot, is an associate professor of environmental history at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. His first book, The Frigid Golden Age (Cambridge University Press) was named by the Financial Times as one of the ten best history books of 2018. His latest book, Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean (Harvard University Press/Penguin) was a 2025 Scientific American book of the year. He publishes equally in leading historical and scientific journals; writes for the public in, for example, the Washington Post, Aeon, and National Geographic; and maintains popular online resources, including The Climate Chronicles, a multimedia guide to the history of climate change, and After 2C, a fictional history of global warming's future. He has shared the unique perspectives of the past with diverse audiences in many cities, from Wuhan to Washington, DC.
