Congratulations to David Armstrong Mckay et al. whose paper ‘Exceeding 1.5°C global warming could trigger multiple climate tipping points’ was ranked second in Carbon Brief’s‘The Top 10 Climate papers in 2022 for news and social media attention’.
The paper provides the first comprehensive assessment of climate-related tipping points since the 2008 paper “Tipping elements in the Earth’s climate system”. It identifies 16 climate-tipping elements and finds a “significant likelihood” that multiple tipping points will be crossed if global temperatures exceed 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
“The world is already at risk of some tipping points. As global temperatures rise further, more tipping points become possible. The chance of crossing tipping points can be reduced by rapidly cutting greenhouse gas emissions, starting immediately.”
(Dr David Armstrong McKay, University of Exeter)
The rankings come from Altmetric scores, which are based on factors including news coverage and social media mentions. Each of the articles received extensive media coverage, reaching many millions of people worldwide.
According to Carbon Brief 667 news stories from 397 outlets mention the paper. It received the highest number of mentions in blog posts and Wikipedia pages of the top 25 climate papers and is featured in 6,145 tweets. The papers overall Altmetric score was 6,573.
Exeter affiliated authors featured highly on the list, further congratulations is extend to them:
- Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios (Professor Tim Lenton) – Ranked 6th, with a Altmetric score of 5506, referenced in 556 news stories from 428 outlets, 46 Blogs and 3934 tweets.
- Pronounced loss of Amazon rainforest resilience since the early 2000s (Dr Chris Boulton, Professor Tim Lenton, Professor Niklas Boers) Ranked 10th with a Altmetric score of 4195, referenced in 563 news stories, 23 Blogs and 1104 tweets.
- Global Carbon Budget 2022 (Professor Pierre Friedlingstein, Dr Michael O’Sullivan, Professor Stephen Sitch, Thais Rosan, Dr Jamie Shutler). Ranked 11th
“There has been huge interest in our research on climate tipping points during 2022, and I am over the moon to have three papers in the top 10.”
(Professor Lenton, Director of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute)
(Image and data from Carbon Brief 18/01/2023)