Tipping points in our climate predictions are both wildly dramatic and wildly uncertain. Can mathematicians make them useful?
In the 1960s, the Soviet climatologist and mathematician Mikhail Budyko set out to investigate the potential future of a planet on the brink of nuclear Armageddon. He started by looking some 600 million years into the past.
Back then, some scientists claimed, the ancient planet was an iced-over snowball. Most researchers considered that a crackpot theory. Ice over the equator? Please. But Budkyo developed a mathematical model to back it up. If sea ice had been able to expand past a critical latitude, he suggested, then its reflective surface would have returned more sunlight to space. This would have kicked off an out-of-control feedback loop: The planet would cool further and ice would build up until it spread everywhere. The Earth would, in other words, tip from one equilibrium into a different one, reaching a new stable — and frozen — state.
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