Catastrophic climate 'doom loops' could start in just 15 years, new study warns

Earth's ecosystems may be careering toward collapse much sooner than scientists thought, a new study of our planet's warming climate has warned.

Yet the science behind these dramatic transformations is poorly understood and often based on oversimplified models. Now, a new attempt to understand their inner workings, published June 22 in the journal Nature, has revealed that they may happen much sooner than we thought. "Over a fifth of ecosystems worldwide are in danger of collapsing," co-author Simon Willcock, a professor of sustainability at Bangor University in the U.K., said in a statement.

But if these simulations miss an important element or interaction, their forecasts can land decades off the mark. For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in its most recent report that the Amazon rainforest could reach a tipping point that will transform it into a savannah by 2100. According to the researchers, most tipping-point studies build the math in their models to focus on one predominant driver of collapse, for example deforestation in the Amazon rainforest.

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