The United Kingdom’s Government Research Arm Is Developing An Early Warning Climate Tipping Point System

In the prophetic and often scientifically inaccurate 2004 movie, The Day After Tomorrow, an Atlantic Ocean monitoring station somewhere off Northern Scotland receives data from an autonomous robotic profiling float that detects a rapid drop in sea temperatures. At the same time, weather systems form that draw down polar air as far south as the U.S.-Mexican border and the Mediterranean causing hundreds of millions in the Northern Hemisphere to become victims or climate refugees.

The movie dramatizes the consequences of ignoring tipping point signals and may be the inspiration behind a U.K. initiative allocating £81 million to create an early warning climate change system.

The Advanced Research and Invention Agency or ARIA is Britain’s equivalent to America’s DARPA and was inspired by the latter. Created from 2021 legislation and officially launched in 2023, ARIA is receiving government financial backing for U.K. researchers in academic and private enterprise to invent transformative technologies covering several fields including:

• Neuroscience and brain monitoring technologies
• Advanced AI systems
• Robotics and intelligent machines
• New computing paradigms
• Climate change mitigation and plant resilience

The government provided £800 million to get ARIA operational with current projects including:

• Reengineering plants and next-generation crop development.
• Creating safe and transformative artificial intelligence.
• New ways of interfacing with the brain to learn and treat neurological diseases and conditions.
• Developing advanced robotics and intelligent machines.
• Rethinking computer design using lessons from nature.
• Climate change prediction and monitoring.

For the last topic, ARIA hopes to see the development of advanced warning tipping point detection systems to improve the ability to mitigate and adapt to changing climate by being forewarned. States Sarah Bohndiek, Program Director at ARIA, “Finding early warning signals for climate tipping points is like searching for a needle in a haystack.”

The 5-year funded program is focusing on two particular tipping points:

• The Greenland Ice Sheet – This island ice sheet is 1.7 million square kilometres (656,000 square miles). It has seen rapid ice loss at an increasing rate in each of the first three decades of the 21st century. The ice surfaces on the island are darkening from wildfire ash, atmospheric dust, and algae blooms in surface meltwater. Vegetation is taking root in some areas of the Ice Sheet furthering the albedo effect. Studies of ice cores show that a period of moderate warming between 374,000 and 424,000 years ago led to a global sea level rise of 1.5 metres (5 feet). If the Ice Sheet were to melt entirely, it could raise sea levels by 7.4 metres (23 feet).
• The North Atlantic Subpolar Gyre (NASG) – This current is closely linked to another circulation system called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). The two intersect with the Gulf Stream feeding into the NASG which consists of the North Atlantic, Norwegian, East Greenland and Labrador Currents. The Gyre circulates counterclockwise bringing warm water from the tropics to Europe and drawing down cold water from the Arctic along the coastline of Eastern North America. Scientists studying the NASG and AMOC are trying to discern the tipping points that could precede a total collapse. A study published in 2021 estimated a 36.4% risk of collapse leading to abrupt cooling across Europe.

What does ARIA want to see come from its investment in the development of tipping point tools and technologies to address these two?

• New climate change sensing tools.
• Deployment of a monitoring observational network.
• New computational models for understanding observed data.
• Completion of a fully implemented tipping point early warning system.

Bohndiek wants the money spent by ARIA to produce confident predictions of when a tipping point will happen and the potential consequences. How the U.K. government reacts with policy, notification and intervention strategies represents another story. Those interested in receiving grants to finance solutions that meet the tipping point criteria should apply no later than September 23, 2024.