The Climate Tipping Point

The NASA scientist who tried to warn us about global warming before the Bushies stomped on him had to go all the way to Britain to have his say. The news is pretty bad: the Greenland glaciers are melting even faster than people first thought. What's more, there's such a thing as a tipping point in ice cap melting:

Once a sheet starts to disintegrate, it can reach a tipping point beyond which break-up is explosively rapid. The issue is how close we are getting to that tipping point. The summer of 2005 broke all records for melting in Greenland. So we may be on the edge.

I wonder if Malcom Gladwell's concept of the tipping point, or more accurately, his popularization of it, has shaped our understanding of global warming. At the very least the concept absolves Hansen from having to explain why polar ice can reach a point at which the melting speeds up and can't be reversed. (Something to do with internal temperatures, I would guess.) Before it seemed like there would be a gradual warming and rising of the seas some time later in the century. At that point we'll all be really sorry we didn't do something earlier. Now there's a certain, but invisible, point at which we're screwed, and it's going to happen sooner than we thought. The concept of the tipping point has redirected our anxious gaze from the warm winters (January was the warmest ever recorded) to the rising seas.

It's also interesting that Hansen's parting shot to the neocons is an appeal to immediate observation. To those who would claim there's nothing to worry about, he says, "I prefer the evidence from the Earth's history and my own eyes." He appeals to the real and direct observation against the abstract and the ideological. Fair enough, but aren't his eyes directed to look at a certain place by Malcom Gladwell?