Ecowatch: We must act before the climate switch flips – permanently

Sled dogs resting near a thin sea ice edge in Eastern Greenland. Between 2002 and 2025, the Greenland ice sheet shed 264 gigatonnes of ice per year, causing global sea level to rise by 0.8mm. This is something that can affect Malaysia directly, as rising seas threaten our low-lying coasts and Klang Valley infrastructure. — AFP

MOST of us understand climate change as something gradual. A little hotter each year, a little more rain in the wrong season. But climate scientists have long warned of a different kind of danger: tipping points, thresholds in the Earth’s systems that, once crossed, do not reverse on human time-scales.

Coral reefs can flip from living colour to algae-smothered rubble. The Amazon rainforest can dry out and stop generating its own rain, turning from a carbon sink into a carbon source. The great ocean currents that regulate our weather can slow to the point of collapse. These are not slow slides. They are switches, and once flipped, they tend to stay flipped.