23.10.2025

Bleach new reality

We are on the brink of catastrophic climate tipping points, like the bleaching of coral reefs and Amazon forest dieback, writes Eddie Ford. Meanwhile, the political class puts economic growth front and centre

In what should act as yet another very loud wake-up call, but will very likely be ignored by a criminally irresponsible political class, Exeter University has published a new study showing that warm-water coral reefs are dying off at a qualitative level.

This coincides with the preparations being made for COP30 in Belém, Brazil, November 11-21.¹ The US will not be sending any official representatives, of course, as Donald Trump recently told the United Nations in a long, rambling speech that climate change is “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” - and one of his first acts in office was to pull out of the Paris Agreement, like he did in his first term. In March the US withdrew from the Just Energy Transition Partnerships (JETP) - a multilateral initiative launched at COP26 in Glasgow in 2021, under which developed countries help coal-dependent, so-called developing nations transition to renewable energy.

Anyway, with global warming set to breach the 1.5°C limit set by Paris, a United Nations report saying in October last year that the world is on track for 3.1°C of global warming by 2100 - with others making even more dire predictions - the Exeter study (by 160 scientists at 87 institutions in 23 countries) finds that warm-water coral reefs, on which nearly a billion people and a quarter of all marine life depend, are passing a tipping point, though this is questioned by some scientists, as one would expect. Massive bleaching events are now taking place that affect almost 85% of reefs - the worst on record² - and, unless global warming is reversed, extensive reefs will be lost.

This means that the planet’s most vibrant underwater gardens, from the Great Barrier Reef in Australia to Florida's Sombrero Reef, are being annihilated by human-caused global warming. Two of these global coral bleaching events have occurred in the last decade and during this time the Great Barrier Reef alone has bleached six times. These repeat events are now occurring too close together for reefs to recover, triggering the mass death of corals we are now witnessing and threatening the myriad creatures that rely on them.

The thermal tipping point of reefs is estimated to be 1.2°C, which we have passed already (the temperature rise stands today at about 1.4°C), so even if you imagine an incredible scenario, whereby warming stabilises at around 1.5°C, warm-water coral reefs now have a 99% probability of tipping over into death. The coral restoration efforts often touted by the media are utterly meaningless (despite the fact that they can be made to look great on TV), if our emissions continue to rise - which they will unfortunately.

Dominoes

Even though no-one likes to be a prophet of doom, there is no ignoring actual facts - they will not go away. The new study points out that corals are merely the canary in a coal mine and in this bleak new reality we are on the brink of other, more catastrophic tipping points - though naturally the report argues that countries must minimise temperature overshoot to avoid crossing even more tipping points, as every fraction of a degree matters, because it can potentially worsen or lessen the climate crisis.³

According to professor Tim Lenton, co-author of the study, the next Earth system ‘domino’ set to topple could be the collapse of part of the West Antarctic or Greenland ice sheet. Inevitably, the melting of the permafrost will release carbon dioxide which has been locked away for millennia, heating the planet further. In turn, this makes it more likely that other tipping points will then occur and the resulting sea level rise will become largely locked in - threatening to engulf dozens of cities and coastal communities with incalculable consequences.

The report also finds that a temperature rise that would trigger the widespread dieback of the Amazon rainforest is lower than previously thought, especially after two years of intense drought, driven by the warming El Niño weather phenomenon and deforestation. Thus the need for urgent action, as over a hundred million people depend on the Amazon (Belém is often called the ‘gateway to the Amazon’). Nevertheless, the summit has been used as justification for building a new highway cutting through the rainforest and thus an exercise in stupendous hypocrisy.⁴

Perhaps the most severe tipping point is the ocean current, known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), or the Gulf Stream, as this regulates the temperature of Europe and North America and helps to stabilise almost half of the other known tipping points. If climate change causes it to collapse, then both continents would face extreme climate shifts beyond anything our societies have ever seen, possibly leading to the plunging of north-western Europe into a “little ice age” that could see temperatures dip to as low as minus 30°C in Britain, which would experience three frozen months a year. Of course, much harsher winters in north-west Europe would disrupt the West African and Indian monsoons, and hence decrease agricultural yields in much of the world - posing a major threat to global food security. Having said that, the exact point at which this tipping point will be triggered is hotly contested, with some estimates suggesting the collapse of the AMOC is already in progress; others predict that it will only falter at much higher temperatures.

Positive

Showing mindboggling levels of complacency that makes you think of the last days of Rome, current policy as a rule does not even take tipping points into account - essentially because they present distinct governmental challenges, requiring both governance innovations and drastic reforms of existing institutions.

As explained by a scientist from Oslo University, preventing tipping points “requires ‘frontloaded’ mitigation pathways that minimise peak global temperature, the duration of the overshoot period above 1.5°C, and the return time to below 1.5°C”. Thus “sustainable carbon dioxide removal approaches need to be rapidly scaled up to achieve this”. In other words, it needs more extreme or revolutionary measures to reach ‘net zero’, not less, but the ascending right worldwide wants to do the exact opposite.

However, Tim Lenton remains an optimist despite everything, arguing that in the two years since the first Global Tipping Points report, “there has been a radical global acceleration in some areas, including the uptake of solar power and electric vehicles”, but “we need to do more and move faster to seize positive tipping point opportunities” if we want a “thriving, sustainable future”. This is problematic, it goes without saying. EVs mean the continued existence of the car economy and indeed, if the green capitalists get their way, the expansion of that economy, which means continuing rising temperatures and general pollution - and further acceleration towards those tipping points that we are allegedly striving to avoid. We need to reorganise the entire economy from top to bottom by getting away from production for the sake of production.

But positive tipping points identified by Lenton and the report, apart from EVs, include solar PV [photovoltaic - light to electricity] and wind power globally, improved efficiency of battery storage and the increased introduction of heat pumps - transitions that “can still be accelerated”. We read that “coordinated policy action” at “super-leverage points” can “unleash positive tipping cascades” across the various interacting sectors (eg, power, transport and heating), “bringing forward tipping in all”. Once replaced, the report says correctly, polluting technologies are “unlikely to return because the new options are cheaper and better” - also making the valid point that “social attitudes are also tipping” as it is clear that concern about climate change is growing globally, and “even small numbers of people can tip the majority”. The report study also argues that “more positive tipping points” are approaching in sectors including goods transport, believing that COP30’s host nation, Brazil, has great potential for producing green steel, green hydrogen and green ammonia⁵ - helping to “kickstart” these crucial technologies worldwide.

In this way, at least according to the Exeter report, positive tipping points can “rapidly restore nature and biodiversity” with ecosystem restoration tipping “degraded systems back to health”, while shifts to more sustainable patterns of consumption and production “can lead to tipping points in food and fibre supply chains that end deforestation and ecosystem conversion” - which can only mean that “we need to identify and trigger many more positive tipping points” and “better indicators are needed to understand tipping potential”. To this end, we discover the COP30 presidency has launched a Global Mutirão (‘collective effort’) to encourage climate action worldwide.

Degreening

Using satellites, we can actually see the degreening of the world. Another study that includes scientists from the Universities of Beijing and Pennsylvania shows starkly that the world’s oceans are losing their greenness, as our planet’s capacity to absorb carbon dioxide weakens.⁶ The change in the palette of the seas is caused by a decline of phytoplankton, the tiny marine creatures that are responsible for nearly half of the biosphere’s productivity, and the findings are based on a groundbreaking study of daily chlorophyll concentrations in low- to mid-latitude oceans from 2001 to 2023. Chlorophyll is a green pigment vital for photosynthesis, of course - the process by which plants, algae and phytoplankton convert sunlight, water and carbon dioxide into oxygen and glucose. It is one of the foundation blocks of life on Earth.

Using deep-learning algorithms, the new paper found a significant decline of greenness (about 0.35 micrograms per cubic metre each year) over the more than two decades of the study - a trend that was twice as high in coastal regions and more than four times greater near river estuaries. The paper essentially associates this with a reduction in the ecological functioning of the ocean, finding a 0.088% annual decrease in carbon sequestration capacity, equivalent to 32 million tons (the decline in surface phytoplankton’s carbon sequestration capacity has profound implications for the carbon cycle), and the new paper makes the obvious point: the change was very probably caused by climate change.

Heating

The heating of the upper strata of ocean near the surface has widened the temperature difference with the colder depths, which is thought to be blocking the vertical transport of the nutrients on which the phytoplankton depend. Fundamentally, this confirms theories about the impact of global heating on ocean stratification, contradicting several previous studies that suggested algal blooms were increasing in the oceans - indicating a lowering of marine productivity that constitutes yet another threat to humanity and reinforces the need for more careful management of agricultural fertilisation, sewage discharge, deforestation and water pollution.

Yet the right wing tells us that net zero is economic suicide, and what we really need is ‘Drill, baby, drill’. The Tories under Kemi Badenoch have joined Reform in pledging to scrap the UK’s climate change legislation, which was introduced by the last Labour government and strengthened under Theresa May, saying that reaching net zero target by 2050 is “impossible” for the UK to meet.⁷ Instead, Badenoch has promised to “maximise” extraction of oil and gas from the North Sea - which is laughably presented as “cheap and reliable” energy, along with nuclear power.

You cannot help but think that it is only a matter of time before environment secretary Ed Miliband is given the boot (it being widely rumoured that he was under heavy pressure to go during the last government reshuffle) and Keir Starmer joins in the rightwing chorus of warning against economic suicide.

Meanwhile, human civilisation rushes towards climate catastrophe.

eddie.ford@weeklyworker.co.uk