Click the link to read the article on the Inside Climate News website (Bob Berwyn):
February 11, 2026
If you think of Earth’s climate system as a backyard swing that’s been gently swaying for millennia, then human-caused global warming is like a sudden shove strong enough to disrupt the usual arc and buckle the chains.
And if humans keep heating the planet with greenhouse gas pollution, the climate swing could lock Earth into a hothouse trajectory, as parts of the system feed on their own momentum, even if emissions are reduced later, an international team of scientists warned Wednesday in a new paperpublished in the journal One Earth.
Their analysis covers 16 key Earth systems, including oceans, ice sheets and forests, that are likely to destabilize if the planet continues to warm. If large parts of the Amazon rainforest and tropical coral reefs die, they absorb less carbon dioxide, triggering a dangerous chain reaction of warming.
If Earth’s climate starts on a hothouse trajectory, it would represent a “global tipping point” as the heating sustains itself even if greenhouse gas emissions drop, said lead author William Ripple, a distinguished professor of ecology at Oregon State University and a leading researcher on climate tipping points.
In the backyard, that’s the moment when the push is so hard that the swing hesitates at the top, just long enough to show that the ride may not be under control anymore and the chains are being tested.
“What typically took thousands of years is now happening in decades,” Ripple said, adding that human-caused warming is already nudging the climate system out of 11,000 years of relative stability with good conditions for farming and societal development.
Earth could be entering a period of unprecedented climate change on a one-way trajectory, in which processes such as ice-sheet collapse can continue even if the average global temperature is stabilized, he said.
Recent observations suggest that the climate may be responding more strongly than some models predicted, Ripple added. “We are concerned that policymakers and the public may not yet be aware of these recent developments.”
In late January, another group of leading climate scientists urged policymakers to adopt a climate goal of limiting human-caused warming to 1 degree Celsius above the pre-fossil fuel era, which is more ambitious than the 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius target set in the Paris Agreement. They’ve also recently reported that Earth is losing its reflective sheen, which amplifies warming, and that key ocean currents are changing in ways that destabilize the entire global climate system.
But it’s not clear if the scientific warnings are making a difference in “a post-truth era in which too many people prefer pleasant lies over unpleasant truths,” said Reinhard Steurer, a professor of climate policy and governance at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna who studies how climate science and policy interact. He said that new studies outlining disastrous scenarios are unlikely to have much impact in the current political climate, but that researchers should keep speaking out, and not surrender to “techno illusions or hopium.”
The authors of the new paper stressed that a self-sustaining hothouse trajectory is not the same as a Hothouse Earth state, which would be when the global climate rebalances at a much hotter average temperature.
No Good Analog Climates
Instead of offering a single new climate forecast, the paper synthesizes decades of research revealing how different parts of the climate system influence one another. When one part of the system is destabilized, they wrote, it can amplify stress in others, pushing the planet along a self-reinforcing warming pathway.
Earth has had hothouse climates in the ancient geological past. But the authors of the new paper said there may not be a parallel to what’s happening now, at least not during the past 3 million years, co-author Johan Rockström, co-director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said via email.
That amount of warming goes beyond current expectations and would devastate ecosystems and communities globally. Many other current climate projections suggest that, under current policies, warming would level off somewhere between 2.7 and 3 degrees Celsius.
Human-caused warming is happening much faster than any other warming documented in the paleoclimate record, and it’s also unprecedented because it’s driven by a single dominant force, Rockström added: human greenhouse gas emissions. Under these conditions, research has documented that Earth is already losing some of the natural buffers that dampened climate swings in recent millennia.
“We now see worrying signs that the Earth system is losing resilience,” Rockström said. Recent extremes, he added, are a sign that the climate system “may respond more strongly to the same amount of warming than it did before.”
