Comment by throw310822

> Not a good example as the Empire State Building isn't tipping.

Sorry but I have to insist: the tipping points of the ESB are real, it will fall over if it leans above a certain threshold, and the threshold could be lower than we think.

This statement is trivially true and yet it tells you nothing about the current state of the ESB.

Note: I am not saying that I don't believe climate change is happening, or that we should not be worried about it, or even that tipping points are a fiction. But I agree with BurningFrog that these statements are full of hypotheticals and that they seem to say more than they actually do- exactly like the statement about the ESB. There is an obvious incentive for publishing results that attract attention and nothing attracts attention more than prophecies of doom; this is in addition to the normal publication bias of non-neutral results. We have a replication crisis in actual experimental disciplines- where the papers detail what experiments were made and how to replicate them; but much of climate science is a speculative science that operates on models and extrapolations. And, differently from say, medicine, there is an actual political side to these results that muddies things even more- we want to see results that confirm our current opinion. This should makes us doubly careful on the topic.