'The' Tipping Point? Or Just One of Many?

Real Climate's Gavin Schmidt looks at the sudden proliferation of "tipping points" and related concepts in media coverage of global warming and warns that:

Much of the discussion about tipping points, like the discussion about 'dangerous interference' with climate often implicitly assumes that there is just 'a' point at which things tip and become 'dangerous'. This can lead to two seemingly opposite, and erroneous, conclusions - that nothing will happen until we reach the 'point' and conversely, that once we've reached it, there will be nothing that can be done about it. i.e. it promotes both a cavalier and fatalistic outlook. However, it seems more appropriate to view the system as having multiple tipping points and thresholds that range in importance and scale from the smallest ecosystem to the size of the planet.

For more, see: "Runaway tipping points of no return"