Coral collapse signals Earth’s first climate tipping point
The global die-off of coral reefs signals a critical shift in Earth’s climate system with global environmental consequences along with economic ones.
prativad 
Earth has entered a grim new climate reality.
The planet has officially passed its first climate tipping point. Relentlessly rising heat in the oceans has now pushed corals around the world past their limit, causing an unprecedented die-off of global reefs and threatening the livelihoods of nearly a billion people, scientists say in a new report published October 13.
Even under the most optimistic future warming scenario — one in which global warming does not exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times — all warm-water coral reefs are virtually certain to pass a point of no return. That makes this “one of the most pressing ecological losses humanity confronts,” the researchers say in Global Tipping Points Report 2025.
And the loss of corals is just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak.
“Since 2023, we’ve witnessed over a year of temperatures of more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial average,” said Steve Smith, a geographer at the University of Exeter who researches tipping points and sustainable solutions, at a press event October 7 ahead of publication. “Overshooting the 1.5 degree C limit now looks pretty inevitable and could happen around 2030. This puts the world in a danger zone of escalating risks, of more tipping points being crossed.”
Those tipping points are points of no return, nudging the world over a proverbial peak into a new climate paradigm that, in turn, triggers a cascade of effects. Depending on the degree of warming over the next decades, the world could witness widespread dieback of the Amazon rainforest, the collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets and — most worrisome of all — the collapse of a powerful ocean current system known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC.
