[Ken Gray]
What a title! Today’s post is LONG . . . but worth every second of your time. Trust me on this. So take your time; you’ll be glad you did. Greenberg lays out the best summary to my knowledge of what can feel like a complicated panoply of relationships; he does so clearly, and effectively. As we each discover bits of the catastrophic climate crisis puzzle, piece by piece, Greenberg takes us higher, for an overview, a sequence of effects he names as “collapse.” This is not easy reading for sure; but essential. Please share widely.
Aug 23, 2025
There are two tales about climate change. One is the fairy tale the fossil fuel industry has spent more than half a century and billions of dollars refining. It tells us the danger is exaggerated, a hoax dreamed up by elites who want to control our lives. It is the tale the orange man in the Uncle Sam costume repeats at his rallies, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing. The other tale is far scarier than anything Stephen King ever wrote. It is the story of tipping points: thresholds in Earth’s climate system that, once crossed, unleash change that is abrupt, self-reinforcing, and irreversible.
Tipping points are often spoken of as if there is just one: the moment when climate change suddenly becomes irreversible. The truth is more unsettling. There are many tipping points, each embedded in different parts of the Earth system: the ice sheets, the oceans, the great forests, the frozen soils. Each has its own threshold, and once crossed, change feeds on itself and becomes a vicious circle, amplifying its destructiveness.
The horror lies in how ordinary everything seems—until it doesn’t. Today’s weather feels much like yesterday’s, and gradual warming masks the danger. But beneath the surface, bombs are ticking. The West Antarctic ice sheet is unraveling, threatening several meters of sea-level rise that would redraw coastlines around the world. The Amazon is drying, inching toward collapse into a savannah, with feedbacks that could alter rainfall across South America. The Atlantic circulation, the conveyor belt that shapes weather across Europe and North America, is weakening in ways that foretell violent swings in storms, droughts, and floods.
The real danger is not just one tipping point but the way they trigger each other. Greenland’s melting ice dilutes the Atlantic, slowing currents, which shifts rainfall, which starves the Amazon of water, which kills trees that once stored carbon, which drives more warming that melts more ice. That is cascading collapse: a sequence of dominoes, each larger than the last, where the fall of one accelerates the fall of all. What appear as separate problems are in fact parts of a single system coming apart.
Collapse rarely comes as a single dramatic event. The Maya didn’t vanish overnight, and the kingdoms of the Late Bronze Age didn’t crumble in a day. They unraveled slowly, as drought, deforestation, and conflict fed into each other until the old ways of living could no longer hold. Climate tipping points follow the same pattern: long buildup, sudden break. And when that break comes, it isn’t only physical. Governments lose their grip because the tools they rely on—maps, models, forecasts—stop matching reality. Change starts outrunning the ability to measure it, and institutions are left stumbling in the dark.
The Arctic albedo effect is already unraveling. Ice that once reflected sunlight now melts away, leaving dark water to absorb heat. Since 1979, three-quarters of summer ice has disappeared. The Arctic is warming nearly four times faster than the global average, destabilizing jet streams and fueling fires across Canada, Europe, and Siberia. In Alaska, villages like Shishmaref and Kivalina are being relocated as thawing ground and rising seas swallow homes. This isn’t just ice disappearing. It’s the breakdown of a planetary thermostat that has kept conditions stable for millennia. The frightening part is time itself. The fuse is already lit, but the explosion will stretch across decades and centuries. Politics, tuned to election cycles and quarterly reports, cannot see that far ahead—and so the danger keeps deepening while leaders look the other way.
As the Arctic melts, permafrost begins to thaw. Frozen soils that locked away carbon for millennia are now softening, releasing methane and carbon dioxide. Scientists once feared a sudden “methane bomb,” but the reality is a slow leak that adds up to the same danger. Microbial communities consume much of the methane before it escapes, forming a hidden firewall. Yet their resilience is fragile. Warming seas and acidification could quietly tip them into failure. Already in Siberia, enormous craters have formed where thawing ground suddenly releases gas. In Alaska, highways buckle and oil pipelines warp as the earth itself loses stability. For governments, this is a nightmare. Scientists can’t monitor the changes fast enough, models fail to capture the sudden jumps, and officials who once promised stability find the ground itself giving way under their feet. Collapse here may not come with a bang but with the silent failure of invisible guardians.
Farther south, the Amazon rainforest nears its threshold. Trees generate the rain that sustains them. Deforestation, fire, and rising temperatures break that cycle. Once forest cover falls below a certain level, rainfall declines, and vast areas shift toward savannah. The Amazon then releases more carbon than it stores, accelerating warming while undermining rainfall far beyond its basin. Farmers in southern Brazil already struggle with erratic rains; Indigenous communities lose both land and livelihood. This tipping point is inequality in action: those least responsible for the destruction—Indigenous peoples, small farmers, the rural poor—are the first to pay the price, while distant consumers of beef and soy continue to profit from the industries driving the collapse.
The Atlantic circulation, the great conveyor belt of currents, is weakening. Freshwater from melting Greenland ice makes the Atlantic lighter, slowing the overturning circulation that regulates weather across much of the Northern Hemisphere. If this system collapses, African and South Asian monsoons may fail, devastating crops for hundreds of millions. Droughts would deepen across the Sahel, while hurricanes grow fiercer in the Caribbean. Already, farmers in the Horn of Africa have endured five failed rainy seasons in a row, while Europe has faced both unprecedented floods and record-breaking heat waves. This is where psychology collides with physics. Because the ocean looks the same to the naked eye, because the seasons still appear familiar, denial thrives. Humans normalize gradual change. The fossil fuel industry weaponized this weakness, spending billions to tell people the fairy tale they wanted to believe. The true horror is not just the weakening currents but the blindness that allows them to falter unseen.
The Antarctic ice sheets are the slowest fuse but the most devastating bomb. The West Antarctic sheet is retreating into deep basins where collapse cannot be stopped once it begins. If it goes, sea levels could rise by several meters, redrawing coastlines worldwide. Already Pacific islands prepare for relocation. In Bangladesh, saltwater intrudes into rice paddies, displacing millions, and threatening food security. In the Himalayas, glaciers that once guaranteed water supplies are shrinking too quickly. First come the flash floods, then the long drought as the ice disappears. This is the time-lag horror: what politics sees as distant is already inevitable. Even if emissions fell to zero tomorrow, collapse could already be locked in.
Taken together, these tipping points form a haunted architecture. Arctic melt accelerates permafrost thaw, which adds more greenhouse gases, which drives Amazon dieback, which shifts rainfall and weakens currents, which further destabilize ice sheets. What looks manageable in isolation becomes catastrophic in sequence. The slow buildup, then the sudden breakdown: this is the rhythm of ecological and human collapse alike.
The inequality of collapse is impossible to ignore. Sea-level rise strikes hardest at low-lying nations like Bangladesh, the Maldives, and Kiribati. Himalayan melt threatens both sudden floods and future drought for hundreds of millions in South Asia. Caribbean islands face stronger storms even as they struggle with debt burdens and colonial legacies. In the United States, insurers retreat from coastal Florida and fire-prone California, leaving communities to shoulder the losses. Those who contributed least to the warming are hit first and hardest, while those who profited most continue to deny the urgency.
This is the Stephen King story we are living in: haunted not by ghosts, but by feedback loops that do not forgive error. The real terror is that we know the script and keep walking toward the climax.
And here is where the second tale, the fable of denial, becomes its own horror story. The science is terrifying because it is true. The hoax story is terrifying because it is false, and because it has worked. It has kept action at bay long enough for bombs to tick louder, thresholds to edge closer, and feedbacks to accelerate. The industry that profited from carbon knew this. It buried its own research, bought the narrative space, and sold confusion as certainty. The orange man’s rallies are only the loudest echo of a campaign that began decades earlier in boardrooms and PR firms.
The greatest horror is not what science tells us might happen. It is the knowledge that collapse is being made more likely, even inevitable, by a deliberate project to keep us in the dark. The bombs are real, the cascades are coming, and yet the story most people hear is still that there is nothing to fear.
We still live in a narrowing window where choices matter. But each year spent in denial shortens it, bringing the cascades closer. The Stephen King story is written in ice, forests, and oceans. The fairy tale is written in money, politics, and lies. Together, they create the scariest story of all: one where collapse is not just a possibility but our inheritance.
Suggested Readings
Armstrong McKay, David I., et al. “Exceeding 1.5 °C Global Warming Could Trigger Multiple Climate Tipping Points.” Science 377, no. 6611 (2022): 1171–75.
Greenberg, James B., and Thomas K. Park. “The Political Ecology of Climate Change.” In Terrestrial Transformations: The Political Ecology of Climate Change, edited by Thomas K. Park and James B. Greenberg, 33–50. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020.
Kröger, Martin. “Socio-ecological Crises and Global Climate Tipping Points as Narratives of Transformation.” Journal of Political Ecology 30, no. 1 (2023): 1–18.
Lenton, Timothy M., et al. “Tipping Elements in the Earth’s Climate System.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105, no. 6 (2008): 1786–95.
Nuttall, Mark. “Tipping Points and the Human World: Living with Change.” Journal of Political Ecology 19, no. 1 (2012): 21–34.
Park, Thomas K., and James B. Greenberg. “The Anthropocene and Other Noxious Concepts.” In Terrestrial Transformations: The Political Ecology of Climate Change, edited by Thomas K. Park and James B. Greenberg, 15–32. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020.
Ritz, Violetta. “Climate Tipping Points: Tracing the Limits of Political Discretion.” Leiden Journal of International Law (2024): 1–22.
Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.
Steffen, Will, et al. “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115, no. 33 (2018): 8252–59.
Van der Hel, Sandra. “Tipping Points and Climate Change: Metaphor Between Science and the News Media.” Environmental Communication 12, no. 4 (2018): 499–513.
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Take Note - Reflections on life, music, politics, retirement and more by Ken Gray 
Excellent (and yes, scary) read. Thank you for sharing this.
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