Question: How many more years until gobal warming hits a dangerous high?

Carys Cook answered on 19 Jun 2011:

That is a very good question, and unfortunately no one knows. This is because the climate system is so incredibly complicated and it has a lot of feedback loops that we don’t know about. These feedbacks simply make things a lot more difficult to understand as different parts of the climate system will react in ways we cannot predict and prepare for. Some scientists talk about a ‘tipping point’, that is a time when the climate system will be nudged into chaos and the point at which is too late to really reverse any of the damage already done. It is thought this tipping point is fast approaching, or already may have happened. Personally I think the strange weather and increasing frequency of extreme weather events around the Earth are a sign that we are pushing the climate closer and closer to this tipping point, although it is very difficult to put a time (or rather a better way to think about it would be what amount of CO2) to it.