Tipping point
A tipping points are normally used in physical and climate science to describe a threshold beyond which significant and often rapid changes to the state and often behaviour of a system can be noted. In climate science the systems usually refer to the global climate systems that stabilise the earths temperature and surface behaviour, monitored through the earths tipping elements.
Tipping points can be simply described by example with a glass of water on a surface being tilted at the top, less than 45 degrees and the situation will most likely remains similar, with most of the water in the glass. More than 45 degrees and the glass will fall over, that is the point it tips, the tipping point where the situation changes dramatically and all the water spills.
In construction the tipping point might more accurately be described by the term breaking or fracture point, the point beyond the elastic limit where a material permanently deforms, to the plastic region where the material fails irreversibly and in some cases causes the collapse of for example a structural system.
AR5 Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability, Glossary, published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) defines tipping point as: ‘A level of change in system properties beyond which a system reorganises, often abruptly, and does not return to the initial state even if the drivers of the change are abated.’
In sociology tipping point can refer to where previously rare phenomenon become rapidly and dramatically more common.
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