The word "Kipppunkt", as you can read in a free dictionary on the Internet, rarely appears in German-language texts. Is that due to the three "p"? In any case, there are enough reasons to talk about “tipping points”. They play a crucial role in climate research and discussions. The writer Frank Schätzing made this very clear in the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger: A system, here nature, is under stress, puts it away for a long time, withstands stress so that one thinks that nothing has changed. But then - it tips "in a new, irreversible direction".
What this means is demonstrated by the flood disaster in North Rhine-Westphalia and Rhineland-Palatinate. The soils can no longer absorb the water masses that the constant rain brings and give way. That is one tipping element, the other precedes it: The jet stream that blows around the North Pole and causes alternation of highs and lows in our latitudes is flagging. The high or low comes and remains. Extreme weather conditions are becoming the norm.
This is how the communication scientist and bestselling author Schätzing explains it in the style of a climate researcher who also knows about the social climate. This also has its tipping points: If the catastrophe occurs, the mood changes. Suddenly everyone knows what should have been done in terms of climate protection or disaster control. Only the voices of those who warned against reaching the "tipping point" are not heard. In the case of climate, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change identified the points at which it would tip two decades ago, and in this newspaper they were taken up countless times, from the melting of the sea ice and the ice sheet in Greenland to the rise in sea levels to the drying up of the rainforest and thawing the permafrost soils, to name just a few that could be prevented, would reduce global warming to 1,5 percent limited.
When does the debate tip over?
But whenever you get to the point, the debate tips in a different direction: Does the mood for Armin Laschet change because he made an amused expression for a brief moment, even though there is nothing to laugh about?
What interpretation allows that Angela Merkel and Malu Dreyer went hand in hand to blame the place destroyed by the floods, apart from the fact that Dreyer needs support because of her multiple sclerosis disease?
The people in the disaster area need support when the politicians have made a picture of them and the media have made pictures of them.
And we all need an understanding of climate protection, as Frank Schätzing postulates, “as a triad of politics, economy and society”.
Otherwise it is not far to the next tipping point.