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    Teleconnections among tipping elements in the Earth system
    (London : Nature Publ. Group, 2023) Liu, Teng; Chen, Dean; Yang, Lan; Meng, Jun; Wang, Zanchenling; Ludescher, Josef; Fan, Jingfang; Yang, Saini; Chen, Deliang; Kurths, Jürgen; Chen, Xiaosong; Havlin, Shlomo; Schellnhuber, Hans Joachim
    Tipping elements are components of the Earth system that may shift abruptly and irreversibly from one state to another at specific thresholds. It is not well understood to what degree tipping of one system can influence other regions or tipping elements. Here, we propose a climate network approach to analyse the global impacts of a prominent tipping element, the Amazon Rainforest Area (ARA). We find that the ARA exhibits strong correlations with regions such as the Tibetan Plateau (TP) and West Antarctic ice sheet. Models show that the identified teleconnection propagation path between the ARA and the TP is robust under climate change. In addition, we detect that TP snow cover extent has been losing stability since 2008. We further uncover that various climate extremes between the ARA and the TP are synchronized under climate change. Our framework highlights that tipping elements can be linked and also the potential predictability of cascading tipping dynamics.
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    Setting the tree‑ring record straight
    (Berlin ; Heidelberg : Springer, 2020) Ludescher, Josef; Bunde, Armin; Büntgen, Ulf; Schellnhuber, Hans Joachim
    Tree-ring chronologies are the main source for annually resolved and absolutely dated temperature reconstructions of the last millennia and thus for studying the intriguing problem of climate impacts. Here we focus on central Europe and compare the tree-ring based temperature reconstruction with reconstructions from harvest dates, long meteorological measurements, and historical model data. We find that all data are long-term persistent, but in the tree-ring based reconstruction the strength of the persistence quantified by the Hurst exponent is remarkably larger (h≅ 1.02) than in the other data (h= 0.52–0.69), indicating an unrealistic exaggeration of the historical temperature variations.We show how to correct the tree-ring based reconstruction by a mathematical transformation that adjusts the persistence and leads to reduced amplitudes of the warm and cold periods. The new transformed record agrees well with both the observational data and the harvest dates-based reconstructions and allows more realistic studies of climate impacts. It confirms that the present warming is unprecedented. © 2020, The Author(s).