“Nature is the proof of dialectics,” Friedrich Engels wrote. The accelerating climate crisis brings us more proof of that assertion.
A new report published Oct. 13 warns that Earth has begun to cross multiple “climate tipping points”. Warm-water coral reefs are already “crossing their thermal tipping point and experiencing unprecedented dieback, threatening the livelihoods of hundreds of millions who depend on them,” according to the 2025 Global Tipping Points report. Polar ice sheets, it adds, are also approaching tipping points that will lock in several metres of irreversible sea-level rise.
Science News describes climate tipping points as “points of no return, nudging the world over a proverbial peak into a new climate paradigm that, in turn, triggers a cascade of effects.” Geographer Steve Smith, one of the researchers for the Global Tipping Points report, says since 2023, the world has experienced more than a year of temperatures at least 1.5 C above the preindustrial average.
Current warming, the researchers say, has already pushed coral reefs past their limits. Coral reefs serve vital environmental functions, from nurturing fisheries to protecting coastal communities. Die-off of coral reefs is the first climate tipping point the report identifies, followed by further tipping points as average global temperatures continue to rise. These include the successive collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet, then of the subpolar gyre convection and Atlantic meridional overturning circulation that help regulate global climate; followed by retreat of mountain glaciers and die-back of the Amazon rainforest.
Understanding tipping points
Dialectics can be summarized as the logic of contradiction, motion and change. Rather than the metaphysical view, which views everything as static and in isolation, the dialectical worldview considers reality as a process in which everything continually interacts with everything else.
One of the three laws of dialectics is the transformation of quantity into quality, and vice versa. Steady quantitative increase leads to a sudden qualitative change. Heating liquid water to 100 C, for example, causes rapid qualitative transformation when the water turns into steam. The water doesn’t turn to steam gradually, but quickly once the temperature reaches a certain quantitative level—a “tipping point”, if you will.
Climate tipping points such as die-off of coral reefs show us once more the proof of dialectics in nature. A gradual increase in global temperature averages above pre-industrial levels, due to greenhouse-gas emissions, lead to major qualitative changes in the ecosystem that unfold rapidly.
Another law of dialectics is the interpenetration and unity of opposites. Day has no meaning without night, for example, and over time one transforms into the other. In the same way, cause and effect are not isolated from each other, but are part of the same dialectical unity. Cause becomes effect, which in turn becomes cause again. Likewise, Global Tipping Points researchers note,
climate tipping point risks are interconnected and most of the interactions between them are destabilising, meaning tipping one system makes tipping another more likely.
Learning that we’ve passed climate tipping points such as the collapse of coral reefs can lead to pessimism. To their credit, the researchers point out “the extraordinary potential of positive tipping points: self-reinforcing shifts in policies, technologies, finance, and behaviours that can drive change at unprecedented speed and scale.” Just as rising global temperatures lead to negative climate tipping points, positive action can serve as tipping points in the opposite direction.
Unfortunately, that’s not what we’re seeing. Ten years after the Paris Agreement—one of countless climate summits where world leaders promised to meet certain targets they later abandoned—Tanya Steele, CEO of the World Wildlife Fund’s U.K. office, acknowledged,
We are seeing the backsliding of climate and environmental commitments from governments, and indeed from businesses as well.
Climate action requires revolutionary change
Abandonment by governments and businesses of any pretense to address the climate crisis is directly tied to the global crisis of capitalism, which requires eliminating all possible barriers to the maximization of profit. In Canada, for example, Prime Minister Mark Carney repealed the consumer carbon tax and has championed the building of new pipelines, while federal and provincial governments passed laws allowing them to ignore environmental regulations. In January, Canada’s five largest banks left the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, an initiative launched in 2021 led by Carney that purported to coordinate climate action among banks.
“Only with a combination of decisive policy and civil society action can the world turn from facing existential climate tipping point risks to seizing positive tipping point opportunities,” the Global Tipping Points report says. The problem is the contradiction between the measures needed to address the climate crisis, and a socioeconomic system based on private property and individual profit.
A 2020 document by the International Marxist Tendency, now the Revolutionary Communist International, points out that the science and technology needed to drastically reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and undertake large-scale adaptation and mitigation measures, such as reforestation and building flood defences, already exist:
Electricity grids could be decarbonised with wind, solar, and tidal power. Cars and transports systems could be shifted to electricity, batteries, and hydrogen. Energy-efficiency measures could dramatically reduce energy demands from households and industry. Pollution levels could be slashed. Food could be grown sustainably. Waste could be recycled. Swathes of forests could be replanted.
But these vital steps all require two things: planning and resources—neither of which capitalism is capable of providing. The basis of capitalist production is private ownership and competition, in the pursuit of the profits of a handful of unelected and unaccountable parasites; not planning in order to meet social and environmental needs.
Moving from negative to positive climate tipping points will require a social tipping point: the revolutionary transformation of a system based on private profit into one based on need.