INTRO | HIGHLIGHTS | FEATURES | FOCUS | PERSPECTIVES | BIOS
‘moderate’, ‘heavy’, ‘heavy and admit to having
a problem’ and ‘in treatment’. Today, wards in
Durham and neighbouring Stockton may have
a binge drinking rate as high as 50 percent.
Another tipping point that has caught much
attention from popular media, academia and
government is the ‘tipping point’ associated
with climate change.
One of the last major transitions that took
In order to combat the spread of alcoholism
a useful model is needed to provide the
national healthcare system with accurate
predictions, which can be used to develop an
appropriate policy strategy. Binge drinking
also affects certain vulnerable populations,
such as pregnant women, and mathematical
modelling could account for them in order
to help prevent disease and birth defects.
Another model that Straughan and Mulone
have developed is similar to one used for
people with bulimia that is split into two
categories – those that admit to having a
problem and those that don’t. Those that
don’t admit to having an alcohol problem is
the larger group of the two that needs to be
addressed by national health policy.
The popularity of tipping point theories of
climate change is relatively recent. A wide
variety of scientists including climatologists
geographers, physicists and mathematicians,
have been investigating whether our planet is
about to cross a critical climate threshold into
irreversible disaster. Some are more optimistic
than others saying that even if the Earth’s
temperature rises significantly in the future,
the change is not necessarily irreversible.
Other theories posited by researchers are far
grimmer stating that not only are we heading
into inevitable environmental disaster, but there
is nothing we can do about it. Finally, there is
a minority of scientists who believe humaninduced climate change is not happening and
that there are other reasons for the planet’s
warming. This group have failed to convince
the majority of the climate science community,
but with the help of the popular media, have
nonetheless convinced a significant number of
people throughout the world, despite a large,
increasing amount of scientific evidence to the
contrary. But how do sudden, rapid shifts in
the Earth’s climate happen in the first place?
Temperatures around the North Atlantic
“There is no such thing as a single climate,
there are multiple climates over space and we
know from our present understanding of the
Earth’s atmospheric system that many places
warm up while other places simultaneously cool
down. The question is whether or not we can
see patterns of climate behaviour which might
make a coherent story about what is happening
on average”, says Prof Antony Long, one of the
lead climate scientists on Tipping Points.
drivers of climate during the mid-Holocene
Modelling behaviour can assist health policy
makers in looking for ways to get more people
into treatment in order to counteract the high
levels of alcoholism in communities and help
them become alcohol-free. There are still
other problems however to do with relapse
which is currently 60-90 per cent according
to recent estimates and modelling the number
of people who go from not admitting to
admitting they have an alcohol problem is
far from straightforward. If there is a tipping
point in alcoholism that leads to an epidemic
in populations in North East England, or other
parts of the world, then mathematics may
hold the answer to stopping the problem
before it starts.
place during a climate similar to the one
we’re in now was a cooling event that
occurred between 4,000-6,000 years ago.
dropped and many ice masses, including the
Greenland Ice Sheet, started to grow again
after their retreat since