Tipping Point

Climate change is not a new concept. It has been mostly referred to as global warming in the past. As much as people would like to file this issue away as something to deal with at a later date, it simply cannot wait. This problem we face is costing us billions of dollars, forests and wildlife are being eliminated, and people are dying. Starting to sound like a big deal, right? Future generations will be affected the most. People who do not even exist will have to pay for what we, all people, have done to this earth. To begin to make changes, one must realize the severity of the issue. Bill Mckibben, author of “Recalculating the Climate Math,” conveys that “We’ve already raised the world’s temperature by one degree—enough to melt almost half the ice in the Arctic, kill off huge swaths of the world’s coral, and unleash lethal floods and drought. July and August tied for the hottest months ever recorded on our planet, and scientists think they were almost certainly the hottest in the history of human civilization” (Page 3 of 5). Global climate change is a serious problem because it increases natural disasters and is the cause of extreme weather.

Society is stocked full of various trends and epidemics. To many, the way in which these trends start is a mystery. As members of a society, we often subconsciously take part in these patterns without questioning our participation. Therefore, people continue to ignore the drastic changes in society, and the reasons why they occur so swiftly. There is a lack of motivation to take a step back and inquire about society as a whole, and rethink one’s actions. In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell effectively discusses and analyzes how and why ideas spread throughout societies using the rhetorical appeals, ethos, pathos and logos.

Many parts of our daily life revolve around social sciences and are caused by much more research and in-depth thought than we may originally realize. Innumerable products, ideas, epidemics, and modern thought processes are the product of tipping points. For any idea to gain enough ground to become popular to a large audience, it has to have a very specific environment and the idea must be spread at very certain times in history. There is a very precarious balance to making anything have the ability to be prominent or sought after. Nature, political revolutions, and credibility and popularity are all events and phenomena that have tipping points and relate to The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.

4) How would you relate “the law of the few” to a transition management team?

In, “The Tipping Point,” Gladwell employs the rhetorical appeal, logos, to prove that individuals can make enormous changes in society. Gladwell identifies “connectors” using logos through statistics, “Anyone who has ever acted, in other words, can be linked to Bacon in an average of under three steps.” (Gladwell: page 47) When Gladwell expresses that Bacon is a connector, he uses a numerical value to demonstrate how most people that act are connected to Bacon. Using statistics through logos makes Gladwell’s argument more sophisticated and believable with numerical values.

As Earths average temperature increases every year, the discussion of climate change has become a significant topic in the scientific community. Human activities such as powering factories, running automobiles or something as simple as burning wood for heat, emit dangerous greenhouse gases. What makes these greenhouse gases so detrimental is that they absorb the heat radiating off of Earth and keep it in the lower atmosphere creating a “blanket” of warmth around the Earth’s surface. This causes a drastic increase in the Earths average temperature. Due to the rise in temperature, the polar caps have been melting faster than ever, this is dangerous not only because of the risk of floods and sea level increase but ocean water will become less saline and ecosystems will be destroyed, impacting humans just as much as marine life. In the article, Understand faulty thinking to tackle climate change by George Marshall, Marshall states that most people in our world today do not care about climate change because it will not affect them, “Which points to the real problem: climate change is exceptionally amorphous, … no deadlines, no geographic location, no single cause or solution.” (Marshall 2014). Because the author makes it clear that climate change is indeed a great plight, and fails to be acknowledged by people, it is a significant matter that should be discussed

The rise of sea levels are projected to increase warmer waters from one and a half to two degrees in Central North Pacific in 2050, 1.9 to 2.6 degrees in Northern Islands, and also two to five degrees in the Caribbean at the end of this century. This rise of temperature decreases the life of ecosystems in the ocean and resulting in less freshwater for

The Connectors are the kinds of people who know lots of people, and are able to get a message across and to many in a matter of a short period of time, depending on the context. This is explicitly explained in Gladwell’s example of the six degrees of separation in his book. The Connectors are the kinds of people who have their foot

Shifts in temperature and precipitation will be a shock to fragile ecosystems which depend on specific climatic conditions. Many species will be unable to adapt as fast as their environment changes and face sharply reduced numbers or extinction. Scientists estimate that a warming of just 2 degree will put as many as 30% of the world's species at risk of extinction. Plants and animals aren’t the only ones feeling the pressure of changing ecosystems. Many regions will face severe water shortages in a warmer world, creating the potential for conflict. It is believed that the genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region is at least in part a response to water shortages resulting from global warming.

What can one consider being a tipping point in a situation. Is it when a situation changes from bad to worse? Could it be when it changes from good to better? Or could it be from when it changes from a bad situation and all of a sudden it turns around and becomes good? In my essay we are going to explore the tipping point from four different authors: Malcolm Gladwell, Mary G. King, Lynne M. Anderson, and Christine M. Pearson. From subject of: hush puppies, teen suicide, crime, smoking, incivility in the workplace and the black women’s breakthrough into clerical work. There could be many reasons why there were tipping

A tipping point is an idea, an idea that creates a simple understanding of how something begins. In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell creates the three rules of epidemic. His rules contain theories of how a story or event tips. The Civil Rights Movement is an epidemic because an “epidemic is a function of people who transmit an infectious disease, the agent itself and the environment in which the disease is operating”(Gladwell,18). During the Civil Rights Movement the word of defeating segregating or the “virus”, spread across the country reaching the hearts of every African American. The word spread by a 42 year old African American woman tired of being pushed around, she made a stand and spread the word with her actions to change the views of society. While fighting for their freedom, 300,000 African Americans protested segregation and violence from the white people during the Civil Rights Movement of 1955. Rosa

As with anything in life though, there were flaws with our system and our product. Over the course of two week working on the Tipping Point, our group encountered many problems due to errors made that could have been solved, though not each issue was solved. One of the problems our group faced was on day one of the game commencing, not everyone collected their popsicle sticks. This issue occurred even with a reminder lunch announcement that was emi-faulty in itself. Unfortunately, we had not prepared for such an issue and made the executive decision that all who had not collected their targets were now considered “dead”. Then the assassin’s of those newly “dead” individuals were required to come retrieve their new target. Even with this new

Specific Purpose: To inform the audience about three issues of how global warming is affecting our weather, animals, and our future.

Your research on tipping points seems to be based on descriptive modelling. Could rule-based modelling also be useful for revealing interesting properties for tipping points?

Climate change is one of the major issues surfacing earth over the past century. The earth’s temperature has increased over the years leading to detrimental effects on the economic and life sources of people, especially that of agricultural production and livestock. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary (2014), defined climate change as a change in global climate patterns apparent from the mid late 20th century. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, (2007) predicts that by 2100 the increase in global average surface temperature may be between 1.8° C and 4.0° C. With increases of 1.5° C to 2.5° C, approximately 20 to 30 percent of plant and animal species are expected to be at risk of extinction. Moreover, the IPCC (2007)