The Federation of American Scientists is collaborating with researchers around the world to advance our understanding of positive climate tipping points and resulting nonlinearities toward decarbonization in the United States. This group is seeking to develop new approaches for identifying and activating these phenomena in order to achieve a socially just transformation. While the concept of positive climate tipping points is still largely academic, researchers are making progress in identifying the conditions that will enable them to occur. Using this research, policy makers may be able to operationalize positive tipping points; in fact, organizations around the world have already begun thinking about climate policy interventions through the lens of positive tipping points.

In the United States, for example, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) provide an opportunity to create significant, transformative change. Positive tipping points and other nonlinearities could accelerate the federal government’s return on investment and rapidly usher in a more sustainable future. In practice, what if we could map the distribution of charging infrastructure required to kickstart electric vehicle adoption — and target infrastructure subsidies accordingly? Or, could the government sequence the transition of the federal fleet toward 100% zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) procurement in a way that optimizes positive tipping points to achieve faster and greater results? By answering these questions and many others, The Federation of American Scientists hopes to help chart a better path for policy makers to take strategic and effective climate action.

The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) is a nonprofit organization that embeds science, technology, innovation, and experience into government and public discourse in order to build a healthy, safe, prosperous, and equitable society. Since its founding in 1945 by a group of atomic researchers, FAS has worked towards a world where science, technology, ideas and talent are deployed to solve the biggest challenges of our time, from nuclear proliferation to climate change. Through policy entrepreneurship, FAS develops and crowdsources innovative policy ideas from the scientific community and generates actionable solutions that drive change across the executive and legislative branches of government. The Talent Hub at FAS helps integrate subject matter expertise into the policymaking process by recruiting and placing science and tech talent in government. Agency partnerships allow FAS to shape government agenda, respond to agency priorities, coordinate actors across agencies, and support agencies on strategic implementation challenges.

The goal of this tournament is to forecast and assess the underlying factors and policy interventions that may activate positive tipping points toward the adoption of ZEVs. It will comprise two broad categories of questions. The first category will ask forecasters to predict the trajectory and impact of several factors that are relevant to ZEV adoption. The second will examine specific, ZEV-focused policies. These questions will ask forecasters to comparatively predict the rates of ZEV adoption conditional on the policy’s implementation or its absence.

FAS intends to use these policy-specific forecasts to identify transformative policy levers that may trigger positive tipping points and help the transportation sector achieve its sustainability objectives.

The Climate Tipping Points Tournament is the first of its kind for Metaculus. Unlike our other collaborations and projects, this tournament asks forecasters to not only predict what will happen, but also to consider the impact of specific indicators and policies on broader trends. We are excited to debut this novel approach and grateful to our forecasting community for their participation.

The Climate Tipping Points Tournament consists of two separate prize pools totaling $5,000. The first round of the tournament will feature approximately 14 question groups, most of which are asked for the years 2023, 2024, 2025, 2030, and 2035. The second round will feature conditional forecasting about climate policy and the relationship between questions in the first round. One prize pool of $2,500 will be distributed for accuracy on any questions which resolve before March 1, 2027. Questions which resolve after this cutoff date will not be scored for prizes. Another prize pool of $2,500 will be awarded for comments made before July 1, 2023. Read more about the questions we expect to be counted in each prize pool in the "Eligible Questions" section below.

In addition to the prize pool for accuracy on the questions resolving before March 1, 2027, there will be a commenting prize pool of $2,500 for comments made on the policy questions and conditional questions launched in the second round. There will be 19 commenting prizes awarded for comments made before July 1, 2023. In July of 2023, three Metaculus Admins will independently read through all of the comments on all of the questions in the second round of the Climate Tipping Points tournament and assign a rating to each comment out of 10. Ratings will be aggregated, and prizes will be awarded to the top 19 comments as shown below:

• $300 each for the top three comments
• $150 each for the fourth place through ninth place comments
• $70 each for the tenth place through 19th place comments

Individual users may receive multiple comment prizes up to a maximum prize award of $900. To be eligible to win the commenting prize any user who wishes to participate must also have made forecasts on the question they comment on. The comments will be judged based on how they meet some or all of the criteria described below:

• The comment is well-reasoned and clearly written.
• The comment identifies mistakes in the community’s reasoning or clearly explains why the author’s forecast differs from the community’s.
• For conditional questions the comment provides a detailed explanation of the impact of the parent question on the child question. Higher ratings will be given to comments which provide a clear and well-reasoned estimate of the impact of confounding and/or reverse causality on the relevant forecast.

All questions in the first round will be hidden for a period of one month, during which the community median will not be visible. First round questions for the periods of 2030 and 2035 will also be hidden for one month, however these time horizons will not be scored. Questions in the second round will not have a hidden period aside from the default Metaculus hidden period.

For the leaderboard, 25% of the coverage weight for the first round questions will be determined by participation during this hidden period and the other 75% will be based on participation during the visible period. Any questions launched in the second round will not have a coverage weight applied, coverage will be calculated based on participation as a portion of the question lifetime. Tournament scoring aims to balance rewarding independent forecasting skill (during the hidden period) and providing latecomers who miss the hidden period a realistic chance to finish in first place.

Any questions from the first and second round which resolve before March 1, 2027 will be scored for the $2,500 accuracy prize pool. Currently we expect that all of the questions from the first round asking about the time periods of 2023, 2024, 2025, and 2026 will be eligible, though any of these questions which resolve as Ambiguous or for which unexpected delays in resolution data result in them resolving after the cutoff date will not count toward the accuracy prize.

All questions from the second round are eligible for the commenting prize. Round 2 questions include the Round 2 tag and can be found here. Comments on the first round of questions are not eligible for the commenting prize.

To keep the focus of this tournament on climate policy and zero-emission vehicles we have excluded some of the more extreme potential outcomes from consideration for these questions. See the fine print of the first round questions for more details, but in short disasters which result in a significant reduction in human population or a halving of US GDP and scenarios where world GDP experiences a massive surge are excluded, and the occurrence of those scenarios will result in the questions resolving as Ambiguous.