Reader question:

Please explain this paragraph, “the tipping point” in particular:

Last year marked the tipping point in the fight against tobacco addiction according to Free & Clear, a national leader in coaching-based tobacco dependence treatment. The United States now has more former smokers than current smokers. Further, over half of Americans now live in a city or state that is smoke-free.

My comments:

For the first time in history, more people are now quitting smoking than they are smoking tobacco. The turning point came last year. Before last year, even though more and more people had been joining the quitting game thanks to efforts such as coaching-based tobacco dependence treatment, the number of people quitting had never reached half of the smoking population.

Now, that half-way point is reached.

And that half-way point is the tipping point here. In other words, it’s the turning point.

To tip, you see, is for something to turn over or fall. For example, if all people on a boat converge on one side of the ship, it’ll tip and fall over because the balance of ship is tipped.

Yeah, it’s the same way you tip the scales. When the scale is perfectly balanced, any little weight you put on either side will tip the scale in its direction.

And the tipping point is where this shift happens.

This phrase often describes situations where small problems keep accumulating till one day they begin to cause great damages, if, that is, people don’t start dealing with them properly. People talk of the last straw breaks the camels back and that last straw, in a way, is the tipping point.

It changes the nature of a situation.

Smoking a cigarette, to use the above example, can be perfectly harmless if you only puff, say, one cigarette a day. Still a negligible problem, I think if you smoke two or three per day. However, if you keep puffing on, say, smoking two packs a day, its effect will soon show. Somewhere along the line, you’re going to feel its effect on the lungs – you begin to cough, for instance, and your lungs are going to hurt – and that is a tipping point, after which things are going to turn really bad, and from bad to worse, and ugly.

Alright, let’s get a better feel of the tipping point via these media examples:

1. An already relentless melting of the Arctic greatly accelerated this summer, a warning sign that some scientists worry could mean global warming has passed an ominous tipping point. One even speculated that summer sea ice would be gone in five years.

Greenland’s ice sheet melted nearly 19 billion tons more than the previous high mark, and the volume of Arctic sea ice at summer’s end was half what it was just four years earlier, according to new NASA satellite data obtained by the Associated Press.

“The Arctic is screaming,” said Mark Serreze, senior scientist at the government’s snow and ice data center in Boulder, Colo.

Just last year, two top scientists surprised their colleagues by projecting that the Arctic sea ice was melting so rapidly that it could disappear entirely by the summer of 2040.

This week, after reviewing his own new data, NASA climate scientist Jay Zwally said: “At this rate, the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions.”

- Scientists fear Arctic thaw has reached ‘tipping point’, Associated Press, December 12, 2007.

2. The end appears nigh for Saddam Hussein’s regime, but U.S. officials were not ready to say Monday they had reached the “tipping point,” that moment when most Iraqis believe the dictator is finished.

“I can’t say we’re at a tipping point,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told a Pentagon news briefing. “I think that there won’t be a single point.”

- Despite successes, U.S. says Iraq war hasn't reached ‘tipping point’, The Dallas Morning News, April 7, 2003.

3. The two most recent Surgeons General of the United States, David Satcher, M.D., Ph.D., FAAFP, FACPM, FACP and Richard H. Carmona, M.D., M.P.H., FACS, today led the Strategies to Overcome and Prevent (STOP) Obesity Alliance in urging policymakers to take direct action in health reform to address obesity and the chronic diseases associated with it.

“We’ve reached the tipping point on obesity in the United States,” said Dr. Richard H. Carmona, 17th U.S. Surgeon General, Health and Wellness Chairperson of the STOP Obesity Alliance and President of Canyon Ranch Institute. “Obesity now impacts every aspect of our lives, including the future of our health care system. Health reform that directly addresses obesity will save lives, save money, and improve the health and well-being of every American.”

“When I served as Surgeon General, obesity was a problem of epidemic proportions,” said Dr. David Satcher, 16th U.S. Surgeon General, who released the 2001 Surgeon General’s Call to Action To Prevent and Decrease Overweight and Obesity. “Today, we are in a state of emergency when it comes to obesity. The issues underpinning obesity are too complex and widespread for any one institution to effectively address it alone. Until we collaborate to address obesity through meaningful, population-based policies and programs, our nation will continue to be crippled by obesity and the chronic diseases it causes.”

- Groups Announce America Has Reached Tipping Point On Obesity, RedOrbit.com, September 9, 2009.

4. At Facebook, we’re inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television — by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together.

Today, our society has reached another tipping point. We live at a moment when the majority of people in the world have access to the internet or mobile phones — the raw tools necessary to start sharing what they're thinking, feeling and doing with whomever they want. Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.

There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.

We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other.

- Facebook’s letter from Mark Zuckerberg, Guardian.co.uk, February 1, 2012.

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About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.

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