Study predicts imminent irreversible planetary collapse

I mean... why the hell not?

It says that local ecosystems are known to go through critical transitions, and that what's make these transitions remarkable is that the tipping point is so hard to identify or predict. They are extrapolating this and saying that a global tipping point may exist as well. That's it.

You are right, it's incredibly vague and there isn't any awesome undeniable evidence. That's the whole point of the paper. "Hey guys, we might be screwing up our shit more than we think, we need to start taking more measurements" is basically the entire gist of the paper.

Edit: Here's the actual paper: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v486/n7401/full/nature1...

I'll reserve my full judgement until I've read it, but I don't have high hopes. It seems quite odd to invent an entirely new scientific discipline in one fell swoop along with making such a bold prediction.

PPS: After reading the paper my opinion is that this is far more pseudoscience than not, by a wide margin. There are some points worthy of further study (biodiversity studies, effects of the impact of human activity comprising a large and growing part of the world's energy budget, changes in ecosystems due to fragmentation due to human activity, etc.) but this paper steams by those topics at a thousand miles an hour. There is no theory here, only the vaguest outlines of one. Even the core terms (state, state shift, forcings) are vauguely and generically defined, if at all. There is no model, no predictions, and no evidence.

Flatly put the ideas put forth here are non-falsifiable. At its simplest "state shift theory" can be boiled down to "change causes change, sometimes permanently". Figure 2 is a graph which plots "global ecological state" against "global forcing". There are no numbers and neither term is defined either quantitatively or qualitatively. As a side note the essay references the now debunked theory of Mt Kilimanjaro's glaciers melting due to global warming, despite the lack of evidence of local temperature increases there (the glaciers have been sublimating away and snowfall changes have failed to replace the lost material.)

Nature should be ashamed to have printed this, even in an editorial context. It is so lacking in hard scientific rigor and so generic and amenable to any interpretation (there is no evidence presented whether "state change" could be beneficial or detrimental to humans or to Earth's species) that it doesn't belong within a thousand meters of a journal as prestigious as Nature. There is even a chance, though admittedly slim, that this could be a hoax, the work of someone who wishes to discredit the scientific establishment of today and its seemingly infinite ability to bend its standards and tarnish its history to print anything so long as the conclusions are politically correct (human population reduction, switching to "green" energy and "sustainable" agriculture, etc.)

These topics are too important for us to abandon scientific rigor in our attempt to understand our world and how it works and will change. We cannot afford to slip into an era of superstition and ignorance where conclusions are assumed and evidence is irrelevant.

But if you try to make a model based only on your observations, without also being able to experiment, then that's not science, that's tautology.

Your model will do whatever you want, and you have no way of knowing if it has anything to do with the real world because you can not run multiple experiments. In some cases if you wait long enough you may randomly get enough variation in the real world to be confident in your model (for example stellar evolution).

But using a model to predict something you have never seen in the real world? That's not science, that's speculation.