Early Warning Signals for Ecological Tipping Points via Causal Entropy Divergence: The KA-Climate Framework

Ecological tipping points—abrupt, self-reinforcing state transitions in Earth system components—may trigger cascading, irreversible changes across biomes, ocean systems, and ice sheets. Existing early warning signal (EWS) methods based on critical slowing down require long, stationary time series and are computationally retrospective. We present KA-Climate, a streaming multi-channel EWS framework grounded in the Karimov–Alekberli (KA) thermodynamic framework, applied to six ecological indicators: Amazon forest cover, Arctic sea ice extent, Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) strength, coral reef health, Greenland ice mass balance, and permafrost temperature anomaly. Validated on a simulation calibrated to published Earth observation statistics, KA-Climate achieves 3-year lead times before three major tipping events: Arctic sea ice record loss (2007), Amazon drought–deforestation synergy (2015), and the 2016 global coral bleaching crisis. Isolation Forest detects none of these events. The C2 cross-system coupling channel is the unique KA-Climate contribution: it captures the synchronized degradation of multiple biomes—Amazon, Arctic, and coral reef simultaneously weakening under common climate forcing—which is the thermodynamic signature of Earth-system-level destabilization not detectable by any single-indicator method. This paper is the seventh and final paper in the KA Framework series.