Experts on global warming told a crowd of several hundred people in San Rafael this week that the Nov. 8 election figures to be a key turning point in the battle to prevent irreversible climate change.

The Time to Lead on Climate coalition, which consists of more than a dozen Marin environmental organizations, held its third educational forum in Dominican University’s Angelico Hall Monday night. Speakers included Michael Wara, an associate professor of law at Stanford University and former climate scientist; Kate Gordon, vice chair of climate and sustainable urbanization at the Paulson Institute; and Rep. Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, a former attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

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Wara spoke about climate tipping points and climate policy tipping points.

“The climate tends to be stable until it isn’t,” Wara said. “ Then it changes rapidly to new stable states.”

He said there is growing concern due to the devastating fires in California and loss of trees due to disease and pests that what we’re witnessing is landscape transition, “ what happens when you go over a tipping point and are moving toward a new equilibrium.”

Wara added, however that “there are other kinds of tipping points that are much more hopeful and worth focusing on.”

For example, he said solar energy can now compete on a level playing field with any other energy source and wind power in the right places is cheaper than the cheapest natural gas.

“Both technologies are continuing to fall in price every year to the point where by the middle of the next decade nothing else will be likely to compete,” Wara said.