Climate Change and Global ‘Weirding’

It is well known and understood, at least within the scientific community and the educated segment of the population, that the climate is changing and that this change is reflected in a warmer planet, and because of this it is called ‘global warming’. In essence, global warming is the increase of the average temperature of the planet mainly due to anthropogenic activities and in particular the release of carbon in the atmosphere due to the burning of fossil fuels.

Now, although the warming of the planet is global, it has unique characteristics at regional levels. In other words, it is not uniform nor correlates with regular weather patterns of the past. The non-uniformity of the effects of global warming means that each region of the world perceives (and will perceive) the effects of global warming in different ways. Within this global warming scenario, it is expected that the intensity of weather-related phenomena will increase, and that means for example, hotter and more prolonged heat waves, longer and more severe droughts, stronger storms (and hurricanes) and intense flooding, etc. Also, although it might sound contrary to global warming, but cold spells could become significantly colder. The repercussions of events of such magnitude could potentially be catastrophic for entire societies and the environment since these events could lead to forest fires, loss of crops, sea level rise due to glacier and ice-sheet melting, mass human migration, migration also of animal and plant species and the extinction of species unable to adapt to these changes in the climate.

The above mentioned characteristics are already being observed and are not the product of the fictional view of a futuristic novel or movie. Because of the fact that these weather manifestations are so intrinsically potent, inherently erratic and potentially harmful, are also perceived in a more colloquial way as ‘weird’ and hence the coining of the term of ‘Global Weirding’.

 Etymology of ‘Global Weirding’: Thomas Friedman of The New York Times is sometimes credited with coining the term ‘global weirding’. Hunter Lovins, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute refers: "I prefer the term 'global weirding', because the rise in average global temperature is going to lead to all sorts of crazy things — from hotter heat spells and droughts in some places, to colder cold spells and more violent storms, more intense flooding, forest fires and species loss in other places".