The world's climate has become more unpredictable, leading experts to coin the phrase "global weirding" – an alternative to "global warming" that better reflects the wider spectrum of extreme weather related to climate change.
Where did the term come from? US political commentator Thomas Friedman popularised the term "global weirding" in a 2007 opinion piece in The New York Times. "The rise in average global temperature is going to lead to all sorts of crazy things," he said, "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."
What does that look like? Many places are experiencing "climate whiplash" – extreme reversals of weather conditions, according to a new report by WaterAid. "Places accustomed to heavy rainfall are now facing droughts, while historically arid regions grapple with unexpected floods." This whiplash can happen fast, too, with "droughts that dry up water sources followed closely by floods that overwhelm infrastructure". Los Angeles, for example, recently experienced "two very wet winters" that "produced lots of grass and shrubs", said Sky News. These were then "followed by a long, hot summer that dried out that vegetation, providing abundant, tinder-dry fuel" for what would become, at the turn of this year, the worst wildfires in its history.
Why is it so dangerous? Global weirding and climate whiplash are producing more powerful extreme weather phenomena. "Wherever we look around the world, we see that these weather events are getting supersized by climate change, and they're putting us all at risk," climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe told Space.com.
And, in the longer term, global weirding "supercharges" the "water supply, sewage and flood-protection problems" faced by cities around the world "as their populations rapidly swell", said The Guardian. In low-income nations, these shifting climate extremes make "the establishment of much-needed infrastructure" much harder. Even wealthier nations can be caught off-guard because of their reliance on "ageing infrastructure" that's "designed for a climate that no longer exists". |