There's a new word that describes all the weird weather we've been having recently. It's global weirding. It describes the weird weather extremes that we've been experiencing - for example, the extreme heat in Arizona last summer (more than a month of over 110 degrees F), extreme wildfires (Canada last year), extreme torrential rains.
All sorts of weather records are being broken each year. This weird and extreme weather is occurring because our climate is changing. Thomas Friedman described global weirding years ago. He wrote in the NY Times:
"Avoid the term “global warming.” I prefer the term “global weirding,” because that is what actually happens as global temperatures rise and the climate changes. The weather gets weird. The hots are expected to get hotter, the wets wetter, the dries drier and the most violent storms more numerous."
From Discover: As Weather Extremes Increase in 2023, Global Weirding Becomes a Better Term
While temperatures in Phoenix soared above 110 degrees Fahrenheit for a record-shattering 31 straight days in July, people began turning up in emergency rooms with third-degree burns they’d suffered after falling — their skin seared by blistering hot pavement. Although not unprecedented, burn specialists said the number and severity of injuries were much higher than ever before.
Meanwhile, 30,000 feet up, the jet stream had become deranged. Its wavy, loopy and swirling pattern helped lock heat domes in place, like the one over south-central Arizona. Meteorologist Jeff Berardelli called the pattern “insane.” University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann likened it to a Vincent Van Gogh painting.
What Is Global Weirding?
Back in the early 2000s, author and environmentalist L. Hunter Lovins coined the term “global weirding” as an alternative to “global warming.” The idea was to describe where Earth was heading with continued emissions of greenhouse gases. The weather extremes of 2023 suggest she was prescient.
“I do think there’s something to the ‘global weirding’ framing,” says Mann. “We’re experiencing a type of weather behavior we haven’t seen before.” Research by Mann and colleagues has tied certain behaviors — like stalled weather systems floating over a place for weeks on end — to a jet stream flow made wavier than normal by climate change. But that possible connection is still the focus of intense scientific study.
How Hot Is the Planet Getting?
While some of the detailed mechanisms are still being worked out, there’s no doubt humans have been tilting the climatic scales toward more intense and frequent extreme weather. In addition to hotter and longer-lasting heat waves, that includes drier droughts (with both hot and dry conditions contributing to wildfire disasters), as well as heavier deluges.
In 2023, our hand seemed to push even more heavily on the scales. On July 6, for example, Earth’s average surface temperature soared to an unofficial record high. It could well have been the warmest day in 120,000 years. Research has shown that heat waves in Southern Europe, North America, and China were made 1.8 F to 4.5 F hotter by climate change. Moreover, the maximum heat experienced in some of these regions would have been all but impossible without our influence.
With broiling heat still gripping large parts of the planet, scientists knew well before the end of July that the month would be the warmest on record. This prompted U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres to say, “The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived.”