Global Weirding

It was Thomas Friedman, in his book Hot, Flat, and Crowded, who introduced me to the notion of Global Wierding. He credits Hunter Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute as inventing the term. We are not going to see gradual warming. We are going to see weird weather, and often dangerous weather, popping up all over the place.

"The rise in global average temperature (global warming)," writes Friedman, "is actually going to trigger all sorts of unusual weather events – from hotter heat spells and droughts in some places to heavier snows in others, to more violent storms, more intense flooding, downpours, forest fires, and species loss in still others. The weather," in other words, "is going to get weird. It already has."

Interesting story in today's Washington Post on how this is playing out this winter in the Northern Hemisphere. Opinion polls show waning support in the USA for the notion of global warming as being related to human population growth and activities. So, like deficit spending, we push the problem downstream, take our chances, and risk the consequences.