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Global warming is a technically accurate phrase to describe what we're dealing with, but I prefer 'climate change' because it captures the other, perhaps more i

Global warming is a technically accurate phrase to describe what we're dealing with, but I prefer 'climate change' because it captures the other, perhaps more important impacts beyond increasing average temperature. Warmth is energy, and injecting energy into a large, chaotic system, like our planet's climate, certainly causes the average temperature to increase, but it also causes the system to become more chaotic. More concretely, climate change also means more frequent hot spells, more frequent cold spells, more frequent flooding events, more frequent droughts, more frequent storms, etc. Along with certain average temperature ranges, crops need many months of stable weather in order to usefully produce. Even though, on average, the temperatures in more areas will move into the range needed by various crops, the average amount of necessary weather stability will also decrease, in the potential new growing areas as well as the old. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/global_weirding https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/global_weirding

castis 6y ago
I can corroborate this, living in Virginia for the last 20 years. We used to get a lot of snow when I was younger, and now we get a lot more days where the heat/humidity is almost unbearable, and a lot more storms that result in less snow, and more ice. Charlotte county recently had about 80% of their electrical infrastructure taken down by an ice storm. Not fun. Ive attempted to explain the weather as a pendulum, the highs get higher and the lows get lower as the system attempts to find equilibrium while having energy added from outside an otherwise closed system.
- Diederich 6y ago
  Yup, that sort of thing is happening all over the planet. Things get really confusing when, one winter in the future, your location ends up getting a record high snowfall total. On average, you're getting less, but the extremes on both sides also get more extreme. The winter I described very well might be sandwiched between winters where you received no frozen precipitation at all.

castis 6y ago

I can corroborate this, living in Virginia for the last 20 years. We used to get a lot of snow when I was younger, and now we get a lot more days where the heat/humidity is almost unbearable, and a lot more storms that result in less snow, and more ice. Charlotte county recently had about 80% of their electrical infrastructure taken down by an ice storm. Not fun. Ive attempted to explain the weather as a pendulum, the highs get higher and the lows get lower as the system attempts to find equilibrium while having energy added from outside an otherwise closed system.

Diederich 6y ago
Yup, that sort of thing is happening all over the planet. Things get really confusing when, one winter in the future, your location ends up getting a record high snowfall total. On average, you're getting less, but the extremes on both sides also get more extreme. The winter I described very well might be sandwiched between winters where you received no frozen precipitation at all.