Climate "Weirding"

 As a native midwestern, I cannot help but notice the changes. I have always thought of myself as someone who is in tune with nature, connected to it. I have noticed the changes for several years now, hotter falls, shorter winters, 60 degrees in December, heavy storms that dump snow, rain, hail, tornados sporadically, heat waves, cold snaps, it runs the gambit. One term I heard a number of years ago that rang true with me is "climate weirding". It seems to be a more viscerally descriptive way of communicating how the climate has changed. To me, change implies moving from point A to point B, but that's not how climate weirding really works. There's no finite point in which this thing will go, well of course there are projects and models, but there are practically limitless ways this story could go, it's up to us to legislate it into fruition. 

"Hurricane Sandy was not caused by human-made climate change, but the damage it did to the Jersey Shore was exacerbated by sea-level rise, caused in part by climate change." From the National Geographic March 2015 story, "Why Do Many Reasonable People Doubt Science?" Photograph by Richard Barnes, Nata Geo Image Collection [Link] 

I think that others are starting to see it too, but still not enough. A 2020 study done by Resources for the Future indicated that "more people are noticing more changes in global weather and temperature than in local weather". Good news right? Wrong. When that question was asked in 2006, 70% of respondents remarked that they noticed more changes in global weather and temperatures than in local weather. In 2020, 63% remarked they noticed the change. That's a 7% decrease in just under two decades, the same two decades that sea levels have risen 3 inches, and ice sheets have lost 4.9 trillion tons of ice [Link]. 

The most interesting piece of knowledge that I will take away from this course was the fact about the Tension Zone. Not a particularly "sexy" topic, but in all of my education I had yet to know the term that described the thing I've always wondered about.