Global Weirding

Tom Friedman is a strange man, but he has a gift from clever phrases that sometimes makes his writing very memorable. Here he explains in very few words what the climate models predict for a world with increasing greenhouse gases:

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.

The fact that it has snowed like crazy in Washington — while it has rained at the Winter Olympics in Canada, while Australia is having a record 13-year drought — is right in line with what every major study on climate change predicts: The weather will get weird; some areas will get more precipitation than ever; others will become drier than ever.

Exactly. I note, though, that he makes the same irritating equation of what the models predict with what "actually happens." We don't know what will "actually happen" to the weather over the next century. But we do have models, and since what they predict is pretty much in line with what we have seen over the past 20 years, it might be a good idea to take them seriously.