Global Weirding: Humans Have Drastically Altered the Climate to the Point of Bringing Chaos

According to scientists, we have drastically altered the climate to the point where we have brought about anarchy on Earth. Weather and hydrological extremes have intensified due to the combustion of fossil fuels, deforestation, and pollution, and this trend will only increase.

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Breaking Records After Records

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Nearly every year, weather records are broken all across the world. In the U.K. this year, China's Yangtze River is so dry from a drought that the government is planning to cloud-seed to make it rain; Pakistan is facing some of the worst floodings in its history and records its hottest summer on record this year.

Wildfires have plagued California and Oregon all summer, forcing large-scale evacuations and exacerbating air pollution.

Several significant reservoirs in the United States, such as Lake Mead and Lake Powell, are edging closer to the dead pool level, at which point their hydroelectric dams will no longer be able to produce energy, causing power shortages in the neighboring areas.

To avoid stressing the state's power grid, certain cities in California have been advised not to charge their electric vehicles.

Heavy rains and flooding in Mississippi have rendered reliable running water "indefinitely" unavailable to 180,000 inhabitants in Jackson, and hailstones that fell in Spain were so enormous that one struck and killed a one-year-old.

Also Read: Is the Worsening Climate Crisis Triggering Intense Extreme Weather Events?

Need Immediate Action

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Environment Campaigns Director at nonprofit organization PIRG Matthew Casale told Newsweek, "Climate change is here, and it's time to quit fooling."

The overwhelming scientific consensus is that human activity, primarily burning fossil fuels, is to blame for this hazardous rise in global temperatures. As a result, our globe is getting hotter, our forests are burning, and we are losing more lives and homes every year.

According to Auroop R. Ganguly, head of Northeastern University's Sustainability & Data Sciences Laboratory, this rise in extreme weather events is called "global weirding."

Worsening Impacts

He said that the impacts could be far-reaching across multiple sectors, including ecosystems and coastal processes, aspects of the water-energy-food nexus, infrastructures, and urban lifelines. "On the side of the hydrometeorological hazard, heat waves are getting (and are projected to get) even hotter, cold snaps persisting even if growing less frequent, heavy precipitation getting heavier, and so on."

The increase in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere and the rise in global temperatures observed over the past century cannot be explained by natural changes, according to the historical record, according to Casale. "Even more extreme global warming is unavoidable, and the consequences for all of us might be terrible," states the United Nations. "If the world emits greenhouse gases near the current rate, even."

The fact that so many systems are interconnected explains why they are all influenced to such a great extent. When one changes as a result of what we do to the world, they all change and interact with one another in unpredictable ways.

According to Ganguly, this unpredictability might be risky because affected systems might malfunction when the worst scenarios happen. If the consequences are less pronounced one year compared to another, people might become complacent.