Weather Whiplash

This morning I bundled up and shoveled several inches of snow off our driveway. Last Monday we didn't even wear jackets for an after school trip to the playground. In the intervening week, we've had temperatures in the single digits and wind chills well below zero. This pattern of wild swings in the weather is no longer unusual. The cupboard near our back door that serves as a tiny coat closet is stuffed to overflowing with three or four jackets per person because we seem to need a different set of layers every day.

This weather whiplash is the more obvious face of climate change. It is hard to notice the gradual, longer term changes of global warming. Based on your recollection, could you say whether winter where you live was warmer or cooler than last year, on average? I doubt it, because our brains just don't work in averages like that.

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But heat trapped by greenhouse gases is warming the Earth more quickly than planetary systems that normally operate on scales of millennia can keep up. When you get a fever, you don't always feel hot. Your sensations swing from hot and parched to chills that drive you to snuggle under the blankets because your body's systems are disrupted. On a global scale, system disruptions mean unseasonable cold snaps interspersed with record high temperatures.

It's hard enough for us humans to keep up, with shelter, variable clothing choices, and 7-day forecasts. Imagine what it's like for migrating birds and insects trying to determine when they should move from one seasonal home to another. Or the day lilies that sprouted in my garden in early February.

The biggest problem with climate change is not the increase of a few degrees in the global average temperature. The problem is that it is happening at a pace far faster than the Earth's systems, geophysical, biological, and social, can handle. The chaos wrought by disrupted systems now means not knowing when you can put away your winter coat. What will it mean in another five, ten, or twenty years?

What signs of global weirding have you noticed in your neighborhood?