Destinations knownTyphoon Mangkhut, ‘global weirding’ and how tourism contributes to climate change

As Typhoon Mangkhut was doing its best to make life miserable in the Philippines and on China’s south coast, felling trees, shattering windows and laying waste to low-lying areas in its destructive wake, on the other side of the world, Hurricane Florence slammed into the United States’ eastern seaboard, dumping record rainfall and cutting power to hundreds of thousands of households.

So far, so standard. After all, the tropical cyclones of the Atlantic hurricane season and the Pacific typhoon season always overlap, right? Wrong. While the seasons do run simultaneously, it is most unusual for the two areas to be active at the same time. Since 1970, such an anomaly has arisen just twice before, in 1998 and 2016, atmospheric research scientist Philip Klotzbach told NBC News on September 10, making Florence and Mangkhut’s dual attacks a symptom of “global weirding”.

But what is global weirding, and what does it mean for holidaymakers across Asia?

New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman first tried to embed the expression into the zeitgeist in 2010, when he wrote: “sweet-sounding ‘global warming’ doesn’t really capture what’s likely to happen. I prefer the term ‘global weirding’, coined by Hunter Lovins, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, because the rise in average global temperature is going to lead to all sorts of crazy things – from hotter heat spells and droughts in some places, to colder cold spells and more violent storms, more intense flooding, forest fires and species loss in other places.”