Global Weirding

Coined by environmentalist Hunter Lovins in the early 2000s, “global weirding” was popularized in a New York Times column in 2010. Say “global weirding,” not “warming,” Tom Friedman advises his readers—“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” (Friedman 2010). Since then, the concept has retained some momentum in journalistic pieces on climate change and has frequently been cited in environmental humanities research on climate change representation.

More surprisingly, perhaps, “Global Weirding is Here” was the name of a project and interactive digital model by the Norwegian Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research (CICERO) that visualized the data and predictions published in the 2014 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report. It is also the title of a Canadian climate scientist’s YouTube channel: “Global Weirding with Katharine Hayhoe,” in which Hayhoe talks about weather patterns and climate predictions in accessible, informative video clips. The weather gets weird, Friedman writes. But why would weird do better as a catch-all descriptor for this new status quo of hotter hots and wetter wets? What are the benefits of focusing on the weirding rather than the warming of the planet?

In the introduction to a collection of literary essays centered on global weirding, Gerry Canavan and Andrew Hageman suggest that the concept captures how “we are now living in postnormal times: we can no longer depend on the climatological patterns that up till now have more or less reliably structured our behaviors, including our architectural, agricultural, and resource-extractive practices, as well as the life patterns of the plants and animals with which our coexistent surviving and thriving depends” (Canavan and Hageman 2016, 8). As floods, forest fires, and heatwaves become more frequent and pose greater threats to human and nonhuman life across the planet—and especially as they increasingly affect the privileged and rich—a sense of urgency saturates one side of the climate change discourse, while the other pushes for continuing with business as usual. The average human is usually torn between a fear of the former and a desire for the latter. Global weirding evokes this cognitive dissonance of abstract, climate change-driven crises intruding into the (relative) safety of everyday life. And of course, this weirding has not escaped expressions in contemporary art.

For example, in China Miéville’s short story “Polynia,” the sudden emergence of threatened natural structures—notably levitating icebergs circling London, rainforest undergrowth in Japanese factories, and coral reefs across Brussels skyscrapers—are on-the-nose inversions of anthropogenic environmental disasters. But while these playful inversions sound innocuous and strangely beautiful, there is a double edge to the satirical message of the story. “I love the London bergs,” the narrator remarks, 15 years after the structures first appeared.“They still circle, and they don’t get in the way of business” (Miéville 2015, 22).The characters treat the structures as marvelous tourist attractions that they can covet and own, ignoring their symbolic value as Anthropocene artifacts. Thus the narrator has “been through the Great Brussels Reef plenty of times,” and has “a little bottle-opener of the Belgian flag cut out from a bit of its coral” (Miéville 2015, 22). This ethically vacuous response to the structures is driven by a consumer mindset and is an invitation for Miéville’s readers to reflect on how, globally, a similar treatment of natural structures and ecosystems is currently leading to their irreversible disappearance. 

Miéville’s story is part of a post-1990 literary movement often referred to as ‘the New Weird.’ The New Weird has roots in early-twentieth-century pulp fiction and the ‘Old Weird,’ in which themes like cosmic dread and misanthropy often contained overtones of xenophobia and racism (in the case of H. P. Lovecraft in particular). Conversely, the New Weird tends to be more explicitly political, more personal, in its engagement with the nonhuman unknown. As a literary mode, therefore, it lends itself well to ecocritical readings, and the “eco-weird” has recently been established as a distinct literary category (Onishi and Bell 2025). As with climate fiction more broadly, the eco-weird is still a very Anglophone phenomenon, with comparatively few Germanic and Scandinavian examples. 

However, global weirding is not constrained by genre or medium. Rather, its speculative tendrils meander through stories in which the vast scale of the planet collides with the intimate scale of the human body. In Maja Lunde’s novel Blå (2017), this collision reverberates across decades as a father and daughter, climate refugees in a drought-ridden Southern Europe in 2041, find an abandoned boat sailed there by a Norwegian climate activist in 2017. The boat is loaded with tanks of glacier water stolen from a corporation that aimed to sell it as exclusive ice cubes. Lunde, like Miéville, targets extractive politics and asks her readers what urgency means to them. The global weirding of entangled extraction also drives the alter ego of Belgian performance/ visual artist Gosie Vervloessem: her “Sick Detective” investigates how “destructive actions” against nature “entangle us in dense relationships with our environment” across wide-ranging projects and installations that combine art, research, and activism (Vervloessem 2020-2021).

Similarly, TV series like Fortitude (2015-2018), Dark (2017-2020), and Katla (2021) visualize the world’s weirding by violently meshing anthropogenic activity and (super)natural landscapes. The series recount strange and horrific events and their effects on fictional communities in Norway, Germany, and Iceland, respectively. Fortitude’s thawing permafrost unleashes a prehistoric, zombifying wasp that takes over the brains of the Arctic islanders and makes them kill each other so that the wasp can lay eggs in their flesh, while Katla’s volcano—resting upon an ancient meteorite in the melting glacier—triggers the return of the dead as “changelings” covered in ash. Both Fortitude and Katla use body horror as a speculative way of representing the visceral reality of global weirding. They question the amount of control humans have over nonhuman systems that transcend the Anthropocene epoch. Dark more elusively targets the fallout of human hubris as the residents of Winden are trapped in an apocalyptic time warp conspiracy ostensibly originating from the local nuclear plant. These series all imply that global weirding is indeed multifaceted and urgent, but their dark outlook—typical also of the weird and of dystopian climate fiction—prompts introspective shock and voyeuristic acknowledgment rather than future-oriented action.