March 21, 2025, by Brigitte Nerlich
Compound weather: Some linguistic musings
You might have heard of a ‘compound fracture’ or of ‘compound interest’ or even, if you are a linguist, of a ‘compound noun’ (nouns consisting of more than one noun). But have you come across ‘compound weather’? I recently came across this expression when looking at some extreme weather disasters which were compounded by compound weather.
On 9 January The Guardian proclaimed that “The Los Angeles wildfires are climate disasters compounded”. A scientific article had the title “Compounding effects of climate change and WUI [wild urban interface] expansion quadruple the likelihood of extreme-impact wildfires in California” and the Japan Times published an article on another disaster saying: “The South Carolina disaster is the latest high-profile example of compound weather, or two or more concurrent events that collectively yield a result worse than if each had occurred on its own. It’s a global phenomenon — and its prevalence in a warming world portends the risks ahead.”
In the past, Nelya Koteyko and I mused about ‘carbon compounds’, a neologism we coined to refer to lexical compounds around carbon, such as ‘carbon footprint’, ‘carbon offset’, ‘carbon indulgence’ or even ‘carbon indulgence pixie dust’. These compounds have faded away a bit but are still being discussed by linguists and people interested in environmental communication.
An article published just at the time when I was starting to be curious about ‘compound weather’ investigated the role of neologisms in the climate change debate and asked whether new words help to speed up social change. The answer was yes and no.
In the following I’ll first say a few things about neologisms or new words and then home in on the new word or new phrase ‘compound weather’ and the ways in which it is being explained through analogies and metaphors.
Neologisms
A neologism is just a posh word for ‘new word’ or ‘new expression’. It’s indeed itself a neologism. It was invented in the latter half of the 18th century, when English speakers borrowed the French term néologisme. The word’s roots are quite old, ultimately tracing back to ancient Greek neos, meaning “new,” and logos, meaning “word.”
Why are neologisms important? First, because to name something is to be and to become aware of something and make others aware of something. Second, because neologisms create new concepts and communicate them efficiently. Compounds and metaphors do this job well, separately and together. Think about compounds like ‘headache pill’ (a pill you swallow to treat a headache) or ‘video pill’ (a camera that resembles a vitamin pill that broadcasts images from the stomach and intestines of a person when swallowed).
In the context of climate change, think about ‘greenhouse effect’ and ‘greenwashing’, for example, both new words encapsulating new phenomena and telling us about them without wasting too many words.
Compound weather
And so, we come to compound weather. We all know about bad weather, severe weather, unprecedented weather, weird weather and, more recently. lots of ‘extreme weather’ and extreme weather events like floods, droughts, heatwaves, wildfires and so on.
What a about ‘compound weather’? It’s sort of one step beyond extreme weather. What it refers to is a combination of changes in weather patterns and climate patterns that compound the impacts of both.
More scientifically: “Compound weather events are combinations of multiple weather and climate drivers or hazards that, when interacting, lead to potentially large and amplified societal or environmental impacts, such as a heatwave followed by heavy rainfall causing flooding.” In short: “A compound event is when bad weather and climate events combine together”.
Examples are heatwaves followed and/or combined with heavy rainfall; droughts followed by and/or combined with wildfires; wildfires followed by and/or combined with floods; heatwaves followed by and/or combined with air pollution; sea-level rise and storm surges, etc. and all of them amplifying each other in complex ways.
The recent wildfires in Southern California are an example of compound weather. They were fuelled by a combination of climate change-driven factors, including drought, strong Santa Ana winds, and the wildland-urban interface, leading to a significant increase in the risk and intensity of wildfires. (I have written two posts about these fires here and here.)
Related to the neologismm ‘compound weather’ are other emerging new phrases like ‘compound flooding’ ‘compound risk’, ‘compound weather extremes’ and so on, all trying to deal with new climate realities.
Metaphors and analogies
Neologisms are good at packing a lot of information into a few choice words. But to unpack that information you need a bit of knowledge and to get that knowledge you might need some analogies or metaphors.
A rash
When I was trying to find out what compound weather was, I stumbled across a post trying to explain the phenomenon and I can’t resist quoting their explanation based on a nice analogy:
“A compound event is like going to the doctor with a rash. A rash could be a simple problem. Maybe you changed your laundry powder and your skin had a bad reaction. That would be a simple problem, with a simple solution. Change your laundry powder! A compound event in weather and climate is like going to the doctor with a rash, but the doctor finds out the rash is a mix of your diet, your medication and an allergy at the same time! All these different problems are giving you a painful mega-rash! The doctor has to investigate each problem causing your mega-rash. Compound events in weather and climate are similar.” In what way?
“A flood might be worse because you had really bad rain a few months ago. The soil could still be wet, causing floods, because the soil can’t take more rain. Bushfires could be worse because you’ve had a heatwave and everything is too dry. A thunderstorm then comes and lightning sparks fires. The winds from the storm make the fire worse too.” Etc.
In both cases, the mega-rash and the mega-fire or mega-flood or mega-drought, you need lots of different experts to explain what’s going on and tell you how to deal with things. You need scientific collaboration and coordination, as well as coordination between scientists, policy makers and people on the ground.
All this will become much more difficult in the future, as, in the United States at least, scientific institutions collapse, funding disappears and bringing experts together to talk about climate-related issues becomes dangerous.
Loading the dice
Another way to explain ‘compound weather, apart from using the rash analogy, is using an older metaphor that has been in circulation for a while and adapting it to the new phenomenon.
From an interview with Andrew Revkin we learn that “In the hot summer of 1988, several times after NASA scientist Jim Hansen delivered landmark Senate testimony asserting human-caused global warming was under way, the pioneering researcher wielded a home-made set of ‘loaded’ cardboard dice to explain the shift in odds of hot days to lawmakers and the press.” And: “In 2008, Jim Hansen said his climate dice would need a fifth red side (out of six) by 2023.” It’s certainly needed now.
In June 2024, Katharine Hayhoe told readers on Facebook that “Climate change is ‘loading the weather dice against us,’ I said on this week’s Zero podcast. ‘We all have a pair of weather dice and we have a chance of rolling a double six — a heat wave, a storm, a flood, a wildfire or more — at any given time. As the climate changes, as the ocean and the atmosphere are heating up, it’s supercharging our climate system, essentially adding more sixes and even nowadays some sevens and even an eight to our dice events.’”
Conclusion
Now, in 2025 compound weather can strike almost anywhere in the world and can affect anybody who lives on this planet, rich or poor. Does it help to have a new word for this new phenomenon? The fact that the neologism is beginning to be used is certainly a signal that a new awareness is emerging of the complex interactions between climate and weather. And one might hope that this then influences public discourse and policy responses.
On a different level, I hope that my little exploration of this new expression might also contribute to a better understanding of how language evolves to help us understand our changing climate. If you want to explore this type of language change prompted by climate change a bit further, here is an older post about some other neologisms…
Image: Wikimedia Commons, Justin Matthews
No comments yet, fill out a comment to be the first
Leave a Reply