EARTH's "climate change" is a pair of nouns that is deceptively euphemistic.
The connotation, however, is calamitous, meaning that the planet underwent and still undergoes adverse transformations in weather patterns.
It spurs melting ice caps, hot to arid elements, chilly to cold snaps and, in its rare extremity, has led to snow in a sweltering Arab desert.
Therefore, an accurate description of climate change is another pair of nouns: "climate crisis".
This more urgent definition reflects Earth's violent metamorphosis in the past 40 years.
The climate crisis has manifested into killer symptoms — air pollution, disease, extreme weather, population displacement, mental health degradation, increased hunger and poor nutrition, especially in regions where food is insufficiently grown or accessible.
Hollywood hasn't ignored this narrative, producing scary but over-the-top critiques of the climate crisis, in 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow.
The two movies conjure a super doomsday scenario: deadly earthquakes crushing California, coastal cities sliding into rising seas, volcanoes spitting lethal lava bombs, tsunamis engulfing the Himalayas, and cold snaps freezing humans.
You get the picture. Is this horrifying spectre of the end of life as we know it plausible? Perhaps not as fertile as Hollywood's fantasy, but it's bad enough.
The grim aspects of a Malaysian climate crisis stemming from the El Nino and La Nina phenomena has been devastating.
It's vaguely understood, but people are now grasping with soaring temperatures, frequent heatwaves, overdrawn droughts (Perlis' parched Chuping), irregular floods, notwithstanding the monsoon and surging sea levels eroding away Kelantan's coastal villages.
The Meteorological Department reported this week that several states experienced thunderstorms, heavy rain and strong winds — a brief respite against an unbearable heatwave lasting 30 minutes.
A spectacular 30 minutes of lightning and strong winds toppled trees and blew off roofs, flooding inner cities and highways.
It's comforting that Malaysia is not perched on the Ring of Fire, thus shielding the country from cyclones, earthquakes and tornadoes.
However, the northern littoral states are still susceptible to the odd tsunami.
Earth's upheaval is a direct consequence to humanity's penchant for brazen industrialisation, ravaging rainforests and suppressing vital oxygen buffering the thinning ozone layer.
Wealthy nations dawdled in heeding scientists' warnings of breaches in climate crisis' tipping points.
Tragically, it may be too late: mountainous ice sheets and glaciers have either collapsed or melted away, ocean circulation patterns and ecosystems are distorted and thawing permafrost has released methane, a greenhouse gas perilous to humans.
Environmental campaigners, who warn of planetary bad omens if climate nihilism persists, have it wrong: it's the other way around.
Historically, Earth has repeatedly survived cataclysmic destruction, overcoming extinction-level events in its 4.5 billion-year existence.
Given time, Earth has the capacity to repair itself.
The ones facing extermination are humans, still in denial over the damage done.
It is paradoxical, this illogical push to make ourselves extinct.