The Weather Is Not Weird

For the last several years, climate change alarmists have focused on the argument that a warmer planet will see more extreme weather events. This claim serves two purposes:

1. Any abnormal weather event (including blizzards and cold spells) can be blamed on global warming.
2. Such anecdotal events of extreme weather (a blizzard here, a hurricane there) can be accumulated and pointed to as a body of evidence demonstrating the collective impact of climate change.

There's one problem, though. It's not too difficult to count the number of extreme weather events, and, a research project has done just that:

As it happens, the project's initial findings, published last month, show no evidence of an intensifying weather trend. "In the climate models, the extremes get more extreme as we move into a doubled CO2 world in 100 years," atmospheric scientist Gilbert Compo, one of the researchers on the project, tells me from his office at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "So we were surprised that none of the three major indices of climate variability that we used show a trend of increased circulation going back to 1871."

In other words, researchers have yet to find evidence of more-extreme weather patterns over the period, contrary to what the models predict. "There's no data-driven answer yet to the question of how human activity has affected extreme weather," adds Roger Pielke Jr., another University of Colorado climate researcher. 

There is nothing weird about the weather, only the alarmists' reaction to it.