Last year, I posted this question. Today, the New York Times announced that "Around the world, extreme has become the new commonplace." http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/11/science/earth/extreme-weather-grows-in-frequency-and-intensity-around-world.html This is in response to record cold in Europe and north Asia, record heat in Australia and Brazil, and unusual storms in the Middle East and Pakistan. This year has been marked by an outbreak of extreme weather so global in scale and so continuous in time that it cannot be regarded as an unlikely concatenation of unlikely events. These events are being driven by profound, large-scale changes in the oceans and atmosphere, not by isolated chaotic responses to small changes. This is the way of the warmer world.
