Well, that didn't take long to run the "climate is severe weather" scare story

I’m surprised we don’t see more of this. Weather people have an incentive to play up the significance of weather events. In a world where big scary things might happen with the weather, the TV weather guy becomes more important. Weather presenters have as much incentive as climate scientists to overhype the dangers of climate change. I’m actually astonished that so few have succumbed to the temptation and joined the dark side.

Looking at the ENSO meter, we’ve not been in neutral territory for very long, and the system response has lots of momentum to sort out. No surprise that we’re seeing some bad storms this year. We’ll see if we give ’74 a run for its money but it seems unlikely at this point.

I’ll bet Dorothy and Toto didn’t know they were victims of AGW.

There is nothing more usual than unusual weather – except the usual kind.

“This global warming is really kind of a misnomer,” Steele said. “It’s global climate change. So the colds are colder and warms are warmer and severe is more severe.”
So the average won’t change then.

I actually am a believer in climate change. After all, if one looks at the proxy record for the last 5 million years, the climate was approximately stable until some 3 million years ago, then the mean temperature started to decline, then the planet entered a real ice age perhaps 2 million years ago or a bit more, then it began to exhibit bistability around 1 million years ago, and for the last 400-500 thousand years the bistability has been pronounced with a warm phase almost as warm as the standard stable temperature was 3 million years ago, although distinctly cooler than it was 5 million years ago.
In that last 500,000 year period, the Earth has spent 80% of the time in cold/ice phase with substantial glaciation, around 10% of the time in warm/interglacial phase, 10% of the time in multi-thousand-year transitions or partial warmings or coolings. In the current interglacial (the Holocene) temperatures have fluctuated by as much as 2K between the Holocene Optimum (when it was 0.5-1 K warmer than it is now) and the LIA minimum about 1-1.5K cooler — not including the Younger Dryas excursion which was a thousand year hiatus of cooling, drought, and climate catastrophe that interrupted the initial warming of the Holocene. Over the last 1000 years alone temperatures have fluctuated by well over 1K, although perhaps a bit less than 2K max to min. Sounds like climate change to me.
I’m a moderate believer in anthropogenic climate change. Or rather I’m a firm believer that some moderate fraction of the temperature variations observed and climate pattern variations observed is anthropogenic. After all, there is substantial evidence and a sound physical argument that this is the case. The evidence is difficult to quantify, though, because we still lack a comprehensive theory that can explain the baseline temperature and its substantial natural variability. Lacking such a theory, attempts to assign “anthropogenic blame” for “climate change” are, as you note, so much bullshit.
However, I do suspect that we are preparing to enter a period where Earth’s temperatures do become more polarized, with the poles colder and the equator warmer not as the Earth warms, but as it cools. Since severe weather is indeed associated with with “warmth” per se but with temperature deltas, this may eventually produce a measurable change in frequency of severe events, although again it will be difficult to detect (to say the least) given our lack of a comprehensive baseline — at most 50 odd years of weather satellites, more like 30 or 40 of satellites teamed with weather radar and accurate recording and reporting — in some parts of the land surface of the Earth and a tiny fraction of the water surface (in the case of radar).
That doesn’t excuse alarmism, or citing climate change as if it is all anthropogenic. As noted, it will be difficult to impossible to tell if the climate is changing at all, let alone what the proximate causes of that change are, lacking a comprehensive theory and a long baseline of modern-era measurements. Perhaps in 30-50 years (giving us close to a century of decent instrumental observations). In the meantime, the weather is even more changeable than the climate, and its variations mean even less. We’ve had an extraordinarily warm spring in NC (after an unusually cold and snowy winter last year) just as we’ve had before and no doubt will have again. Extreme weather events happen literally every day, somewhere on the planet, making it easy for alarmists to find one to neurose over and blame on Civilization.
In the end, the Earth’s climate is what it is and will do what it does, mostly unforced by human hand. The short-term prediction is cooling, not warming, at least until the albedo goes back down.
rgb

Here’s what the CNN weather reporter person(!) REALLY meant to say:
“This global warming is really kind of a misnomer…”
“It’s global climate insanity! So the unprecedented is MORE unprecedented and catastrophes are MORE catastrophic and the alarmists are MORE alarming and … ”
/sarc