Everywhere you look, its all doom and gloom. Floods, droughts, heat waves, blizzards, violent storms, broken records.

It would be tempting to just say “climate change” is responsible, and I’m sure it plays a role. After all, as more energy gets pumped into the atmosphere, it must manifest itself as more weather activity. But occasional violent and extreme weather is nothing new in recorded history, and as in all stochastic phenomena, there will be peaks and valleys, and outliers.

Much of it may be a selection effect, as well. We report more completely and quickly on the weather, and the news media are hungry for disasters to report. The country is more populated too, and settlement more dispersed, remote areas where a wild fire might have been barely noticed a decade ago are now covered with million dollar homes ready to be burned down live, on camera.

And is this just a North American phenomenon, the few percent of the earth’s surface for which data has been collected systematically for a very long time? What is the weather like in other parts of the world? Again, I’m not talking climate here, I said weather. The two may be related, but they’re not the same. They operate at different spatial and temporal resolutions, even if there is some overlap between the two.

I have avoided remarking about these weather extremes when discussing climate change issues because I recognize it is very difficult to untangle the two. I prefer, instead, to look for barometer phenomena, “canary in the coal mine” indicators like summer arctic ice extent minima. These tend to be more stable, homogeneous datasets for which long and uninterrupted data collection with consistent methodologies is available. But surely the weather services maintain records and analysts dedicated to studying weather trends as they may be related to climate issues. Anybody familiar with any of this?

No politics or conspiracies, please.