The over-the-top predictions of catastrophic climate disaster from proponents of CAGW have become a public relations disaster for the establishment science community...the constant hyperbole about extreme climate change due to abrupt, accelerating and unequivocal global warming turns out to be without empirical, scientific merit, as the UK's recognized gold-standard global temperature dataset confirms....
The lack of major hurricanes making direct landfall on the continental U.S. over the last 8+ years is a classic example of extreme climate change not happening as predicted.
Now, add to that the complete disappearance of statistically significant global warming - for the UK's HadCRUT4 there has been no statistically significant warming since October 1996; and for the RSS global atmosphere dataset, it has been since November 1992 - and one then begins to wonder about the incompetence of elite science.
The absence of climate significant warming by itself pretty much confirms that extreme climate change is a non-issue, deserving little priority and resources.
But, there is another view of extreme climate change that can be examined to ascertain whether it has become a modern era problem or not. This can be accomplished by examining simple 10-year absolute change events for global temperatures, both positive and negative.
By identifying the largest 20 warming events and 20 largest cooling events since 1850, the most extreme 2% of temperature swings can be placed in chronological significance. (This identification is best done with the IPCC's gold-standard, the UK's HadCRUT4 monthly dataset, which stretches back to 1850.)
The charts above provide the identification of these extreme, outlier temperature swings. (The May 2014 HC4 dataset contains 1,973 monthly observations from which 1,853 moving 10-year absolute change calculations can be derived.)
As is evident from the empirical data, the vast majority of extreme temperature swings (both warming and cooling) occur prior to 1960. Also, the charts' purple linear trend lines indicate that the extremes are shrinking (getting smaller, if you prefer) over time.
Conclusion: Human CO2 emissions have not caused the predicted abrupt, accelerating and unequivocal global warming during the modern era, as all of the above scientific evidence attests. In addition, the lack of extreme climate change disasters and shrinking temperature swings, in relation to the past, actually indicate there may be an inverse relationship with growing CO2 emissions and atmospheric levels.
Now that would truly be mind-boggling, and help explain why "consensus" scientists are so befuddled and at a loss. Of course, stranger things have happened, such as the recent admission by consensus establishment science that they have been horribly wrong (for three decades, yikes!) about dietary cholesterol and saturated fat causing heart disease.
However, with all the above stated, this does not mean that climate change is not happening; that human activities have no influence on weather and climate; nor that global warming won't occur in the near future.
Note: UK's HadCRUT4 2014 satellite dataset used in Excel to calculate 10-year absolute (i.e. arithmetic difference) temperature changes and linear trends for above charts. Hey, don't know how to chart in Excel? It's easy to produce charts - you can do it too! Go here to learn how.