A full-page analysis of climate change issues in today’s Financial Times, ‘Lingering Clouds’, caught my eye. ‘Consensus on dangers,’ says the sub-title, ‘but scientists face a hard task in accounting for margins of error.’ In July I wrote several posts about an extreme weather event that occurred in Belgium and the destruction it caused in the Famennes town of Ciney in particular. Whilst we were on holiday in northern Italy, there were headlines about a ‘mini-hurricane’ that occurred in Como, causing extensive flooding and quite a lot of damage. On our way back up to Belgium on Saturday we stopped for petrol in a Lorraine petrol station and the following headline in the day’s edition of Le Républicain Lorrain leapt out at me: ‘Une tornade balaie le sud de la Moselle.’ An inside article provided an account of the tornado’s path and a series of graphic images showing the damage it had caused. The tornado struck at around midnight and must have been very scary. Just on the basis of these three events – I won’t mention the unseasonal August weather throughout much of Europe nor the Russian and Finnish heat waves nor the floods in Pakistan in China – it seems that something is happening in good old Europe. There are several possibilities. Maybe we use the vocabulary of ‘tornados’ and ‘hurricanes’ more loosely; maybe, just maybe, events like this were always occurring but previously would have been described as ‘violent’ or ‘freak’ storms. Maybe there is a trend to report such events more; maybe, just maybe, they were previously occurring, but not even regional newspapers bothered to report them. But for my money there has been a steady increase in such events, whatever we wish to call them. Since such an increase in extreme weather events was one of the phenomena that climate scientists predicted would occur as a consequence of climate change, maybe we ought to listen more closely to the rest of what they have to say.