Here's a climate scientist seeking to bring a bit of sanity to the current outbreak of hysteria over extreme weather. While Lord Deben rather hilariously reckons he can see global warming in the weather patterns for January, John Wallace, a climatologist at the University of Washington has a rather more sensible take on it:
Like many of my colleagues in the climate dynamics community, I am not convinced that this winter’s extreme cold lies outside the range of internally generated variability of the climate system or that it was exacerbated by the recent reduction of summer Arctic sea ice coverage. The evidence linking Arctic amplification to the behavior of the wintertime polar vortex is not strong and it is not well supported by independent, peer-reviewed studies.