It is...irresponsible to ignore the preponderance of evidence on floods, extreme precipitation events (and if it is winter, these are snow storms), wildfires, etc. These were anticipated to occur as the climate changes. They have occurred around the world (U.S., Russia, Indonesia, Japan, Argentina, etc..), and they are getting worse and more frequent[2].
The quote is from famous environmental economist Gary Yohe, writing at Climate Feedback, a site where climate scientists rate media articles on their scientific content. Yohe was writing about a Bjorn Lomborg piece.
Yohe's citation is to the detection and attribution chapter of AR5, which is, on the face of it, a bizarre thing given that there are whole chapters in the IPCC about observations of the climate. Intrigued, I looked at the chapter cited.
Here is what it said about floods:
River floods, defined as impacts caused by the overtopping of river banks and levées, have shown statistically significant increasing and decreasing trends in some regions. The role of climate change in these changes is uncertain, as they may reflect decadal climate variability and be affected by other confounding factors such as human alteration of river channels and land use.
And here's what it said about heavy rainfall.
In regions with detected increases in heavy rainfall events (North America, Europe), both increases and decreases in floods have been found (medium confidence in detection; Petrow and Merz, 2009; Villarini et al., 2009). In the UK, flood risk has increased due to anthropogenic forcing for events comparable to the 2000 floods (Kay et al., 2011; Pall et al., 2011; see also Section 18.4.3).
A "preponderance of evidence" eh? What is about climate scientists that makes them think that nobody is ever going to check their citations?
Bishop Hill