Judith Curry has reviewed the major climate stories of 2012. She notes

The theme of these seems to be dangerous impacts of climate change, bypassing of course the issue of attribution of these events.  Maybe the big story is that a critical mass of bad weather events happened in the U.S., so we are experiencing in the U.S. another round of what we experienced post Katrina in terms of elevating concern about global warming.

The leaked draft AR5 SPM Page 3 Lines 46-47

Changes in many extreme weather and climate events have been observed, but the level of confidence in these changes varies widely depending on type of extreme and regions considered.

The leaked draft AR5 SPM Page 4 Lines 10-11

There is low confidence in observed large-scale trends in drought, due to lack of direct observations, dependencies of inferred trends on the index choice, and geographical inconsistencies in the trends

The leaked draft AR5 SPM Page 4 Lines 14-16

Tropical cyclone data provides low confidence that any reported long-term changes are robust, after accounting for past changes in observing capabilities. This is a revision from previous IPCC Assessments Reports…

Are the commentators going to come into line with the consensus of scientific opinion, or will it be the other way round? Maybe, like in the disaster movies, they will continue to insist to believe that the world only consists of USA.

For those who still think that extreme weather is still increasing, check out the Wattupwiththat “Extreme Weather” page. In particular take a look at Ryan Maue’s accumulated cyclone energy graph.