Yes. The forecasts are brilliant now.
The expert on Radio 4 was less clear about it. Her statement was that, although there is now good evidence for increased rainfall, the evidence for an increase in severe weather is not yet established over a long enough period for it to be regarded as proven. I’m happy to go along with the majority view, that there seems to be more stormy weather, while accepting that the reason for it may not yet be fully established, even though most of us already know the most likely answer.
Yes, that's a real problem. During most of the 1990s, those of us who worked on the Antarctic Peninsula were all quite convinced that the Peninsula was warming. But because the records didn't rise to where we could say that it was statistically significant, we couldn't assert it. The level of significance passed the relevant statistical tests in the late 90s/early 2000s (I forget exactly); but there was plenty of evidence of change before then, e.g.
Perhaps it depends on which expert you heard. There are many good scientist who get interviewed on the BBC and elsewhere. In the same way that I would regard BAS as the top experts for events in the Antarctic, the Met Office and ECMWF are in the forefront on weather and climate change. They can now do attribution studies, see Attributing extreme weather to climate change. I cannot say just how they do these but it clearly involve running models father than any statistical technique. I heard one interviewee mention this in the context of Isha.
What is less clear is where that energy will go, and who gets all the extra weather. It is almost certainly true that some features of our weather have changed, and also that this is part of the climate change scenario. What can’t be proved is that individual events have any connection at all, and what saddens me is that the repetitions of such assertions by unthinking journalists may actually make the public less receptive to the important matter of climate change when they are shown to be wrong or inaccurate.
The problem with that argument is that we have always had severe storms or extreme weather. That is what the deniers of MMGW say with some justification. The Daniel Defoe storm of 1704 is an example. What we are seeing is that there are more storms that are severe, more Cat 4/5 hurricanes as well as a suggestion that we might need a Cat 6.
As Frank says, it's about the increasing frequency of severe storms, and you can't link an individual storm or even an individual bad winter or hot summer to MMGW. The statistics for such things are tricky; a trend that looks good to casual inspection can be very difficult to establish as being statistically significant without a long series of observations because of the intrinsic variability in the weather. We passed the point where such series were available around 2000 in the Antarctic, but it needed 50 years of observations, despite the trend being obvious to most of us who worked on the continent! The Antarctic Peninsula happens also to be one of the places where the warming trend is amplified by its climatology. ; it is harder to establish in more temperate places where most observations are available. But the trend is now very firmly established; we passed the point where the statistics could be challenged in around 2000.