"Alarming" anecdotes and more from Scientific American: Big hailstones and lack of cowbells and low pressure and CO2 training the climate which trains the weather which throws the punches, oh my

Global Warming and the Science of Extreme Weather: Scientific American

the changed conditions bring an increased likelihood of more powerful thunderstorms with violent updrafts, like a July 23, 2010, tempest in Vivian, S.D., that produced hailstones that punched softball-size holes through roofs—and created a behemoth ball of ice measured at a U.S. record 8 inches (20 centimeters) in diameter even after it had partially melted. "I've never seen a storm like that before—and hope I'll never go through anything like it," says Les Scott , the Vivian farmer and rancher who found the hailstone .
...On October 26, 2010, the Minneapolis area even experienced record low pressure in what Paul Douglas, founder and CEO of WeatherNation in Minnesota, dubbed a "landicane"—a hurricanelike storm that swept across the country. "I thought the windows of my home would blow in," Douglas recalls. "I've chased tornados and flown into hurricanes but never experienced anything like this before." Yet it makes sense in the context of climate change, he adds. "Every day, every week, another piece of the puzzle falls into place," he says. "More extreme weather seems to have become the rule, not just in the U.S. but in Europe and Asia."
...The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Deke Arndt puts it more colorfully: "Weather throws the punches, but climate trains the boxer," he says. By charting the overall shift, then, it's possible to calculate the increased chances of extreme events due to global warming.

This idea was already in the air in 2003 when Stott traveled though the worst heat wave in recorded European history on a wedding anniversary trip to Italy and Switzerland. One of the striking consequences he noticed was that the Swiss mountains were missing their usual melodious tinkling of cowbells. "There was no water in the mountains, and the farmers had to take all their cows down in the valley," he says. He decided to see if he could pin part of the blame on climate change after he returned to his office in Exeter, England. "I didn't expect to get a positive result," he says