Strange weather is normal

Christopher Booker,Telegraph
"...... It is true that for some years the hawthorn did flower very much earlier than normal (in 2010 I saw it in Somerset on April 25). This prompted environmental journalists who know little about nature to hail it as one of the proofs, along with primroses in December, that the world was in the grip of runaway warming. But since nature has since returned to its former patterns (last year’s hawthorn didn’t come into flower until May 22), they have gone strangely quiet about such things.
The new party line, as we know, is to promote their cult by going on about anything that can be called an “extreme weather event”, as if such things never happened before, so that any unusual flood, drought or snowfall can be seen as further proof of warming that otherwise remains largely invisible.
I was lately reading the diary entries by Pepys and Evelyn, noting the plethora of “extreme weather events” in the 17th century, when scarcely a year went by when they could not describe some flood, drought, storm or blizzard as being “unknown in the memory of man”. But the 17th century, of course, was the height of the Little Ice Age, when the world was colder than it had been in 13,000 years. Those environmental zealots so eager to blame any aberration in our weather on man-made warming seem to know as little of history as they do of nature."