1.) Global warming increases average temperatures.
2.) Climate change might turn the weather to extremes, which implies greater temperature _variance_ locally.
Now the pattern I see is: people are trying to focus on 1.), disprove it, then (falsly) claim that 2.) would also be wrong!
This is not the case. 1.) does NOT relate to 2.) in any way!
The climate change IS happening, this does not change by disproving 1.)
If environmentalists think they can turn on a dime after thirty years of "anthropogenic global warming -> disaster", they are in for a well-deserved beating in the court of general opinion. Falling back to "The climate is changing" is basically an admission that we have no clue, and more than that, where we thought human effects dominated it, it doesn't seem to. You can't just turn around and apply panic over AGW to panic over "climate change"; it is neither rational nor human-irrational.
If you want to panic over something environmental, how about overfishing, plastic pollution in the pacific, fertilizer runoff, or something else that isn't "debatable" but actually, factually exists? In addition to the fact that it's a bad idea to try to "salvage" climate change as an issue, it isn't even necessary. There are real problems. Unless you personally are driven by using environmentalism as an excuse to destroy democracy and transfer wealth to the poor, if you are really driven by concern for the environment, you don't need to "win" this issue. Trying to build your political case on a lie can only be actively harmful in the long run.
The IPCC Third Report concludes that climate change might either be caused of a changing mean temperature, a changing variance, or both. What the real cause for climate change is, needs to be carefully assessed. This supports my statement that climate change is not necessarily caused by increasing mean temperatures.
http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc%5Ftar/?src=/clim...