> It may well be counterproductive to normalize drawing conclusions from singular events.
We are not doing that. But we have a lot of statistical data and measurements, which demonstrate a noticeable increases of both frequency and magnitude of these events.
> We don't know whether this particular drought is due to the human induced climate change.
This is the kind of arguments some people use when they want to muddy the waters. Because, sure, someone is going to say that it is caused by global warming and then someone else will say “gotcha, climate is statistics and an event cannot be attributed to a single cause”. So let’s not go that way again.
This event is unprecedented in recorded history in Western Europe. Whilst indeed no single event can be attributed to a single cause, again, we do have data showing that the trend follows exactly what was predicted by the models 30 to 20 years ago. This behaviour is completely inconsistent with the situation of our planet, which should otherwise be in a mild cooling cycle.
> So the climate change proponents get "lucky" this time as they get a single but painful event in their life and they can go to deniers and say "do you see now how bad climate change is?"
Nobody is lucky, certainly not the dead or those whose house went up in flames, or those boiling at home. This attitude is juvenile and unmoored from what actually happens in the real world.
> For all we know, there may have been many similar ones 500 (or 1000) years ago before detailed meteorological records were kept.
I don’t know why you lament people being generally irrational and then come back to this sort of arguments. Let me repeat: single freak events are not caused by a single cause, but we do have data, including concerning the last million of years. The things we see now, with rapid sea level rise, collapse of ecosystems, mass extinction, and regional cataclysms, are things we can see in the fossil record.
> What if this drought is followed by 5 subsequent years of completely normal weather? Would we want the deniers to start claiming everything is fine based on a handful of events?
Except that it is not the case. We keep accumulating heat records, and what used to be centennial droughts are not every 2 years. People already said that in 2003, and yet it keeps getting worse.
Overall, I am not sure why I spent so much time replying. You do not sound half as smart as you seem to think you are. I would encourage you to understand the subject a tiny bit before LARPing the intelligent adult in the room.