As a sidebar to this discussion; my favorite Met from the UK issued his (early) winter forecast ahead of time due to the 'ice-age panic' that's developing over there due to the cold N. Atlantic. He's a straightforward traditionalist not given to hyperbole, and is willing to 'blame' the AMO even though we're not really due to flip yet, but...he gave up! He forecast exactly....nothing!
Looking back over years of analogue data, and going over all the tele's and models, he doesn't see any way to get a reasonable forecast out of it, and said to wait until November.
Now look, we can argue the minutiae and pedantry of any individual posts hyperbole, or we can exaggerate the reserve of others into a claim of 'denial', but neither path leads anywhere positive. Would it be possible to agree that we're beyond the realm of easy understanding of current phenomena and their relationships to one another based on easy attribution to past experience?
We're NOT going to ascribe causation for anything deemed new here in this forum- no one of us will do that- so from that perspective we're all just B.S.'ing, or agglomerating our opinions around unproven science, but can we agree that 'things are different'?
I think they are, and I've yet to hear anyone credible say otherwise. To admit that means that sometimes we'll have to admit to simply 'not knowing'! ( )