If it has seemed like we’ve been hearing an awful lot in recent months about extreme weather, about record this and record that, it’s because the weather has, as a matter of fact, been extremely extreme.  How extreme?  Well, on his Wunderblog, Jeff Masters has just posted an astonishing summary of 2010’s top twenty extreme weather events, in which he documents the most wild and unusual weather in decades.

“Every year extraordinary weather events rock the Earth. Records that have stood centuries are broken. Great floods, droughts, and storms affect millions of people, and truly exceptional weather events unprecedented in human history may occur. But the wild roller-coaster ride of incredible weather events during 2010, in my mind, makes that year the planet’s most extraordinary year for extreme weather since reliable global upper-air data began in the late 1940s.”  

At the end of the post, he goes further, and suggests that in the last year and a half the world may have experienced its the most wild and unusual weather since 1816, the famous “Year Without a Summer” caused by the eruption of the Tambora volcano.  Only this time, of course, there’s no volcano to blame.