Follow up

To follow up on my last post, I did a little research into finding scientific papers about any trends in the frequency of severe weather. I couldn't find any papers that were recent, but I did find two helpful papers- A Climatology of 1980-2003 Extreme Weather and Climate Events and Observed Variability and Trends in Extreme Climate Events: A Brief Review.

What I got from these papers:

• There may not necessarily be an increase in severe weather events. An increase in media attention could contribute to a greater awareness of society. Also, severe weather events may be having a greater impact on society than it did in the past (we are now acknowledging the birth of baby number 7 billion.... that's a lot of people).
• We are lacking in reliable data. Records only go back so far, and the records that do exist vary in accuracy and spatial scale.
• How do we define an extreme weather event?- The departure from average? Severity of the impact on society? The cost of damages?

 So I am not quite able to back up my claim that there's an increase in severe weather events. However, no one (that I'm aware of) has looked at or is looking at data that includes recent years. I would be very interested to see a study done to include recent events.