Last January I attended a seminary on climate change, lectured by Dr. Walaszkovits, Austria's leading expert on global warming and a very experienced meteorologist.
Apart from all the signs and stats refering to a general warming, increasing average wind speeds, higher humidity in many parts of the world, Dr Walaszkovits did also talk about changes regarding the ocean temperure and salination. That part was scary! According to his info, the gulf stream has already lost approx 30% of its strength (=amount of moving water per time unit) due to melting ice from Greenland and the Arctic. The result is an ever getting lower salination of sea water in the northern Atlantic and that might sooner or later lead to the collapse of the gulf stream - ice age for Europe and other parts of the northern hemisphere.
Of course there are so many other factors to be considered but, whatever side you turn the evidence - we are going towards major changes. 8000 years of fair climate stability are finally over - congratulations to mankind (all of us...)
For those who still believe that it will not be as bad as forecasted, I'd like to repeat Dr Walaszkovits: "We will wake up once our roofs start to fly away..." He said that in reference to his own climate stats for his home town in central Austria. Maximum average wind speeds of storms have doubled there during the last 45 years (from ~70 to over 130 km/hr).