Unfortunately we don't have a control Earth to use.

They don't prove anything, but they are evidence in the baysiaan sense of the word. You should be (substantially) more surprised to see freak weather events if climate change isn't real than if climate change is.

Given your take, what kind of evidence would you envision seeing that would give you certainty that anthro cc is going on? Would the evidence arrive before it was too late to do anything?

Perhaps I wasn't clear: I believe that anthropocentric climate change is real.

I just don't have anything to suggest that all this recent freak weather is related to it. It's entirely possible that it is! It's also entirely possible that it isn't.

Freak weather is not, itself, some irrefutable proof of anthropocentric climate change. (We have plenty of that already.)

It could be that all the warming and sea ice loss that humans have caused (which no doubt has a bunch of cataclysmic stuff waiting in the wings for us, likely related to oceans and centered on plankton and other such planet-scale bio processes) is unrelated to the fact that we've had a bunch of bad weather lately, and that we've just been somewhat unlucky.

calculating expected extreme events isn't really that much different in principle than testing if a die is fair. if it's slightly loaded, you'll likely not notice for quite some time and might never be sure.

now the problem with climate change is that emissions now will yield indisputable evidence 20-30-50 years from now - a blink of an eye in climatology and likely point of no return for humanity.

note we do not lack evidence of global warming. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/22/memorial...

I encourage you to read my comment again, the second time more carefully.