Tempests besiege Paris

Paris has been experiencing some apocalyptic weather of late. One day it will be too warm for a winter coat, and then literally the next day there will be a snowstorm leading to an accumulation of several centimeters.
The most startling trend in weather, however, is a recent string of tempests. The French word tempête simply means storm, but these are not your ordinary American "storms". They involve rain and gale-force winds... winds so strong that Charles de Gaulle airport has been shut down since last night (over 200 flights have been grounded as a result).
Living at the top of a hill (la butte of la butte aux cailles), with a large skylight in my bedroom, I experience the meteorological conditions quite intensely. There is never thunder - come to think of it, I haven't heard thunder or seen lightening since I arrived in France - but there's a sound that's far more terrifying: that of the wind wrecking havoc on the neighborhood.
These winds have been known to cause deaths, often due to falling tree branches or flooding. Two weeks ago, the January 24th tempête killed 11 people in western France. Granted, such damage rarely takes its toll on Paris - the storms usually die down as they head inland - but in 1999 such a tempête wrecked havoc on the Parisian suburb of Versaille. The famous chateau lost so many trees that witnesses to the damage could only describe it as "apocalyptic", a landscape ravaged by natural catastrophe.
Basically, these storms are the equivalent of a hurricane or a Nor'easter. What's frightening is that today's is the second such storm in a period of two weeks, and the French are describing them as once-in-a-year-type-occurences. The UK's unusual trend of snow storms is making it into the US newspapers, but in my opinion our tempêtes are just as good a harbinger of potentially disastrous climate change for Europe.