But it becomes harder to love the extremes when they happen much more frequently than the "one-in-100 year" label we have become accustomed to using.

"Consecutive, concurrent and compounding" are the terms government authorities are using in planning for severe weather risks, and most add another alliteration as a contributing cause: climate.

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After the wettest start to a year on record for much of the east coast produced multiple floods, experts now say it's time to rethink some fundamental assumptions behind the way we predict severe weather events, particularly their likelihood of recurring.

In March, NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet signalled the need for a new approach.

"We're seeing these events which we call one-in-1000-year events, or one-in-100-year events now becoming one-in-one-year events," he said, and while he may have invented the millennium storm, he's not alone in the thinking.

At stake is the way development plans are modelled to assess risk from flooding and other phenomena, which sets the rules local councils use for building - and also how insurance companies set risk-based premiums.

On a more human level, it's a change to the way we have come to understand threats from natural forces and disasters. Frequency forecasts represent not just whether we know what's around the corner, but whether we can know - in a measurable way, based on what's happened before.

Mark Howden is the director of the Institute for Climate, Energy and Disaster Solutions at the Australian National University in Canberra. He's also a vice-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He said "one-in-100" was a way of understanding both a severe event's size, and its frequency, but it needed to be based on good data.

"An assessment of flood frequency such as a one-in-100-year event makes a lot of sense when you've got a stable climate ... you're assessing how often one of the outlier events would happen based on your historical statistics," he said.

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But what happens when we face conditions not seen before - at least not with any regularity over a long enough period to make predictions?

"That's why people are starting to say 'I've seen three one-in-100-year events in the last five years ... as the average goes up, you can exceed what used to be a one-in-100-year event much more frequently. [It] might happen now once in 25 years, or once in 50 years," Professor Howden said.

"It's no longer about random chance - our fundamental assumptions are being challenged because of climate change.

"The challenge here is that our global climate models aren't really that good at telling us how the frequency of events is going to change in the future. We're pretty sure it's going to get more frequent, and worse, and that's basically physics that tells us that, but we can't tell how quickly that's going to happen.

"For me, we have to relook at flood risk, and start to accept that there are some unknown unknowns there that we have to deal with."

In 2019 Australia had its hottest and driest year on record, creating the conditions for the devastating bushfires which followed.

This year became the wettest year-to-April on record in Sydney. Flooding was widespread from the mid-north coast to Greater Sydney. This month was already named the wettest in history for the Sydney area. That rainfall record had stood since 1858.

This week the federal Department of Home Affairs' emergency management division broadened its severe weather briefings, which included the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM), to the media.

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It's an indication of the significant interest in extreme weather that will define the near future. Recently, 37 LGAs have needed Disaster Recover Funding Arrangements.

While the BOM doesn't see a "strong climate signal" in frequency of damaging East Coast Low storms, it's much stronger when it comes to the frequency and intensity of bushfires.

Jo Dodds almost lost her house outside Tathra on the NSW far south coast in the bushfires of 2018, and is now active as the president of Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action.

She said for those who had survived disasters, it was a slap in the face when governments failed to address the causes and continued business as usual - "like being gaslit every single day".

"We've had the March 2018 fire in Tathra, then we had, only a few months after, Yankees Gap that burned for six or seven weeks over winter," she said. "Then in 2019-20 even more fires that burned more homes.

"There are communities all across Australia now struggling with the threat, or struggling with the aftermath, or in the middle of, climate-related disasters."

Terminology may not in itself reduce risk, but it can add to our understanding that the world has changed.

"It's a really debated topic within science as to how to express what's going on," Professor Howden said. "The way I tend to do it is say climate change is embedded in these events. In the Lismore floods, or [more] recently around Sydney, the underlying sea surface temperatures have gone up because of climate change, close to a degree.

"That means the water around Australia, everything else being equal, is just simply warmer, and can generate more rainfall. The atmosphere above is warmer and can hold a lot more water, and there's more evaporation from the warmer ocean.

"The way I look at it is not trying to attribute any event like the Lismore floods to climate change - although you can have a go at that and [say] climate change has made it more likely that we're going to get those events.

"The way I say it is climate change is embedded in these events, and the signal is embedded in pretty much every extreme climate event we're seeing these days."