I agree that there's been a lot of over-exaggeration on both sides of the issue. If you listen only to pundits and talking heads, you're almost certainly getting the wrong information. The actual scientists, however, look at things a little differently.

For example, you cannot build a dam to handle any arbitrarily large amount of water. So what do you do? You look at the historic record and build your dam to survive a "1 in 500 year" flood. These sort of "1 in X year" events are all over climate science: "1 in 100 year hurricane", "1 in 500 year drought", "1 in 1000 year cold/warm streak". What I've seen most scientists say regarding climate change is that it will, essentially, shift X down for all of these. Of course, most of us are not going to live 100/500/1000 years, but if you look at all of these statistics in aggregate, you might notice that the globe would normally have, say, 3 "1 in 100 year" floods in any given year. If this year there are 5, and next year there are 4, that might be climate change.

Or it might not, because the aggregate statistics have their own statistics. For example, you might determine that a year with 5 "1 in 100 year" floods is, itself, a "1 in 500 years" phenomenon. Does that mean this year is that 1? Maybe...maybe not. But at some point, when you notice that all of the aggregations of aggregations of "1 in X" years events is a "1 in 1,000,000 year" phenomenon under non-climate change conditions, but a "1 in 10 year" or "1 in 50 year" phenomenon if climate change is occurring, then you might start thinking about attributing these events to climate change.

So: was the Syrian War caused by climate change? Maybe...maybe not. 3 years in a row of drought is probably a "1 in 500 year" type event. If climate change turns that into a "1 in 50 year" event, you still can't say for sure that climate change caused the drought...but you can say it's much more likely to have.

We'll know soon enough. If extreme weather events start causing more destabilization in more different parts of the world, we may find the long trend of decreasing incidence of conflict reverse itself...

Or maybe not, because maybe the decreasing trend will overpower the climate change induced increase, causing the overall trend to remain downward...just not as fast downward as it could have been. And really, that is what the problem with climate change is: the cost of doing nothing is greater than the cost of doing something. (The Stern Report lays this out in 700 pages of painstaking detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern_Review .) Climate change probably won't wipe out the human race, but it will depress the progress and/or potential progress we might have made in its absence.

I find it the highest kind of irony that the main argument people make against doing anything about climate change (it will cost money) is actually the best argument for doing something to prevent it.