This question appears to assume that climate change "paused" due to a reduced amount of aerosols in the atmosphere, but I don't see anything in it to support such an interpretation of facts. Your quote from the UK Met Office mentions air quality and visibility, but is there any reason to conclude that this would also have any significant greenhouse effects (either way)? I haven't looked at relevant data, but an overall increasing frequency of extreme weather events certainly isn't incompatible with a temporary respite from extreme weather events during a 1-2 year period, and can be entirely uncorrelated with air quality or visibility.

Good point, Canina‭. I somehow thought (and have just edited in) it was relevant the lack of heatwaves during the lockdown. I believe climate change is non linear, and that extreme events are not going to follow a perfect correlation, but somehow thought that the reduce of the trend (by having less emissions) could collide with a higher amount of events when the emissions were back to 'normal'.

fedorqui‭ Well, all else equal, it's certainly a reasonable assumption that in the absence of one contributing factor, the probability of an event would be reduced. That said, an increase in the probability of an event (in this case, extreme weather events) over time does not necessarily mean that such an event (again, extreme weather events) will occur every some time period (for example, year). Assuming that the claim is correct, it could be a coincidence, or it could actually be correlated; although if it is the latter, my guess would be that it's not a correlation with aerosol content in the atmosphere, but rather more with the rate of increase of the concentration of greenhouse gases including CO2 from burning of fossil fuels due to reduced energy demand. Have you looked at energy consumption data per source (gasoline, nuclear, ...) for the period in question?