As Fox alluded to in his message, the weakening of the Earth's magnetic field is what is behind the extreme lightning people have witnessed all over the globe recently. The Earth behaves like a gigantic capacitor so when the magnetic field is reduced much more energy from space, in the form of cosmic rays and particles from the solar wind, is absorbed by the globe. That energy has to go somewhere for the Earth to achieve an electrical equilibrium which results in much more frequent high energy lightning discharge events. One other thing that people have noticed is very high intensity ground to cloud lightning occurring more frequently and that further supports the energy discharge theory described above. Here's a video from SuspiciousObservers that talks about the issue. There are many more that go into this subject on his utube channel located here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTiL1q9YbrVam5nP2xzFTWQ