Climate change simulations with the new coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation model ECHAM5/MPI-OM of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (Hamburg, Germany) are used to analyse global changes in the probability and distribution of extreme weather events. Several methods are applied to analyse daily temperature and precipitation data from 2xCO2 sensitivity runs and IPCC (SRES) scenario runs in comparison to a control run with constant greenhouse gas concentrations. The methods include the fitting of the daily precipitation data for selected regions to a Gamma distribution and the analysis of the changes in its parameters under increased greenhouse gas and aerosol concentrations in the atmosphere. Further statistical tests are applied regarding the significance of the changes in the parameters as well as the goodness of fit to verify that the theoretical Gamma distribution provides an adequate description of the model data. In addition, indicators (proposed by Frich et al. 2002) based on precipitation as well as daily maximum and minimum temperature data were calculated to detect global changes in climate extremes. Results of the described analyses are presented mainly for Europe and South America.