Al Gore’s storm comment stirs Category 6 mini-flap



Al Gore needs to be more careful when discussing climate change and hurricanes, one scientist said Thursday.

Gretchen Goldman, an analyst in the Scientific Integrity Initiative at the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Center for Science and Democracy, largely praised Gore but took issue with some comments the former vice president made in an interview with The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein.

in the interview, published Wednesday, Gore said that “the fingerprint of man-made global warming is all over” storms like hurricanes and other extreme weather events.

“The extreme events are more extreme. The hurricane scale used to be 1-5 and now they’re adding a 6,” he said, according to a transcript of the interview.


But Goldman — along with the Post’s own Capital Weather Gang blog — noted that nobody’s planning to add a Category 6 to the hurricane scale.

“There are no plans by the National Hurricane Center — the federal office responsible for categorizing storms — to create a new category,” Goldman wrote.

A National Weather Service spokesman said the same thing to the Capital Weather Gang: “No, we’re not pursuing any such change.”

Category 5 hurricanes, which have sustained winds of 157 mph or higher, are extreme enough that only three have hit the U.S. mainland at that strength since official records began in 1851 — most recently Andrew, which devastated Homestead, Fla., in 1992.

On the other hand, there have been a number of Category 5 hurricanes in recent years that either didn’t strike the U.S. or weakened before hitting land — for example, 2005’s Katrina, which weakened from 5 to 3 before its catastrophic landfall in Louisiana. That October, Hurricane Wilma briefly became the most intense Atlantic hurricane of all time when it was in the southwestern Caribbean.


Goldman also says the link between hurricane intensity and climate change isn’t as crystal clear as Gore makes it seem.

“Though there is some evidence that climate change will influence hurricanes, the effect of climate change on hurricane intensity and hurricane frequency is complex and scientists are continuing to study the connection. Hurricanes in the North Atlantic region have been intensifying over the past 40 years but not elsewhere in the world,” she wrote.

Public figures like Gore need to be careful about how they talk about climate science, Goldman argues. “Politicians and others can be effective communicators of climate science and guide us toward policy action, but they risk creating confusion and eroding public confidence in science when they make misrepresentative statements,” she said.

Goldman stressed that Gore’s mischaracterizations shouldn’t be cause for climate skepticism. There’s plenty of strong evidence that the public faces major consequences in a warming planet.

“[S]cientists have high confidence that sea level will rise all over the world, and particularly fast in some areas like the East Coast. With this knowledge, we can say with certainty that action is warranted, though the type of action necessary will vary based on how communities want to respond,” she said.

Goldman nonetheless said Gore deserves “great praise” for his climate change advocacy. And his mistakes pale in comparison to those who completely reject climate science.

“We should be clear. Attacking science or scientists – or repudiating all of climate science – erodes trust in and understanding of science far more than occasional overstatements about extreme weather and climate change,” she said.

This isn’t the first time that scientists have given Gore a slap on the wrist. When the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” was released in 2006, some meteorologists pointed out that the hurricane on the movie poster was revolving clockwise — the wrong direction for a Northern Hemisphere tropical cyclone.

A Gore spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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