The Patriot Post® · Category 6 Climate Alarmism

Few people deny that the climate is and has been changing. Yet the exact reason, cause, and degree to which mankind may be affecting this change are very much up for debate. However, for the climate cultists, there is only one acceptable answer to the question of what is causing climate change. And that answer is human activity linked directly to the use of fossil fuels. Indeed, a failure to fully embrace this unassailable climate dogma will get one labeled a “climate denier.”

However, the trouble with any cult is that when its prophecies fail to materialize, its adherents begin to lose faith, and skeptics eagerly step forward to expose the failures and errors in those dogmatically held beliefs.

This is much of the reason why the Leftmedia, which has long held that anthropogenic climate change is “settled science,” must continuously prop up the climate narrative, or else people might not believe it and in turn might fail to vote for the media’s preferred leftist political party.

Therefore, the solution to this conundrum of keeping the faith despite repeated instances of climate alarmists’ dire warnings failing to materialize is to spin normal climatic weather events as abnormal and getting worse.

Are storms really getting worse? It has been a repeated refrain almost every time a significant weather event affects the U.S., be it hurricanes, wildfires, tornadoes, heat waves, or snow storms. The reporting on these seasonal and common weather events increasingly frames them as “more severe,” “more extreme,” “more costly,” “more frequent,” or “more deadly” than ever before.

The trouble is the historical scientific record fails to uphold that alarmist narrative.

The alarmists’ solution, then, is to continue to assert that climate change is making common weather events like hurricanes worse and then drive home the issue by making proposals like adding a “Category 6” to the hurricane power scale.

That’s right. An example of this not-so-subtle attempt at climate spin comes courtesy of two scientists, Michael Wehner and James Kossin. The two are promoting the idea, which is not necessarily a new idea, that a Category 6 designation should be added to the five-step Saffir-Simpson measurement scale of a hurricane’s intensity. The reason? Well, climate change, of course.

As Wehner asserts, “Climate change has demonstrably made the strongest storms stronger.” This is how it works: Simply declare it as an undeniable reality and then move on to a proposed policy solution. Wehner then argues, “Introduction of this hypothetical Category 6 would raise awareness of that.”

And there it is. Not enough people have bought into climate alarmism, so by adding a new “extreme” “Category 6” to the hurricane scale, the alarmist narrative can be further pressed home.

The trouble is that from a practical standpoint, adding a sixth level to the well-understood hurricane scale would likely add confusion or even blunt the public’s perception of the danger associated with lower-category storms. Furthermore, while the hurricane categories measure a storm’s maximum sustained wind speed, they don’t account for the other often more damaging aspects of a hurricane, like water or storm surge.

Everyone who lives in a hurricane-affected area already knows that a Category 5 storm is a monster to be avoided at all costs. Who needs to turn the volume up to 11?