Hurricane Florence is gathering strength as it approaches the Carolinas but not everyone is praying that it dissipates.

For Al Gore, Alec Baldwin, Jane Goodall, Catherine McKenna, Dave Matthews, John Kerry, Tom Steyer and all the other celebrity alarmists attending the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco over the next couple of days, this hurricane is like manna from heaven: the worse it gets, the better it is for their scaremongering cause.

Florence is currently a Category 4 but the more optimistic delegates will be hoping it makes Category 5 in the next 24 hours. If they’re really lucky, it will fulfil the Washington Post‘s burning desire for winds so strong they merit an entirely new category:

In little more than a day, Hurricane Florence exploded in strength, jumping from a Category 1 to a Category 4 behemoth with 140 mph winds. This process — hurricanes intensifying fast — is both extremely dangerous and poorly understood. But new research says that as the climate continues to warm, storms will do it faster and more often, and in some extreme cases, grow so powerful that they might arguably be labeled “Category 6.”

As usual WaPo’s resident climate hysteric Chris Mooney is talking rubbish.

Roy Spencer puts him right on this blogpost: you can’t talk about worsening hurricanes when the trend shows the opposite:

Attendees of the conference are almost guaranteed to point to Florence as an example of what we can expect more of with global warming. But it’s curious how there hasn’t been a statistically significant increase in major hurricane strikes in the Carolinas (based upon NHC data), even assuming Florence hits as a Cat3+: (The same is true in Florida.) The 1950s was the stand-out decade for major hurricane strikes in the Carolinas, with Hurricane Hazel in 1954 doing major damage, even as far north as Toronto. Hazel’s destruction of Myrtle Beach, SC led to a massive rebuilding effort that transformed that community forever. For sure, there has been an increase in hurricane damages over time, as infrastructure along the U.S. Gulf and Atlantic coasts has increased dramatically. There is simply more stuff for Mother Nature to destroy. But I doubt that the luminaries attending the Global Climate Action Summit this week can understand that increasing damages would occur even without any climate change.

Steven Goddard is on the case too – and has a few pertinent points to make. (He has also made an excellent video)

According to Roger Pielke Jr., east coast major hurricanes are down more than 60% over the past 50 years. The US is just coming off the longest hurricane drought on record.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post is trying to pin responsibility for this weather event on Donald Trump:

Yet when it comes to extreme weather, Mr. Trump is complicit. He plays down humans’ role in increasing the risks, and he continues to dismantle efforts to address those risks. It is hard to attribute any single weather event to climate change. But there is no reasonable doubt that humans are priming the Earth’s systems to produce disasters.

But as Goddard (aka Tony Heller) notes, if it’s really true that U.S. Presidents have the power to create hurricanes, then the worst living offender is George W Bush. The really bad ones are quite beyond the reach of even the most astringent WaPo editorial…