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It's not surprising that Al Gore put on weight after he lost that election. The guy has more whoppers than a Burger King. Yesterday we noted that in an interview with the Washington Post's Ezra Klein, Gore had misrepresented the content of his own movie by characterizing his outlandish "climate change" doomsaying as having been merely an accurate prediction of last year's weather.

It was left to one of Klein's colleagues, the delightfully named Jason Samenow, to clean up another bit of the mess Klein allowed Gore to make. Gore claimed that "extreme events" like hurricanes are "more extreme" than they used to be: "The hurricane scale used to be 1-5 and now they're adding a 6." Samenow called the National Weather Service, which told him, in Samenow's words, that "Gore's statement about this new breed of hurricanes is patently false."

The idea of a "Category 6 hurricane" is not completely original to Gore; it has been the subject of idle chatter such as this August 2012 Discovery.com piece: "Will we ever need to push the hurricane scale up to a 6? Probably not, experts say."

Reader Jeff Brazell notes that Gore's statement that "extreme events are more extreme" is also false, at least as applied to hurricanes and other tropical cyclones:

Note that the newspaper columnists and scientists who have talked about introducing Category 6 storms (i.e., winds greater than 174 or 180 mph) reference storms that are mostly pre-global-warming-alarmism, most notably Typhoon Ida in 1958 and Typhoon Nancy in 1961, both with sustained winds of 215 mph, and Typhoon Tip in 1979 with sustained winds of 190 mph. The 2005 hurricane season is considered to be the worst ever, but, it didn't have any storms of the ferocity seen in the Pacific in 1958, 1961, 1979.

Also, if you graph and calculate a linear trendline from the government's "U.S. Hurricane Strikes by Decade" report, you see that the trend for major storms (Category 3, 4, and 5) since 1851 is very slightly negative, with the clear peaks, again, in pre-global-warming eras.

As frequent contributor Jeryl Bier notes on Twitter, there are a couple of other statements in the interview that sound implausible, to wit: