On Tuesday night, as Hurricane Idalia barreled toward Floridas coast, Fox News host Jesse Waters teased his next guest, calling her the nations most famous climate scientist. Unsurprisingly to anyone following the right-wing climate denial movement, his guest was Judith Curry, a retired climatologist who dismisses that human activity drives current planetary warming and has become a go-to figure in conservative circles.

What followed was nearly seven minutes of Waters and Curry peddling misinformation about the realities of climate change and its mounting impacts. Curry declared falsely that there is no evidence this is leading to worse weather events. On the side of the screen throughout her interview, a storm tracker kept Fox viewers updated about Hurricane Idalias track and wind speeds.

No single hurricane can be solely attributed to climate change, and scientists are careful to steer clear of such declarations. But Idalia has all the signs of a storm supercharged by climate breakdown the type of event that is expected to become increasingly common in a warming world.

Tropical storms are fueled largely by warm water. The Gulf of Mexico is amid a relentless marine heat wave. Earlier this month, waters in the Gulf reached their hottest on record an average of 88 degrees Fahrenheit.

As Idalia churned over the blistering Gulf and took aim at Florida earlier this week, it underwent whats known as rapid intensification a phenomenon in which a cyclones maximum sustained winds increase at least 35 mph in a 24-hour period. From Tuesday morning into Wednesday, Idalia exploded from a Category 1 to a Category 4 hurricane, with wind speeds spiking 55 mph in a 24-hour period.

Idalia ultimately weakened slightly to a Category 3 before making landfall Wednesday near Keaton Beach, Florida, but its violent growth before that mirrors the kind of hurricane activity that scientists say is becoming more frequent as climate change drives up ocean temperatures.

Ive seen this signature way too much during the past several years rapid intensification before U.S. landfall, Eric Blake, a senior hurricane specialist at the National Hurricane Center, wrote in a post to X, formerly Twitter. #Idalia is showing all the bad signs, and that all-too-familiar pit-in-the-stomach feeling is back.