As Hurricane Ian pummeled Florida and the Carolinas, Fox News was busy dismissing, mocking, or outright denying climate change’s impact on hurricanes. This was not surprising, given the network’s long and sordid history of climate denial.

Also not surprising were the talking points that Fox used to downplay the link between climate change and worsening hurricanes, because the network has used the same ones for every major hurricane in the past six years: singularly focus on the idea that the frequency and intensity of hurricanes are decreasing or unchanged. In reality, hurricane impacts such as rainfall, storm surge, and rapid intensification are all made demonstrably worse by climate change. These impacts have been destructive both in general — rainfall and storm surge make up the vast majority of hurricane deaths — and in Hurricane Ian’s case.

In addition to trotting out the same old talking points year after year, Fox has assembled a cabal of go-to “experts” to push climate change denial. Their commentary on Hurricane Ian has been no different.

Fox continues to ignore science and dismiss climate change’s impact on hurricanes

As part of their Hurricane Ian coverage, Fox News and Fox Business aired numerous segments downplaying climate change’s link to hurricanes by claiming they have decreased in frequency. This is misguided because it's not the number of storms that form that is the problem — it is their destructive capabilites. Fox's frequency narrative also often includes the non sequitur that hurricanes have always happened throughout history, and the network is lying that the intensity of hurricanes hasn’t increased. 

While discussing Ian’s impact on the October 3 edition of Fox Business’ Mornings with Maria, co-host Dagen McDowell stated, “The talking heads of left-wing media repeatedly talked about climate change and these storms are worse and Michael Shellenberger pointed out over the last week the mainstream news media claimed that hurricanes are becoming more frequent and intense — and they are not. Period.”

The September 30 edition of Fox Business’ WSJ at Large attempted to mislead viewers by focusing on the frequency talking point. Host James Freeman cited a passage from the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report that discusses past hurricane activity, stating, “There is still no consensus on the relative magnitude of human and natural influences on past changes in Atlantic hurricane activity.” He also cited a contrarian political science professor, stating, “Observed land-falling hurricane frequency nor intensity shows significant trends.” Not mentioned in Freeman’s monologue however, was the text further down in the IPCC report that absolutely confirms the growing intensity of hurricanes in a warming world, as it mentions a warming world will mean more intense storms. 

Perhaps the worst examples came from Fox News’ most-watched prime-time shows. On the September 29 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, host Tucker Carlson focused on hurricane frequency and downplayed the intensity argument, falsely claiming that “there’s no science behind these claims.” On the September 28 edition of Hannity, host Sean Hannity touched upon the frequency argument by stating, “During hurricane season, you usually have hurricanes, like we did a hundred years ago.” Later that night on The Ingraham Angle, climate contrarian guest Michael Shellenberger stated that hurricanes are “not intensifying right now, so any perception that hurricanes are more intense is just a perception fed by that relentless alarmist media.”

Fox has been wrongly focused on these talking points for years now

Hurricanes Ida (2021), Dorian (2019), Florence (2018), Irma (2017) and Harvey (2017) were immensely powerful and costly storms, and they, like Ian, had the fingerprints of climate change. Fox ignored or downplayed these climate links while discussing those storms, and instead focused on the idea of frequency and intensity.

While discussing Hurricane Ida on the September 7, 2021, edition of The Ingraham Angle, Shellenberger said that the frequency of hurricanes is decreasing and that there is “no significant increase” in intensity — a baldfaced lie. On the September 8, 2021, edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, longtime climate denier guest Joe Bastardi downplayed intensity by stating that other bad storms happened in the 1950s and 1930s.

While discussing Hurricane Dorian on the September 2, 2019, edition of The Story with Martha MacCallum, climate denier Roy Spencer was brought on to downplay climate change’s impact on hurricanes. Spencer stated that there is “no long term trend in either their intensity or in the number of major hurricanes … that have hit Florida.” On the September 4, 2019, edition of Fox & Friends, co-host Ainsley Earhardt brought up the metric of frequency to downplay climate change’s link to hurricanes, stating, “Hurricanes have been happening since the beginning of the atmosphere.” Later on September 4, 2019, host Jesse Watters went on The Story with Martha MacCallum to claim that “there's no correlation between temperature and hurricanes and there's no trend over the last hundred years about intensity or ferociousness or numbers.”

The previous year, both Bastardi and Spencer were on Fox making the same points about Hurricane Florence. On the September 14, 2018, edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, Spencer talked about the declining frequency of U.S. hurricanes, claiming there’s too much “natural variability” to determine what influence human actions have had on hurricanes. Later that night on Hannity, Bastardi stated, “The amount of hurricanes [in] the last 50 years, from Florida to New England, is 37% of what it was the previous 50 years, so if there’s climate change going on, it's actually decreasing the amount of major hits.” 

Discussing Hurricane Harvey on the August 25, 2017, edition of The Five, Watters invoked frequency to downplay climate change’s impact on hurricanes, stating, “Hurricanes have been happening since the beginning of time. …These things just happen. It’s called the weather.” Discussing Hurricane Irma on the September 11, 2017, edition of The Five, co-host Greg Gutfeld also brought up frequency, stating that “landfalling U.S. hurricanes, they’ve been decreasing over the last 140 years.” Finally, Spencer invoked the frequency and intensity of hurricanes hitting Florida on the September 13, 2017, edition of Fox & Friends. 

Throughout the years, as Fox has beat the drum of its denialist hurricane programming, the science surrounding climate change’s impacts on hurricanes has only strengthened. 

Fox’s hurricane “experts” are always the same

Three names stick out in Fox’s rotation of climate deniers: Joe Bastardi, Roy Spencer, and Michael Shellenberger. All three have either denied or downplayed the impact of climate change on hurricanes, and none are credible within the climate science community.

Bastardi has been a fixture of Fox’s hurricane coverage since at least 2011. At the time, Media Matters wrote that Bastardi “has made inaccurate claims about climate science on multiple occasions and is not seen by experts as a credible source of climate information.” Since then, he has continued making inaccurate claims about climate change’s impact on hurricanes and is still not viewed as a credible source within the climate science community. Indeed, he is a weather forecaster and has no climate science background.

While Spencer is the only guest on this list with a background in atmospheric science, his views on climate change fall outside the overwhelming scientific consensus on the issue. Skeptical Science notes that Spencer believes that “global warming is mostly due to natural internal variability, and that the climate system is unresponsive to humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions.” The blog finds roughly 20 instances of his false claims on climate change. Additionally, he is affiliated with The Heartland Institute, a climate-denying conservative think tank that has received a significant amount of money from the fossil fuel industry.

Although Spencer has not appeared on Fox since 2019, taking his place has been Shellenberger, a virulently anti-renewable and pro-fossil fuel activist who has zero background in climate science. Shellenberger has become a mainstay on Fox in recent years, as he claims that climate change is real but not that big of a problem. 

Despite what Fox’s grifters say, climate change is affecting hurricanes 

While it’s true that the impact of an increasingly warming world on the frequency of these cyclonic storms is still uncertain, the storms that do form have a greater likelihood of becoming more intense. This is confirmed by the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the most recent IPCC report, and numerous other peer-reviewed scientific papers. 

The intensity issue is not just limited to labels like Category 4 or 5 storms. The amount of rainfall and storm surge brought on by hurricanes, as well as their ability to rapidly intensify in a short period of time, have also been made worse by climate change. 

Both the GFDL and the recent IPCC report confirm a projected increase in rainfall rates during hurricanes. And these are not just future projections — more recent attribution studies found that the amount of rain dumped by Ian was more than 10% greater due to climate change. Meanwhile, sea-level rise, another well-established and severe impact of climate change, has also exacerbated the height of storm surge during hurricanes. A recent study confirms that “we can expect hurricanes to produce larger storm surge magnitudes in concentrated areas.” 

Finally, the ability of storms to rapidly intensify in a short period of time — making them more destructive at impact — has also been influenced by climate change. Vox did a good job summarizing the science, stating, “There were about 25 percent more rapidly intensifying storms in the Atlantic Ocean and Eastern Pacific in the last 10 years compared to 40 years ago. Some past scientific studies have also shown that hurricanes are intensifying more rapidly in parts of the Atlantic in recent years.”

Hurricane Ian’s record rainfall in Florida was a 1-in-1,000-year event, and its destructive flooding was a 1-in-500-year event. In less than half a day, Ian quickly jumped from a Category 3 storm to a nearly Category 5 storm. These are the fingerprints of climate change. Also worth noting is that warmer than usual waters in the Gulf of Mexico helped Ian become so powerful. Ninety percent of the excess heat from climate change has been absorbed by the world’s oceans in the past 50 years. 

Ian came on the heels of a summer of climate-fueled and costly extreme weather around the globe, driving home among the public what the scientific community has known for decades: Climate change is dire, and it’s here. Much to the detriment of its viewers in Florida and elsewhere, Fox deliberately, consistently, and emphatically ignores and downplays this reality.