After fleeing from Florida to Los Angeles, Rush Limbaugh denies that climate change makes hurricanes stronger

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published

After claiming last week that warnings about Hurricane Irma were a scheme to benefit retailers, the media, and the “climate change agenda” -- a claim he later doubled down on -- Rush Limbaugh evacuated from his Florida home to Los Angeles, where he broadcasted live on September 11. From California, Limbaugh (a noted hurricane conspiracy theorist) insisted that there was “no way” that climate change could have made hurricanes such as Irma, Katrina or Wilma “worse than what's come before it.” From the September 11 edition of Premiere Radio Networks' The Rush Limbaugh Show: 

RUSH LIMBAUGH (HOST): I read a piece today on Florida, because it got hit by the hurricane. Nobody knows how many hurricanes have hit Florida. Florida was uninhabitable at the time this nation was discovered. Zachary Taylor, a United States president, went down there once, fighting the Seminole Indians, and he said, “You know what? This place is hell. This place is -- I wouldn't trade you a square mile of Michigan for the entire state of Florida.”

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And it was so hot that it was uninhabitable long before climate change ever became some dream in a scientists' brain. Long before anyone knew anything about fossil fuels and CO2. It was uninhabitable. Nobody knows how many hurricanes have hit Florida. But I'll tell you what they do know, that the hurricane on Labor Day in 1935 is the strongest and the worst. Irma is number seven. Thereis no way that climate change made this hurricane or [Hurricane] Katrina or [Hurricane] Wilma, which hit in -- any of these, worse than what's come before it. Everything about the weather, if related to climate change, is largely exaggerated, untrue, or politicized, and yet that's what a growing percentage of Americans believe.