A recent broadcast weather segment on CBS News, Los Angeles, titled “Helene gaining strength from climate change effects,” features a staff meteorologist claiming that hurricane Helene was strengthened by climate change, and that indeed hurricanes in general are increasing in intensity and power. This is false. It is actually shocking how wrong CBS is with regards to what actual hurricane data show, which is that hurricanes are not getting more intense, frequent, or powerful.

The CBS video description reads “…Helene is gaining strength from warmer waters in the Gulf of Mexico, an effect linked to climate change that appears to make hurricanes and storms more powerful.”

The CBS anchor hands the segment over to meteorologist Marina Jurica, who alleges that “the increasing intensity of hurricanes is basically rooted in physics… hurricanes draw energy from that warm ocean water and as that climate change causes sea surface temperatures to rise the energy available for these storms increases.”

It is true that warm sea surface temperatures contribute to hurricane formation, However, they are far from the only element, and in fact for most of this hurricane season, despite warmer-than-average sea surface temperatures, storms struggled to form at all.