Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday schooled a reporter who suggested the state’s recent weather events, including two hurricanes and dozens of tornadoes, were tied to climate change.
“I think you can go back and find tornadoes for all of human history for sure,” he said, explaining that Hurricane Milton wasn’t as powerful as other hurricanes that have hit the state.
"How does this storm rate in kind of the history of storms? I think it hit with a barometric pressure of…about 950 millibars when it hit,” he said. “If you go back to 1851, there’s probably been 27 hurricanes that have had lower–so the lower barometric pressure, the strong it is—I think there have been about 27 hurricanes that have had lower barometric pressure on landfall than Milton did, and of those, 17 occurred I think prior to 1960. And the most powerful hurricane on record since the 1850s in the state of Florida occurred in the 1930s, the Labor Day hurricane, barometric pressure on that was 892 millibars, it totally wiped out the Keys, we’ve never seen anything like it and that remains head and shoulders above any powerful hurricane we’ve had in the state of Florida.”
Continuing to prove he is up to speed on Florida’s history with hurricanes, the Republican governor went on to tell the reporter the most deadly hurricane was the 1928 Okeechobee hurricane, which killed more than 4,000 people.
DeSantis went on to argue the recent storms need to be put in perspective.
People “try to take different things that happen with tropical weather and act like it’s something, there’s nothing new under the sun. This is something that the state has dealt with for its entire history," the governor told the reporter.
What has changed, DeSantis noted, is that the population has grown to 23 million residents so any storm that comes will hit more people and property. But, under his leadership, the state has ramped up efforts to pre-stage assets, including power, which he said was not done before.