“This is going to kill people,” he said at one point. At another: “There are no excuses. You need to leave. Evacuate, evacuate, evacuate.”

As the storm made landfall in the Caribbean and southeastern United States over the weekend, Hurricane Matthew did kill people–19 people died in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina, and at least 900 people are known to have perished in Haiti so far. Before it made landfall, the hurricane was the strongest to threaten the continental United States in nearly a decade, though it eventually weakened to a Category 1 by the time it moved up the East Coast.

[Photo: Rob Foldy/Getty Images]

Scientists believe that warmer ocean temperatures created by climate change had been fueling its power–both intensifying it more quickly and sustaining its strength far longer than other storms in the modern record. “It isn’t a coincidence that we’ve seen the strongest hurricanes in both hemispheres within the last year,” Penn State University climate scientist Michael Mann told Democracy Now. (In February, Tropical Cyclone Winston was the strongest ever in the southern hemisphere). MIT atmospheric scientist Kerry Emanuel told CNN that, with climate change, we would expect to see more Category 4 and 5 storms in the future.

Matthew is just the latest and most tragic example of why Florida is not a but the political battleground state for climate change. Lately, the state is a hot mess of climate change-linked apocalyptic disasters. The CDC has issued an unprecedented travel advisory for pockets of the state, due to the spread of the Zika virus, which is also enabled by climate change. In Miami Beach, tidal flooding–i.e. floods that are not even linked to heavy rain–has quadrupled over the last decade, a harbinger of the unabated sea level rise that could put more than 900,000 Florida homes underwater by the end of the century (by far, more than any other state). This year’s outbreak of sludgy toxic algae, exacerbated by warmer water, was so bad on both Florida coasts that a state of emergency was declared in four counties, as the algae sickened people and killed wildlife and fish.

The United States today is trapped along fierce partisan lines on the issue of climate change. Democrats correctly say it is the most urgent challenge of our time, while Republicans say it is a Chinese hoax–and it’s a cycle of partisanship that feels impossible to break. On the eve of Hurricane Matthew this week, as Republican governors like Scott and South Carolina’s Nikki Haley told millions of people to evacuate or risk death, conservative commentators Matt Drudge and Rush Limbaugh seeded weather conspiracies, with Drudge wondering if the “govt has been lying . . . about Hurricane Matthew intensity to make exaggerated point on climate.”

If this toxic political dynamic is ever to break–and it will have to break at some point as climate change worsens–Florida, as both a political and climate battleground state, is one of the best bets to lead change. As a state that is neither firmly Republican or Democrat, it is consistently a major swing state in presidential elections, and as climate-linked disasters get worse, it is possible to imagine the the climate denying voters and politicians finally being forced by reality to pull their heads out of the sand.