Even as NBC’s Today show recently reported that climate change would actually cause fewer hurricanes in the Atlantic during the 2018 season, on Saturday, CBS This Morning warned viewers that warming ocean temperatures could potentially lead to hurricanes in the Pacific hitting the coast of California.

“Hurricanes are well known in the Atlantic and in the Caribbean, but scientists in California are concerned that changing climate conditions could soon bring hurricanes to the west coast,” proclaimed fill-in co-host Elaine Quijano as she introduced the segment. The headline on-screen blared: “Gathering Storms? Warmer Oceans Increase Risk of West Coast Hurricanes.”

Correspondent Jamie Yuccas began her report by invoking images of deadly east coast storms: “Irma, Harvey, and Katrina are among the hurricanes that have ravaged the east coast and Gulf of Mexico. But here in California, hurricanes are virtually unheard of.” She acknowledged hurricanes that regularly form in the Pacific, but pointed out that such storms “usually don’t make it past Baja California,” in Mexico, and that “only one managed to reach as far as San Diego in 1858.”

Sounding the alarm, Yuccas continued: “However, there’s now the potential this rare event could strike the San Diego area again.” Scientist Art Miller, a researcher for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, fretted: “It could happen, especially if the ocean temperatures continue to stay in this anomalously warm state.”

Yuccas noted: “Scientists at the Scripps Pier have been recording historic temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, as high as 79.5 degrees. That’s about ten degrees above normal.” Miller argued: “That potentially increases the likelihood that a hurricane might track just a little bit further north than it would have.”

After Yuccas concluded her report, co-host Anthony Mason worried: “Those rising ocean temperatures are startling.” Quijano agreed: “Startling. And when you think about ten degrees difference, as she pointed out, you think about it’s been a year since Hurricane Harvey. It was this time last year, right? And it was warm ocean waters fueling that as well.”

In August of 2017, CBS repeatedly blamed climate change for causing Hurricane Harvey and intensifying it’s devastation in Texas. In November of that year, Mason, while serving as temporary anchor for CBS Evening News, bemoaned that a lack of environmental activism from the Trump administration meant “saving the world has been harder.”

It’s one thing to claim climate change as the cause when a severe weather event actually occurs, it’s quite another to preemptively argue that any potential future storms would be the result of global warming.

Here is a full transcript of the August 18 report: