We can rebuild businesses.

We can get people back on their feet But only if they go they're safe and they survive the storm We're not going to be able to bring people back who who stay behind in 10 or 15 feet of storm surge Hurricane Milton is intensifying now a category 5 with speeds around 165 miles per hour This crew from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association dubbed hurricane hunters flew through it yesterday and felt its power On The ground residents are doing what they can to protect their properties before they leave but there's real fear here apprehensive ain't really anxious We have two young kids Scary Over 50 counties are now under a state of emergency, but not everyone is deciding to flee We got four five-gallon cans Tommy Hall and his family live near Venice Beach and they've chosen to weather the incoming Storm, we've got gas food two generators Portable air conditions to push around to room the room.

So I Think we might do okay But weather forecasters are now warning of the severity and danger of this storm.

It has dropped 50 millibars in 10 hours Tracking hurricane Milton forecaster John Morales broke down on air because of fears of what's to come everything that's going on Really does affect you emotionally And yeah my delivery of Of trying to carry an audience through these type of emergencies, I think it's become Certainly not the same not alarmist.

I would was before I am alarmed Milton strength has already brought flooding along the Mexican coast and downed power lines and trees But the u.s Is bracing itself for much worse with officials saying that Milton has the potential to be one of the most destructive hurricanes on record When it makes landfall later today Steve nibs BBC News well our correspondent Gordon Carrera's in Tampa in Florida and he's been talking to people who have been preparing for the arrival of hurricane Milton Here in Tampa.

There is a sense of time running out ahead of Milton's really now imminent Arrival the streets in the city have been eerily quiet Hardly anyone's around the few people who we have seen have been preparing their homes or their offices for the storm Boarding things up maybe moving things around I think one of the things that's quite shocking is just that you can see around me the devastation which is still here from Hurricane Helene which hit two weeks ago and there's an enormous amount of debris around particularly where I am in Tampa and the concern is that the massive surge which will come with Milton could lift up all this debris move it around cause even more damage and the fear is that the surge with Milton could be 12 feet or perhaps even more high compared to about half that or less with Helene so could be very significant Indeed there's a lot of work going on already to think about how the community will respond afterwards But first of all, they've got to get through that storm, which is now just really hours away from arriving here Gordon Carrera on at the ground there Well, the National Hurricane Center in the United States expects hurricane Milton to make landfall as an extremely dangerous hurricane The BBC's Sophie Raworth explains why climate change is thought to be behind the ferocity of the storm Well, Hurricane Milton will be the second powerful storm to hit Florida in less than two weeks and it is currently traveling across the Gulf of Mexico You can see its path there and warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico have helped it become a dangerous Hurricane that is expected to make landfall as early as tomorrow Now scientists say that climate change is to blame with much warmer seas supercharging these hurricanes These are the normal range of temperatures for the Atlantic and this should be just about here where they are now But look how much warmer the waters are this year at or near the hottest temperatures on record The oceans absorb most of the extra heat that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases trap near Earth's surface So warmer seas mean more water evaporates and that allows storms to strengthen and grow Sophie Raworth there.

Well, let's speak to Professor Miles Allen a climate physicist at the University of Oxford Welcome to the program A lot of people want to know how much climate change might be playing a part in this because of course There always is a hurricane season in the United States, but you don't regularly see storms of this ferocity category five That's right.

I mean we've always had hurricanes in this part of the world Hurricanes are these giant engines for turning energy from warm ocean temperatures into kinetic energy of the air and Of course if you just if you Increase the the octane in the fuel so to speak by warming up sea surface temperatures as Sophie Raworth was saying You allow hurricanes to get more intense and we have seen an intensification and lots of indicators of hurricane activity Since the 1980s the longer-term picture is is a bit less clear But that coincides with a period of rapidly rising sea surface temperatures much of which is down to human influence on climate and In terms of what might come next in terms of this storm You know when you track this as a physicist what could come next?

Well crucially for a storm activity or for this storm itself.

We are getting much better at Helping enormously in terms of saving lives, of course, it can't really I mean it can help people protect their properties But they still do enormous damage So one of the really good news stories here is how well forecast hurricanes are compared to what they would have been a few decades ago But the longer term outlook is worrying of course because we are as sea surface temperatures continue to warm We will see more intense storms of this nature How many more you know, it's it's like rolling a dice, you know If the dice is a little bit loaded You can't say every time you roll it exactly how many sixes you're going to get But some but but you know, we are loading it in that direction and when you look at the history of the intensification of These hurricanes and linking that to climate change.

What lessons can you draw from that?

I mean, of course, we remember Hurricane Katrina.

That was a category 5 Hurricane that was what nearly close to 20 years ago now What can you draw from the lessons in the past decade or two?

I mean the important lesson is climate change is making certain types of extreme weather more intense It's also making other kinds of extreme weather less intense in other parts of the world and we are having to cope with a changing climate as a result of Human influence as a result of rising greenhouse gas concentrations, but the really important message I think I'd really like your viewers to get is that this is this is we can stop it We could we could stop global warming within a generation if we put our minds to it the combination of reducing the amount of carbon dioxide we produce from burning fossil fuels and Responsible disposal of the remainder and in that regard I mean Britain's got a pretty good track record of reducing the amount of fossil of carbon dioxide We produce from fossil fuels and the announcement last week of the government that we're going to start Responsibly disposing of carbon dioxide back under the North Sea is also very welcome So there are steps in the right direction, but we've a long way to go.

Okay, Professor Myles Allen Thank you very much for taking us through those elements of the story climate physicists there at the University of Oxford.

Thank you very much Just to say we have more on the developments surrounding Hurricane Milton on the BBC News website where we continue to run a live page It has a live stream as well and there's plenty of updates, of course as we continue to track that storm