During a September 18 segment, Fox & Friends covered the most recent instance of a house collapsing into the Atlantic Ocean — this time on Hatteras Island in North Carolina — and mentioned erosion along the coast, but left out that climate change is contributing to the problem. Sea-level rise and erosion from increasingly severe storms has helped claim 11 other homes in the unincorporated community of Rodanthe, North Carolina.
Fox ignores climate change while covering collapsing houses along the North Carolina coast
Written by Ilana Berger
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From the September 18, 2025, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends
CARLEY SHIMKUS (CO-HOST): A stilt house collapsing on the shore along the Outer Banks of North Carolina this week. It's now the 12th home claimed by the Atlantic Ocean in the past five years. The two-story beach home fell at the north end of Hatteras Island. Thankfully, the home was empty at the time. Officials say recent storms have worsened erosion, leading to more collapses like this. Those are your headlines, guys. Huge home.
AINSLEY EARHARDT (CO-HOST): It's interesting they let them just collapse. They don't destroy them before, knowing this is going to happen.
SHIMKUS: Yeah, that's right. And clearly the ocean is moving up the shore or they wouldn't have built that home in the first place.
EARHARDT: It's a big problem. It's a big problem on the East Coast. And you spend so much to have that beachfront property and then, you know — over time, it's gone.
SHIMKUS: It is, yes.
The Charlotte Observer correctly implicated the role of climate change in its reporting on the home’s destruction, highlighting that Hurricane Erin in August generated “waves as high as 50 feet,” causing “severe erosion in some places along the East Coast.”
The Observer noted that “the home was well away from the ocean and behind a vegetated dune when it was built in 1969. But a series of storms, which have occurred more frequently in recent years due to climate change, carved away the beach and the dune and brought the surf up to the pilings of the home and a string of others to its north and south.”
While the Fox & Friends segment mentioned that worsening storms “have caused erosion,” the network has repeatedly downplayed any connections between hurricanes and climate change, which has been making storms grow rapidly and more intense, destroying homes and businesses. Fox has also downplayed the threat of sea level rise, which occurs “mostly due to a combination of melt water from glaciers and ice sheets and thermal expansion of seawater as it warms,” according to NASA.
As FactCheck.org pointed out, “For every inch of sea level rise, approximately 100 inches of beach are lost, according to NASA oceanographer and climate scientist Josh Willis.”
Trump’s Department of Energy recently published a so-called “critical review” of climate science, which included several climate contrarians as authors and “cherry-picks text, data, and studies that paint an incomplete picture” in order “to suggest rising sea-levels in the US are only due to land-sinking,” according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. The DOE report uses limited information to claim that there is “no obvious acceleration beyond the historical average rate of sea level rise.”
Meanwhile, members of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, which manages the coastal area that was impacted, told The Charlotte Observer that “there are probably dozens of homes endangered on the oceanfront.”