By Bryan Merchant for VICE News.

Friday morning, Hurricane Patricia became the strongest storm ever recorded. It did so at a rate so rapid that it took scientists by surprise: Its winds grew from 60 MPH to a sustained 200 MPH in just over a day’s time. As it nears the southwestern coast of Mexico, the National Hurricane Center is calling Patricia “potentially catastrophic.” And it almost certainly wouldn’t be so powerful if human activity hadn’t warmed the waters to near-record temperatures before it developed.

“Patricia was fueled by ocean waters that were a near-record-warm 87 F, which would not have been so warm without climate change,” Jeff Masters, the director of meteorology at the Weather Underground, wrote me in an email. “It is fair to say climate change increased the odds of getting such a strong storm.”

This year has so far been the hottest on record for land and ocean surfaces alike; just this Wednesday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a report announcing that last month was the hottest September yet recorded. NOAA explained that the “oceans were also much warmer than average across vast expanses, with much of the eastern and equatorial Pacific Ocean, the Barents Sea in the Arctic, and large parts of the western North Atlantic and Indian Ocean record warm.”