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hhurricane melissa smashed its way through the caribbean This week, with 185pmh winds destroying anything in its path,
Dozens of people have died and billions of dollars in damage have been caused category 5 hurricane made my way through JamaicaCuba, Dominican Republic, haiti And Bahamas.
However, while it has been dubbed the storm of the century, forecasters have warned that it could be anything but. Experts say climate change means storms of this severity are becoming more common.
A Deep Sky ReportA project in Canada that aims to reduce global carbon levels found that the frequency of extreme storm rainfall has increased by 300 percent over the past four decades.
Severe storm surges that used to occur once every 100 years will now occur every 25 years. “These are no longer rare events,” the report warns. “They will occur with greater frequency and severity. This is our new normal.”
“Climate change is having an impact on each other, and that’s having an impact on this storm,” said Max Dugan-Knight, a climate data scientist at Deep Sky. “As we continue to warm our oceans, hurricanes will become stronger and deadlier.”
Researchers at Imperial College’s Grantham Institute estimated that Melissa was 10 percent stronger, and four times more likely, to have caused a global warning.
In the cold world, a Melissa-level storm used to occur once every 8,000 years, but with 1.3 degrees Celsius of warming, it is now expected to occur once every 1,700 years.
Scientists at the nonprofit Climate Central estimate that the “rapid intensification” conditions that allowed the storm to grow so quickly — jumping from Category 4 to 5 in 24 hours — became at least 500 to 800 times more likely to occur due to human-caused climate change.
Alex DaSilva, AccuWeather’s chief hurricane expert, says hurricane conditions thrive at around 26C. On the day Melissa arrived in Jamaica, the sea was warmer than usual, with a temperature of 30C. The conditions serve as “jet fuel” for the growing animal.
“You’re talking about 4C above what’s required for a hurricane,” says DaSilva. “It was about 2 degrees Celsius, even 3 degrees Celsius in some areas, warmer than average in that area for this time of year. Unfortunately, we’re going to see more of that.”
According to Mr. DaSilva, research shows that “hurricanes are bursting at the seams” with increasing episodes of intense intensity over the past 10 to 15 years.
Although research is still underway on whether the number of hurricanes will increase, studies have already shown that the hurricanes that do occur are likely to become more rapidly intense and stronger in the future due to warmer sea surface temperatures.
Given the changing nature of such storms, there have been suggestions that the classification system should be reviewed. Melissa made landfall as a Category 5 hurricane, the highest level. Higher ranges don’t exist because once the infrastructure is destroyed, faster higher speeds don’t matter.
“Once the house is gone, it’s gone, no matter how hard the wind is blowing,” said Dr. Ralph Toomey, co-director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change.
“It is the most powerful hurricane to strike Jamaica, it is tied for the most powerful tropical storm to hit the Atlantic Basin in history, and it broke the record for the highest wind speed ever recorded in the region.”
The severity of Melissa has again highlighted the need for joint international efforts to tackle climate change.
Britain’s Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper told her cabinet colleagues this week that the storm underlined the importance of the upcoming COP30 summit in Brazil, saying “people most affected by climate change are unable to lift their islands and move them out of the path of incoming storms”.
Scientists have long warned that vulnerable countries, which contribute relatively little to global carbon emissions, will have to pay the price of human-induced emissions. Climate change,
Jamaica – a victim of what the British Red Cross has termed an “unprecedented catastrophe” in Melissa – contributes a negligible 0.02 per cent of global climate emissions.
However, conservative estimates suggest that the island – which has an annual GDP of less than $20 billion – faces billions of dollars in costs to rebuild its dilapidated infrastructure, taking at least a decade or more to recover.