Climate Action
Hurricane Melissa Wasn’t a Surprise – It Was a Warning
November 9, 2025
When he first saw footage of Hurricane Melissa striking the island of Jamaica on October 28, 2025, Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher, remarked that it “looks like it doesn’t even know [the island] is there.”
The storm simply swept through, oblivious to the land, forests, buildings, homes, and people in its path — even as it destroyed them. Before-and-after satellite imagery paints an alarming picture of how the storm decimated the land. Where there were once tall, lush trees and clearly defined city blocks, we now see far-flung debris, in muted colors, lacking the same spirit.
Melissa, since it was named a storm, seemed to be an enigma, one of the slowest moving systems, it kept the experts and people on the tenterhooks. Its path was unpredictable, when it reached Jamaica, strengthened, made a 90 degree turn and rammed Jamaica, its intensity left behind a trail of destruction … The aftermath of Hurricane Jamaica is of apocalyptic proportions.
Amitabh Sharma, Opinion Editor and editor of Arts and Education, The Gleaner, Jamaica
Melissa was the strongest hurricane in modern history to hit the Caribbean islands, and, as it struck Jamaica, it was a Category 5, the most dangerous ranking on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale which classifies hurricanes based on maximum sustained wind speed and potential property damage. It has since slowed down, and become a Category 2.
To date, 49 people have been confirmed dead in Jamaica, Haiti, and Cuba, while 735,000 Cubans and 28,000 Jamaicans were ordered to leave their homes.
Melissa’s destruction was witnessed globally, with many describing the damage as “shocking” or “unimaginable”. However, climate experts highlight rising global temperatures are creating ideal conditions for more intense hurricanes to form. The true tragedy isn’t the storm’s surprise but our ongoing dangerous ignorance of the increasing likelihood of more shocking and unimaginable storms to come.
Boiling Waters
In the scientific community, it’s well-established that climate change intensifies natural disasters. Hurricanes in particular draw energy from warm waters, so as global temperatures rise, it becomes more likely that a given storm will have higher wind speeds and levels of rainfall. Studies show that climate change intensified Hurricane Helene, which struck Florida in September of 2024, by increasing its wind speed by 13 miles per hour and its rainfall by 10-50%. That same year, Hurricane Milton formed due to “unusually warm sea surface temperatures…[which] were made up to 400 to 800 times more likely by climate change.”
But the general public might not recognize these dangers. In Great Britain, most people support net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, but half “rarely” or “never” talk about it publicly. In America, people often try to normalize the abnormally destructive power of recent extreme weather events and disasters — not always out of malice, but often out of fear. This means that after the extreme flooding in Texas’s Hill Country in July 2025, which caused catastrophic damage and loss of life, many residents and locals said things like “[they] get flooding all the time.”
This response often comes not from indifference but from fear and a coping mechanism of normalizing repeated disasters. Despite the severity, such attitudes can make it harder to push urgent climate action, especially as similar patterns of hesitation or regression appear in other countries like Canada and Mexico.
But denial won’t change the fact that what’s happening to our climate isn’t normal. In the past, a hurricane as exceptionally powerful as Melissa would have only happened once every 8,000 years, but climate change has made it four times more likely. In addition, as it moved through the Atlantic Ocean before hitting Jamaica, it went through two spikes in wind speed and intensity caused by abnormally warm ocean waters. And these conditions will create more monstrous hurricanes in the future if nothing is done.
Hurricane Melissa evidently is the manifestation of climate change and global warming, one is afraid that these ‘once in a century’ occurrences may become an annual affair, unless we do the right thing to bring back Earth before the situation reaches a point of no return.
Amitabh Sharma, Opinion Editor and editor of Arts and Education, The Gleaner, Jamaica
The Human Impact
As of Friday, November 7, around 45% of Jamaicans across 77% of Jamaica did not have electricity due to the hurricane’s impact on national power lines.
It is going to be very long and treacherous road to recovery for Jamaica; physical infrastructure would be replaced eventually, but the mental scars are going to be lifelong … for those who lived this ordeal firsthand and their loved ones, who for days didn’t know how and where their family and friends were.
Amitabh Sharma, Opinion Editor and editor of Arts and Education, The Gleaner, Jamaica
In Massachusetts, Delroy Allen, a high school tennis coach, was unable to contact his family in the country in the aftermath of the hurricane. He’s seen pictures of devastation from his hometown, but can’t reach his family to find doubt if they are safe. A Jamaican chef in Atlanta also feared for his sixteen-year-old daughter after he saw photos of St. Elizabeth, the parish most directly affected by the hurricane, where most homes no longer have a roof. Richard Solomon — the mayor of Black River, a town described as “ground zero” for Hurricane Melissa — struggles with losing both his car and roof to flooding.
Because of stories like this, and the widespread images of Hurricane Melissa’s impact on social media, many individuals, NGOs, and nations have offered their support. The Red Cross is providing shelter, and its Restoring Family Links program can help separated relatives find each other (family members can call 1-844-782-9441, or talk to a member of a Red Cross shelter, to do this). Additionally, Great Britain is giving 2.5 million pounds, and the United States is sending teams to provide direct aid (though, because the current administration shut down the agency that normally coordinated aid, USAID, it may not be as effective).
Stafford Geohagan, a Brixton restaurateur with family in Jamaica, believes that after Jamaica has wired to save its citizens in immediate peril, and has time to assess the full extent of the hurricane’s impact, the country will “rise up” from this crisis — more united.
We will get it done. So keep the positive outlook, keep hope alive, and we will get through this, and we will rebuild better.
Dr. The Most Honourable Andrew Michael Holness, Jamaican Prime Minister
Talking About Disaster
But this raises a question – how should we talk about disaster? On the one hand, it’s completely understandable that the leader of a country wants his people to feel hopeful. On the other hand, this notion of “rebuilding” feels at odds with the reality that Jamaica, as a low-lying island, is vulnerable to more climate-related disasters that will continue to occur as it recovers from this one.
According to Dr. Michael Taylor, a professor of climate science at the University of the West Indies, one reason why Jamaica mobilized so well to prepare for Hurricane Melissa was because of its history with hurricanes — specifically, he mentions Hurricane Beryl, a Category 4 hurricane that struck last year, killed four people, and cut off access to drinkable water for 1 in 5 people.
Climate change is not distant. It’s personal and it’s real.
Professor. Michael Taylor, Dean of the Faculty of Science and Technology and the Director of the Climate Studies Group, The University of the West Indies (UWI)
It may be hard for anyone to talk about this as a pattern, when everyone — in or outside Jamaica, or the other affected Caribbean nations — right now needs to believe in recovery.
While some heavily industrialized countries are helping Jamaica, their high greenhouse gas emissions, GHG, means they are some of the same counties most at fault for causing climate change and by default the rise in ever more powerful hurricanes.
What we have to do now is find ways of having meaningful conversations about how we can all work together to mitigate GHG emissions and slow climate change down. With COP30 just kicking off in Belém, Brazil – there has never been a more urgent and critical time to do it. What the world needs now, especially island nations like Jamaica, is meaningful action not just more talking.
A crucial part of fighting climate change is shifting away from fossil fuels toward clean, renewable energy like solar and wind, which produce far fewer greenhouse gases. EARTHDAY.ORG, EDO, is committed to supporting and amplifying the growth of these cleaner energy sources. Which is why EDO designated 2025’s Earth Day theme as OUR POWER, OUR PLANET, to highlight the urgent need for renewable energy, calling for a goal of one-third of global electricity to come from renewables by 2030. You can support this movement by signing the ‘Our Power, Our Plane’ petition for a cleaner, healthier future for us all.
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