In the wake of Hurricane Melissa, everyone should be praying for rapid relief to many who suffered injuries or the loss of loved ones (at least 49 died), homes, businesses, and other property, likely to surpass $8 billion. At the same time, we can be thankful that losses were far lower than they might have been, since its path didn’t include areas with far more people and property.
Having wrought havoc in Jamaica as a Category 5 hurricane, followed by Haiti, eastern Cuba, and parts of the Bahamas (all Cat-3), Melissa was on its way northeast into the open Atlantic, with Bermuda likely to suffer from it as well, though by then it is forecast to be Cat-2.
Predictably, climate activists, media organizations, and others rushed to blame Hurricane Melissa’s exceptional strength, and the deaths and damage it caused, on manmade climate change.
PBS News Hour reported on “How climate change is fueling Hurricane Melissa's ferocity,” saying, “The warming of the world's oceans caused by climate change helped double Hurricane Melissa's wind speed in less than 24 hours over the weekend, climate scientists said Monday.”
In “Why Hurricane Melissa turned into a supercharged monster,” CNN claimed, “Experts highlight that this scenario serves as a stark illustration of how climate change can amplify the planet's most formidable storms, enhancing them with heat and moisture until they become nearly unrecognizable compared to historical Atlantic hurricanes.”
Climate Central, which frames climate change as an “existential threat,” alleged, “Human-caused climate warming is making all of Melissa's dangers worse.”
Not surprisingly, U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, announced, “As the climate crisis escalates, each year we see more storms like Melissa devastate our neighbors. Politicians who continue to deny climate science or block bold climate action are directly responsible for fueling more deadly hurricanes.”
The Revolving Door Project, politically aligned with progressive and Democratic causes, claimed, “By further expanding planet-heating fossil fuel pollution, the Trump administration and its Republican allies in Congress are condemning people around the world to more frequent and severe extreme weather, including rapidly intensifying monster hurricanes.”
Such claims, however, are at best badly exaggerated, and in large part simply false.
Yes, Hurricane Melissa was among the most powerful Atlantic storms ever recorded. But records even of landfalling hurricanes go back only about 150 years, and of hurricanes that never make landfall, only about 60 years. There is geological and archeological evidence that more powerful landfalling storms have occurred in centuries and millennia past—long before any human-induced climate change.
Further, even in the historically documented period, Melissa is not without parallel. The recorded storm with the highest sustained wind speed was Allen, in 1980 (about a decade before manmade warming was measurable), with winds of 190 miles per hour. Melissa is tied with the Labor Day Hurricane (1935), Gilbert (1988), Wilma (which passed directly over my home in 2005), and Dorian (2019) for the next-highest sustained wind speed of 185 mph.
If storms of that strength had happened before manmade warming, we need not blame it for the strength of storms after it.
Still, Jamaican Politician Colin Bogle, an advisor for Mercy Corps, said, “There is a sense of frustration that Jamaica continues to suffer the severe impacts of a climate crisis we did not instigate.” Namibia Press Agency reported that British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said the arrival of Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica shows the importance of the upcoming COP30 climate summit.
Anne Rasmussen, Lead Negotiator of the Alliance of Small Island States at United Nations Climate Talks, insisted, “extreme weather events like Hurricane Melissa heighten the urgency for decisive action on climate change.” Organization of American States Secretary General Albert R. Ramdin claimed, “extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and intense due to the impacts of climate change.”
Nonetheless, as I showed above, the data show otherwise.
Meteorologist Joe D’Aleo and climate statistician Kevin Dyaaratna surveyed the historical evidence and concluded in their report Keeping an Eye on the Storms: An Analysis of Trends in Hurricanes Over Time, available from the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, that “regardless of increases in global temperatures, there have been no commensurate increases in hurricane frequency and intensity over the past century. … Cyclical changes in hurricane activity are much more adequately explained by natural factors, such as El Niño, La Niña, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.”
E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D., is President of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation and the author of numerous books and articles.
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