Climate change denial can't stand up to Category 5 Hurricane Melissa | Opinion

It’s time to address the elephant in the room. 

By now you’ve seen and read about the devastating impact Hurricane Melissa had on Jamaica. Melissa’s Jamaica landfall was the strongest Atlantic hurricane strike in recorded history, and its minimum barometric pressure was the third lowest. 

And that follows Hurricane Milton last year, which was the most intense Gulf of Mexico hurricane in recorded history. And that followed Hurricane Otis the year before, which was a tropical storm about to hit Mexico that exploded from tropical storm to Category 5 monster in one day. How does a nation prepare for that?

Something is clearly going on, and that something is global warming. 

Warmer oceans, worse storms

I give many lectures on the subject, all science and no politics, and there’s one thing that I always emphasize: The oceans are heating up. A lot. 

Nobody says that warmer ocean waters resulting from climate change causes hurricanes. 

They don’t, and anybody who says so is wrong. Rather, warmer ocean waters are increased fuel for these storms. So, hurricanes that form in already favorable atmospheric conditions are predisposed to be stronger and have a higher chance of experiencing rapid intensification. 

That’s bad, because although our computer models do a good job modeling these storms, their weakest link is the intensity forecast.

Furthermore, every 1°F increase in temperature means a 4% increase in atmospheric water vapor due to more evaporation of ocean water. 

And guess what: That water vapor is what storms use to produce precipitation. More water vapor means more precipitation. Remember Hurricane Harvey, the 2017 Category 4 storm that hit Texas? This slow-moving storm (and there is ongoing research to determine if global warming is causing storms like Harvey and Melissa to slow down) dropped over 40 inches of rain on some communities, with one location receiving 60 inches. 

Think about this: 60 inches of rain is equivalent to roughly 600 inches of snow. And they got that much rain in just four days. 

I vividly remember forecasting this storm. The color table on our weather graphics computer did not go that high. We had to create a color table to show areas getting over 40 inches of forecasted rain. Put simply, we never before had to show a forecast graphic depicting this enormous an amount of rain.

Weather on steroids

I have a great analogy to help you understand all of this. Remember the steroid era in Major League Baseball? Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds set records all over the place for home runs hit. But it’s important to remember that these players were hitting home runs before they were suspected of taking steroids … it’s just that they started hitting the ball farther afterward. (Sosa has never admitted to taking steroids, but says he made “mistakes” during the sport’s steroid era.)

We have put our atmosphere on steroids by changing its composition through the addition of “heat trapping” gases, and warming ocean temperatures are a very basic ramification of our planetary warming.

Of course, hurricanes have happened in the past. Even strong ones. But the warmer ocean temperatures are causing stronger storms. Four of the five Atlantic hurricanes this year were Category 4 or higher storms, and we are very fortunate that the other three did not hit land. 

That’s of little comfort, of course, to the people of Jamaica, nor is the report of Climate Central’s Climate Shift Index showing that the abnormally warm waters which powered Melissa’s intensification were made 600 to 700 times more likely due to global warming.

Many of the scientific projections associated with climate change are coming true. Our future is no longer the future: We are living it now.

Paul Gross was a meteorologist at WDIV-TV for forty years and now runs Gross Weather LLC, a consulting business that provides meteorological expert witness work to the legal field. His climate change lectures, given both locally and nationally, are very popular.

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