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Hurricane Melissa was no “natural disaster.” It was the predictable result of choices made by powerful interests that continue to profit from a warming planet.
The wind began howling shortly after midnight on a Tuesday morning. My husband and I gathered the children and moved them into our designated “safe space.” We couldn’t sleep. The roof groaned. The windows rattled. By dawn, the sun broke through to reveal the aftermath. Debris and fallen trees littered the area around our home, but we were fortunate—though we’d lost power, our house was intact. But as I scrolled through the images now flooding social media, primarily from the western side of the island, my emotions swung from relief to despair to sorrow. Black River, Savanna-la-Mar, Santa Cruz, Treasure Beach, Montego Bay, and many other communities were devastated.
Hurricane Melissa, a Category 5 storm at landfall, approached Jamaica slowly before drifting westward along the southern coast. Meteorologists struggled to predict its path. The storm’s slow crawl and eventual path across Jamaica brought something even more dangerous: hours of torrential rain, widespread flooding, and destructive winds.
It’s already considered among the most powerful Atlantic hurricanes in recent history. Yet as the media breathlessly warned of the dangers, few spoke of the connection between this storm and the climate crisis. We kept hearing the term “natural disaster.” Hurricane Melissa, however, was anything but natural.
While hurricanes are natural hazards, the scale of destruction we now face is man-made. Over the past century, the burning of coal, oil, and gas has supercharged our atmosphere with greenhouse gases, trapping heat and warming the oceans that fuel storms like Melissa. Warmer seas mean more intense hurricanes, heavier rainfall, and slower-moving systems that linger and devastate. Meteorologists continuously emphasized how warm the Caribbean Sea was before Melissa made landfall, and how deep the warm water extended, fueling the hurricane.
As the media breathlessly warned of the dangers, few spoke of the connection between this storm and the climate crisis.
While fossil fuel companies have known about the correlation between the warming and a changing climate for decades, they have spent billions sowing doubt, funding misinformation, and lobbying against climate policies that could have curbed emissions. Their profits have come at the expense of our safety and our future. Countries like Jamaica, responsible for less than one percent of global emissions, are left to shoulder the costs of adaptation, recovery, and rebuilding. Longer recovery times and deeper economic strain are becoming the norm.
So, no, Hurricane Melissa was not a “natural disaster.” It was the predictable result of choices made by powerful interests that continue to profit from a warming planet. If global emissions are not drastically reduced urgently, these events will only escalate.
After a disaster, we often applaud those who are able to recover quickly. But we cannot just be resilient in the face of climate chaos —we must be climate resilient. This type of resilience goes further: it’s about the capacity of individuals, communities, and ecosystems to anticipate, prepare for, and respond to the impacts of the climate crisis. That ability to recover means more than rebuilding roads, bridges, hospitals, schools, and homes. It means enforcing environmental laws that prevent unsafe development, investing in nature-based solutions, and ensuring that recovery reaches everyone. It also means supporting community-led adaptation initiatives that are rooted in local knowledge and collective care.
Preparedness must become a culture, not a scramble, before a storm makes landfall. That includes maintaining drainage systems year-round, preserving wetlands that buffer storm surges, enforcing no-build zones and ensuring that technical experts, including meteorologists, hydrologists, and climate scientists—not just politicians—play visible roles in guiding public communication and action.
Hurricane Melissa forces us to confront this issue of climate justice. That’s why the Caribbean Climate Justice Alliance, a coalition of grassroots leaders, creatives, academics, and activists, is calling for bold, unified, justice-centered action at COP30 happening right now in Brazil. The message to world leaders is clear:
This message reflects the lived realities of people across our islands. Hurricane Melissa has reminded us of our vulnerability, but also of our strength, our knowledge, and our capacity to lead. In the coming weeks and months, as relief turns to recovery, we must also keep an eye on transformation. The choices we make now about how we rebuild our towns and cities, as well as how we support farmers, fishers, and community groups will determine whether the next storm brings the same level of devastation.
Let Hurricane Melissa mark not just a moment to rebuild, but a turning point for radical and just changes that are long overdue.
A system rooted in the exploitation of natural resources and labor in the name of corporate profits requires grotesque levels of inequality—all of which could be seen both before and after Hurricane Melissa slammed into Jamaica.
Kingston buzzed with feverish preparations and anxious alerts in the days before Melissa, a powerful Category 5 hurricane, made landfall earlier this week on the island of Jamaica. Supermarkets and hardware stores endured the crush of customers scrambling to stockpile water, food, and other supplies while residents boarded up windows and cut away vulnerable branches from hulking mango trees.
Even for a Caribbean capital city that is no stranger to the perennial threat of hurricanes, the alarming forecasts about Melissa's steady approach and certain intensification put communities across the city on edge. Throughout the island, which has had its share of impacts from deadly tropical weather, including Hurricane Beryl just last year, there was a palpable feeling that Melissa might be a different kind of storm.
"All we can do is try to be prepared," said Kevin, a local handyman who lives in Portmore, an urban center on Kingston's outskirts. "We can only do so much to get ready for it. The rest is in God's hands."
Melissa made weather history as one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes to ever make landfall. As it moved into Jamaica's southwestern coast, the storm's 185-mph sustained winds and sub-900 barometric pressure left meteorologists in awe and Jamaicans under the dark howling shadow of a monster churning over their heads. Yet, as horrifying as Melissa's fury was this week, its destructive strength follows a pattern that has become all too unsurprising on a planet subjected to entirely preventable climate chaos.
"This is actually a complete catastrophe, and it’s really quite terrifying," Jamaican-British climate activist Mikaela Loach told Democracy Now! "And it also makes me quite angry that it doesn’t have to be this way. This has been caused by the climate crisis, by fossil fuel companies. I think it’s important that we’re not just devastated and sad about this, but also that we are angry and direct that anger towards the people who are responsible."
While Hurricane Melissa may be called a natural disaster, the conditions that make super storms like Melissa possible are anything but natural. As Loach and just about every climate scientist on Earth point out, the unprecedented warmth of ocean waters act like fuel for tropical cyclones, supercharging them to the point that Melissa was able to double its wind speeds in under 24 hours. Such rapid hurricane intensification is almost unheard of and is the result of unnaturally warm seawater that extends deep below the surface – water temperatures that are themselves directly linked to the fossil fuel industry and an economic system built around its carbon emissions.
That system, rooted in the exploitation of natural resources and labor in the name of corporate profits, also requires grotesque levels of inequality, which could be seen both before and after Hurricane Melissa slammed into Jamaica.
It was, of course, the wealthiest of communities that enjoyed the means and resources to prepare and weather the storm. From the gated communities of New Kingston where residents quickly summoned workers to close their built-in storm shutters and fuel up generator tanks to the high-end hotels and office buildings outfitted with hurricane-proof glass, there stood one end of Jamaican society girding for Melissa's wrath. On the other end, representing a much larger portion of the Jamaican people, were the poor and working-class communities with far fewer means to prepare for the tempest. From Kingston and beyond, this included thousands of Jamaicans living in ramshackle housing, with corrugated tin roofs that turned into propeller blades thrown into the air by 130-mph wind gusts. It included the fishing villages of Port Royal and other coastal areas, scrambling to shore up boats and flee inland away from the devastating storm surge. It included the shanty neighborhoods on the edge of waterways and canals, prone to severe flooding, as well as hillside hamlets perched along the steep slopes of Jamaica's Blue Mountains that were swept away by dangerous landslides. Then there are the many rural areas that are likely to remain without power and communications for many weeks, along with the farming communities whose crops have been wiped out by the storm.
All of these people were placed in the path of a storm whose destructive power was exacerbated by the climate emergency of the corporate elite and wealthy nations whose profit-obsessed industries have turbocharged the Caribbean's hurricane season.
Just a few days removed from Melissa's torrent of deadly rainfall and winds, the extent of damage and fatalities are yet to be known. In the western parishes of the island where the eyewall of Melissa came ashore, entire communities have been cut off from civilization, unreachable by destroyed telecommunications networks and roads that have been washed away. Many of these communities, lying near the southern coast from 60 to 120 miles west of Kingston, are dealing with widespread structural failure, including flattened homes and roofs sheared off many buildings. In addition to relief operations being mobilized by the Jamaican government, efforts are under way among residents on the east side of the island to gather and transport donated supplies to communities that bore the brunt of Melissa. And the urgency is building for those communities as the shock and hunger have set in, along with reports of looting, i.e., acts of basic human survival. While staying alive in the coming days and weeks is the preoccupation for survivors in these hard-hit areas, the daunting months of clean-up and rebuilding ahead compounds the crippling hardship they are carrying right now.
Back in Kingston, the economic and infrastructural disparities seen in the lead-up to the storm persist in its aftermath. While more than 70 percent of the island remains without electricity, some of the wealthiest parts of Kingston – those that were armed with generators and thus suffered less than a few hours or minutes without lights in their homes – seem to be among the first communities with restored grid power. On the other hand, many neighborhoods within the poorer sections of Kingston continue to have no power and, in many cases, no running water.
Such is the nature of capitalism and its attendant regime of climate disasters, bringing the devastation of extreme weather patterns – induced by the excessive greenhouse gas emissions of rich nations – upon the people of smaller nations who are the least responsible for global climate changes. The disparate impacts are felt on a global scale and at the local level among classes within affected regions.
Disasters like Hurricane Melissa have historically been used by business interests to remake entire cities into free-market dystopias, displacing poorer communities to make way for investment opportunities. The market vultures of what author and activist Naomi Klein calls disaster capitalism may soon be circling Jamaica, poised to prey upon the storm's victims and profit from the wreckage.
In fact, climate capitalists are already watching post-Melissa Jamaica as a test case for bond markets. The Jamaican government was recently issued a $150-million "catastrophe bond" which appears set for a full payout to partially cover rebuilding efforts. These bonds may offer a temporary solution for climate-vulnerable countries but, as property insurers have increasingly pulled out of high-risk areas in the path of extreme weather and natural disasters, it seems likely that U.S. and European investors will become more reluctant to buy in to catastrophe bonds for hurricane-prone areas like Jamaica as such disasters inevitably become more common. In any event, the damage from Melissa will total far more than $150 million and Jamaica will need to take on more debt from global financial institutions to rebuild roads and infrastructure. This includes the more standard World Bank loans which have traditionally kept countries like Jamaica under the neocolonial boot of wealthy nations, with loans conditioned on exploitative trade policies, privatization, and gutted public services within poorer, indebted countries.
So, while Jamaica and Hurricane Melissa fade from headlines over the next week or so, the destructive forces of capitalism and Mother Nature's vengeance will continue to collide over the island.
The more carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, the more we heat up the planet, and the fiercer we make the hurricanes and cyclones.
Hurricane Melissa is the most devastating storm to hit Jamaica in recorded history, CNN reports. It rapidly intensified over the past few days, with its winds reaching 185 miles per hour at the time of landfall. This intensification is a feature of hot water, and the Caribbean in that area is hot, at about 86.1°F or 30.1°C, much higher than it would have been 50 years ago.
Hot water also puts more moisture into the atmosphere, which the storm dumps when it makes landfall, causing massive flooding. Jamaican reporters trying to cover the maelstrom reported being unable to get to affected areas because the roads are flooded.
Only three other such Atlantic storms have reached 185 m/h, and only one has exceeded it. This is the first such monster to sweep into Jamaica. Of course, it is hardly the island’s first big hurricane. Category 4 Beryl hit last July. But this one was a Godzilla, a Category 5.
President Donald Trump calls climate change a “hoax,” and 51% of Americans still say in polling that climate change is not a serious threat. The slightly good news is that Gallup reports that an unprecedented 48% of Americans now say that global warming will pose a serious threat to their way of life sometime in their lifetimes, up from 44% last year. The reason that everybody doesn’t say this (since it is manifestly true) is that a vast apparatus of propaganda by Big Oil, the Republican Party (there, I’ve repeated myself), and Saudi Arabia and Russia floods the airwaves and social media constantly. Even news outlets that don’t deny our climate breakdown seldom make the connection between people-caused climate change and the billion-dollar natural disasters that increasingly strike us annually.
Without people-caused climate breakdown, the winds instead would have been about 168 miles per hour.
Oneal Robinson of St. Elizabeth Parish said the houses were full of water, according to the Jamaica Star: “Beryl was terrible, but this is about three times worse than Beryl. I have never experienced anything like this. Melissa is giving St. Elizabeth a flogging. Some persons have lost their roofs here in Mountainside, and I know Treasure Beach is also getting a beating.”
Indeed, in many parishes all the buildings lost their roofs.
Beryl knocked out electricity for weeks, and Melissa will, too. Already, 77% of Jamaica Public Service customers are without electricity, some 530,000 people.
Half of the utility poles that hold up electrical wires in Westmoreland were knocked down by the winds.
The Jamaica Star says that fierce winds ripped off roofs, sent debris hurtling through the air, and caused significant damage to four big hospitals. When a natural disaster hits, you need hospitals, but what if it hits them, too? The Black River Hospital was completely destroyed.
Eminent climate scientist Michael E. Mann points out that burning coal, fossil gas, and petroleum heated up the water, which then increased the peak wind speed by 10% above what it would otherwise have been. That is, without people-caused climate breakdown, the winds instead would have been about 168 miles per hour.
Here’s the trick. The destructive potential of an increase in wind speeds is exponential, not serial. It doesn’t go 1, 2, 3, 4. It jumps. So 185 m/h winds are fully 33% more destructive than than 168 m/h winds are.
Why were this hurricane’s wind speeds so high? Because hot water generates hurricanes, and the hotter it is, the more powerful the storm it generates. People, by burning fossil fuels, have added 1°C. (1.8°F) to the temperature of the oceans since about 1750 before the Industrial Revolution.
The more carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, the more we heat up the planet, and the fiercer we make the hurricanes and cyclones. The hurricanes’ intensity has necessitated the creation of a new Category 6 storm because the old scale is inadequate to our climate breakdown reality.
Michael E. Mann and his colleague Peter Hotez have explained the climate change denial scam, its origins, and its threat to humanity in their book Science Under Siege.