National Public Radio ran a segment claiming climate change was to blame for Hurricane Melissa’s severity and its impact on Jamaica. There is no data to justify this claim, and it is not supported by Jamaica’s hurricane history or Atlantic hurricane trends. [emphasis, links added]
Jamaica’s been beset by hurricanes throughout its history, with many causing far more death and destruction than Melissa, and data show no long-term increase in hurricane numbers or intensity in the Atlantic region.
The online description of the NPR radio segment, “Jamaican residents wonder what’s next after climate-change-driven Hurricane Melissa,” summarizes international correspondent Eyder Peralta’s story as, “Hurricane Melissa left Jamaica reeling, and as scientists tie its unprecedented power to climate change, people are wondering what comes next.”
First, science made no such connection; rather, Peralta asserts it is based on a single, rapidly produced, non-peer-reviewed attribution study.
Undoubtedly, Hurricane Melissa caused terrible damage in Jamaica, causing untold suffering for its people, some of which is touchingly described in Peralta’s story.
Unfortunately, after admitting “scientists are still sifting through the data,” suggesting it is premature to state any conclusions about Melissa with confidence, Peralta then latches onto a rapid attribution report from the climate change-lobbying group World Weather Attribution (WWA) to claim climate change made Hurricane Melissa worse.
“There’s a clear climate change imprint on Melissa,” the University of the West Indies’ professor Michael Taylor told Peralta, citing the WWA group paper he contributed to as evidence.
The WWA study asserted that Hurricane Melissa’s rapid intensification was made six times more likely because of climate change.
Among the evidence the paper cites as providing a causal link to climate change are Melissa’s warmer seas in the Caribbean. Yet, the Caribbean seas have always been warm [or warmer].
Recent years modest increase in warmth is a result of a combination of factors, including a recent, extended El Nino which warmed the Atlantic where Melissa formed, the huge 2022 Hunga Tonga undersea volcanic eruption which injected an unprecedented amount of the primary greenhouse gas water vapor into the atmosphere, and newly changed shipping rules that have reduced ship emissions, meaning more sunlight is reaching the ocean surface and warming the seas.
There is no significant long-term trend in ocean warming, but there has been a short-term spike.
Yet this fact, along with the myriad factors contributing to hurricane formation, was ignored in the WWA study and in the climate model outputs, on which the study’s findings are based.
As detailed at Climate Realism here and here, for example, warm water is only one factor necessary for hurricane formation, strength, and longevity.
Looking at Jamaica in particular, it lies in a prime hurricane zone, and with hurricanes being recorded there as long as such phenomena have been tracked with a written record.
Since record-keeping began in the 1700s, Jamaica has been impacted by more than 58 tropical storms or hurricanes. Thankfully, for the island nation, most of those storms dealt it only a glancing blow, with winds from storms passing near but not making direct landfall. Still, even winds and rain from storms’ outer bands can cause significant damage and deaths.
Jamaica’s deadliest storm on record struck in 1722, more than 300 years of global warming ago, when a hurricane of unrecorded strength claimed 400 lives or more.
The deadliest storm since then was 1951’s Hurricane Charlie, which took 152 lives. By contrast, Melissa’s confirmed death toll stands at 45. The next direct hit of a hurricane on Jamaica occurred 37 years later, in 1988, when Category 4 Gilbert struck; to this day, it remains the costliest hurricane on record in Jamaica.
2012’s Hurricane Sandy, a full 24 years after Gilbert was the next hurricane to make direct landfall over the island.
There is no evidence at all that hurricanes are becoming more frequent or severe in or around Jamaica.
In fact, data recorded and/or presented by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) show no statistically significant trend of increasing hurricane strength, frequency, or landfall intensity.
As Climate at a Glance: Hurricanes explains, there has been no increase in either the number or intensity of hurricanes worldwide during the past century, even as global carbon dioxide concentrations have risen sharply.
The IPCC’s most recent Sixth Assessment Report found “low confidence in any long-term trends in hurricane activity.”
Regarding hurricane intensity, data indicate no sustained increase in Accumulated Cyclone Energy, a measure of intensity, over more than 50 years, as detailed in the figure below.
The supposed “rapid intensification” phenomenon cited by WWA and Peralta as proving climate change drove Melissa’s intensity is not new.
As Climate Realism has documented repeatedly, improved satellite monitoring and better detection methods since the 1970s make today’s storms appear more frequent and extreme simply because modern technology captures every detail that earlier weather observers missed.
Earlier storm intensities were also harder to measure, making today’s apparent “increase” partly a result of better weather detection technology, such as satellites, radar, and continuous monitoring.
Past storms were often powerful and intensified rapidly—they just weren’t continuously observed from space or by coastal technology such as NEXRAD Doppler Radar, which didn’t exist before 1990.
Finally, regarding WWA and its rapid attribution reports, Climate Realism has rebutted the mainstream media’s fawning, misplaced promotion of debunked WWA’s reports across dozens of posts here, here, and here, for example.
Rapid attribution studies suffer from multiple defects, including reliance on climate models with known flaws and inadequacies, cherry-picking data to prove an assumed connection between climate change and the natural disaster in question, and the logical fallacy of assuming what one is attempting to prove.
Statistician William Briggs, Ph.D., described the problems with attribution studies in a report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, writing:
“All attribution studies work around the same basic theme. … A model of the climate as it does not exist, but which is claimed to represent what the climate would look like had mankind not ‘interfered’ with it, is run many times. The outputs from these runs are examined for some ‘bad’ or ‘extreme’ event, such as higher temperatures or increased numbers of hurricanes making landfall, or rainfall exceeding some amount.
“The frequency with which these bad events occur in the model is noted. Next, a model of the climate as it is said to exist now is run many times. This model represents global warming. The frequencies from the same bad events in the model are again noted. The frequencies between the models are then compared. If the model of the current climate has a greater frequency of the bad event than the imaginary (called ‘counterfactual’) climate, the event is said to be caused by global warming, in whole or in part.”
Fundamentally, attribution science cannot prove human influence on the weather via climate change, because it assumes that any given weather event is influenced by climate change.
In other words, the model is designed with the outcome in mind, making it impossible for them to “discover” anything to the contrary.
In the end, Peralta’s story is full of hype and unverified assertions about Hurricane Melissa but is short on historical context and hurricane data. Rapid attribution is a recent invention and not an established scientific discipline.
Rapid attribution studies are not peer-reviewed, and the best evidence suggests their quick release is timed to promote the narrative that “climate change causes everything bad” by capitalizing on headline-grabbing, tragic weather events.
Such studies are predetermined to find a link to climate change, without reference to long-term real-world data or historical regional context. Attribution studies are the scientific community’s equivalent of a fortune teller’s crystal ball proclamations at a carnival sideshow.
NPR, if it had any journalistic integrity as a supposed news organization, should do some fact-checking, for example, by looking beyond a single novel study’s claims before publishing a story asserting that a long-term shift in climate caused a single weather-terrible event.
This is especially important since real people are suffering and deserve honest answers, and long-term trends undermine any such connection.
Read more at Climate Realism
