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Professor Michael Taylor hopes that Hurricane Beryl will help people who don’t believe in climate change realise that the concept is real.
Taylor has been warning for more than a decade that future storms could spell disaster for the island and the Caribbean in particular if the world does not take the necessary steps to slow climate change.
A few years ago, when Mona, a physicist and dean of the University of the West Indies’ School of Science and Technology, began claiming that climate change might herald more intense storms in the Caribbean, albeit less frequent, many locals scoffed.
When Hurricane Beryl, the first Atlantic hurricane in history to reach Category 5 intensity, struck Jamaica last Wednesday, he said it confirmed a message that had long been preached.
Not surprised
The Jamaican scientist said he was not surprised by the unprecedented consequences of Hurricane Beryl because he believed it was very much in line with what he and other climate change advocates had warned about.
Taylor told The Gleaners The announcement came four days after Hurricane Beryl slammed into the island on Sunday, bringing life-threatening winds and heavy rainfall.
“Beryl broke several records, including being the first Category 5 hurricane to form early in the season; that it experienced rapid intensification, growing from a disturbance to a major hurricane in less than 48 hours; (and) that it formed so far east. All of these things took everyone by surprise. No one could say they expected any of these things,” he said.
Taylor, on the other hand, said he was not surprised that something “unprecedented” was happening again, something he attributed to climate change.
“One of the things that climate change does is bring unprecedented impacts — we call them ‘unprecedented.’ … The heat last year was unprecedented. We’ve never really experienced this kind of heat before, but we’ve also seen unprecedented sea level rise,” explained Taylor, who served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and was the lead author of the special report on global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius.
“We are witnessing unprecedented climate events, floods, heavy rainfall in a short period of time and so on,” he said. “We have been talking about climate change, which is causing unprecedented events and almost making them inevitable. It is not surprising that we are once again experiencing unprecedented events.”
The Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1 to November 30. Hurricane Beryl not only began to form a month into the season, but also strengthened into the earliest Category 5 storm ever recorded in the Atlantic—two months earlier than normal.
Taylor said this could be a manifestation of climate change.
“Typically when we get hurricanes in June we usually get them out of the Gulf of Mexico, but the fact that it formed in the eastern Caribbean and then had the ability to move as a hurricane through the eastern Caribbean, through the western Caribbean and onwards, those things are surprising,” he told The Gleaners.
He explained that the “unprecedented” storms date back to 2017, when Category 4 and 5 storms Irma and Maria made landfall in the Caribbean. In 2019, Hurricane Dorian followed. Then in 2020, the Greek alphabet had to be used to name Atlantic tropical storms after the regular list of 21 names was exhausted.
Taylor noted that climate scientists have been warning of rising temperatures, changes in rainfall patterns, more frequent droughts, more intense rainfall and rising sea levels.
“We’re not necessarily talking about more storms, but seeing more intense storms. So all of these are things we’ve been saying for a while, so when we see them, they’re all new to us. They’re going to be unprecedented, but we’ve been trying to get the message out there: ‘Listen, we have to be prepared because this is an unprecedented event and we’re going to see it more and more,'” he said.
Scientists hope Jamaicans are fully aware of the changing reality.
“We have a much larger window of opportunity with this new climate era coming, so while on the one hand you see the things you’re talking about coming true, you’re not happy to see it coming true because it also means we’re not responding adequately,” he said.
He said The Gleaners Countries can still avoid the worst-case scenario by limiting global warming to at least 1.5 degrees Celsius (or at most 2 degrees), but the window of opportunity is closing.
Taylor said mitigation measures were critical and Jamaica needed to develop more resilience strategies and take adaptation seriously in all areas of life.
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