Scientist urges action after Beryl, links early Category 5 strength to climate shift

Professor Michael Taylor is hoping that the onslaught of Hurricane Beryl is a wake-up call for the unbelievers in climate change that the concept is indeed real

For over a decade, Taylor has sounded the warning about the wrath future storms could bring to the island, and more so the Caribbean, if the world does not adapt to the necessary measures that have been suggested to slow climate change.

When the physicist and dean of the Faculty of Science and Technology at The University of the West Indies, Mona, began preaching years ago that climate change could herald more intense storms, though less frequent, in the Caribbean, many locals scoffed at him.

Last Wednesday, as Hurricane Beryl – the first hurricane in history to reach Category 5 strength in the Atlantic Ocean – unleashed her fury on Jamaica, he said it was confirmation of the long-trumpeted message.

The Jamaican scientist says he is not surprised about the unprecedented results from Hurricane Beryl as he believes it matches near to what he and other climate-change advocates have been warning is to be expected.

“I am surprised on the one hand because there are elements of the unexpected that you see in Beryl,” Taylor told The Gleaner on Sunday, four days after Hurricane Beryl ravaged the island with life-threatening winds and heavy rainfall.

“Beryl has broken a number of records, including being the first Category 5 [hurricane] to form so early in the hurricane season; the rapid intensification that it underwent, moving from a disturbance to a major hurricane in under 48 hours; [and] the fact that it formed so far east. All of these are things that are surprising to everybody. Nobody could say they would have expected those things,” he said.

On the other hand, Taylor said what he is not surprised about is the fact that the “unprecedented” is happening yet again, which he believes is a result of climate change.

“One of the things climate change has been doing is bringing about the unprecedented – things that we label as ‘unprecedented’. … The heat of last year was unprecedented. We have never really lived through that kind of heat before, but we have also seen unprecedented higher sea levels,” explained Taylor, who served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, including as a lead author for the special report on 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming.

“We have seen unprecedented climatic events, so levels of flooding, intense rainfall in short spaces of time, and more and more, what we’ve always been saying about climate change is [that] climate change is inducing things that are unprecedented and almost making them inescapable, and the fact that we have yet another unprecedented event is not surprising,” he said.

The Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1 to November 30. Not only did Hurricane Beryl start forming a month into the season, but it also strengthened into the Atlantic Ocean’s earliest Category 5 storm on record – two months ahead of the norm.

This, Taylor said, could now be a way climate change is manifesting itself.

“Normally, when we are going to get hurricanes in June, we would normally get them out of the Gulf, for example, but to have it formed east of the Caribbean and then have the ability as a hurricane to pass through the Eastern Caribbean, pass through the western Caribbean, and be on its way, those things are surprising,” he told The Gleaner.

He explained that “the unprecedented” storms date back to 2017, when categories 4 and 5 storms, Irma and Maria, made landfall in the Caribbean. They were followed by Dorian in 2019. 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 about increased heat, variability in rainfall patterns, more frequent droughts, intense rainfall, and higher sea levels.

“We spoke about not necessarily more storms, but seeing more intense storms. So all of those are things that we have been saying for quite a while, so all of those, when we see them, they will be new to us. They’ll be unprecedented, but we’ve been trying to preach a story of almost, ‘Listen, we must become prepared because these kinds of unprecedented events, we’re going to see it more and more’,” he said.

The scientist is hoping that Jamaicans have been sufficiently alerted to the changing realities.

“We had a bigger window of opportunity, the kind of onset of this new climate era, so though on the one hand you see what you are talking about coming to pass, you’re not happy to see it coming to pass because it also means that we did not respond adequately,” he said.

He told The Gleaner that nations can still avoid even the worst by at least limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius – or at most 2 degrees warming – but the windows of opportunities are closing.

Taylor says mitigation has to be critical, and Jamaica needs to develop more resilience strategies, with adaptation taken very seriously across all areas of life. (Jamaica Gleaner)

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