Climate Alarmists rejoice! A Devastating storm hits Caribbean

Written by climatediscussionnexus.com on October 31, 2025. Posted in Current News

After all the experts and all the models predicted above-average hurricane activity, as of late October we saw just 4 hurricanes of any sort and 3 majors.

Now comes Hurricane Melissa which “could be the strongest to hit Jamaica since records began in 1851” unless it isn’t, so yes, weather is unpredictable.

In the spirit of “evidence-based decision-making”, a term which here at least does not mean “left-wing no matter what the evidence actually says”, we do think it appropriate for those blowing most loudly back in May and June to say something about having been wrong about what would happen and thus presumably at least somewhat wrong about why.

Unless the usual suspects are clinging on for dear death and telling you to ignore months of wrong predictions and focus only on the one that finally goes their way.

Heatmap Daily in particular had been trying to supplement the failing wind through regular hyperventilating, with almost daily emails saying stuff like:

“A tropical storm brewing in the Caribbean is likely to strengthen into a named storm in the coming days, bringing deadly flooding and powerful winds”.

And before that:

“A major Pacific storm is drenching California and bringing several inches of snow to Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming • A tropical storm in the Atlantic dumped nearly a foot of water on South Carolina over three days”.

And “While Hurricane Priscilla has weakened to a tropical storm, it’s still battering Baja California with winds of up to 70 miles per hour” and blah blah blah. But it won’t wash us away, because the news that there are storms in the ocean would not even have surprised Odysseus, let alone Sir Humphrey Gilbert. What you need is evidence that they’re getting stronger, more frequent or ideally both. Not ideally in the real world, but in the Wacky World of Alarmism with its agony of victory and thrill of defeat, a jibe we borrow from Elizabeth Kristol regarding another form of radicalism.

And finally they got it. The agony, that is. Not the evidence. The Guardian embraced Melissa with glee:

“Liz Stephens, professor in climate risks and resilience at University of Reading, said: ‘Having now intensified to Category 5, slow-moving Hurricane Melissa has all the ingredients to be a catastrophic storm, with devastating storm-surge, extreme winds and unusually high rainfall accumulations. Communities in Jamaica will need to prepare for potentially unimaginable impacts, and with climate change fuelling stronger storms with higher rainfall totals, this is a stark example for other countries as to what may be in store for them,’ Stephens added.”

Phew. Death and destruction. NBC emailed “BREAKING: Hurricane Melissa makes historic landfall in Jamaica as Category 5 storm”. Historic, no less. Or maybe a bit less, since the related story said:

“Melissa is now one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes on record – and the strongest to ever hit Jamaica. It is ranked first in terms of the strongest landfall with winds of 185mph – tied with the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 and Hurricane Dorian in 2019. Melissa has the second-highest wind speed recorded for an Atlantic hurricane, with 185 mph – tied with four other hurricanes. Only Hurricane Allen of 1980 had stronger winds of 190 mph. It has the third-lowest pressure recorded for an Atlantic hurricane at 892mb – tied with the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935.”

Of course it is not “the strongest to ever hit Jamaica”. We have no idea what hit Jamaica before 1492, and only a rather blurry one for centuries afterward since reasonably reliable records here, including accurate wind speed measurements, date back only around a century. (Wikipedia, for instance, reports that “No Category 5 hurricanes were observed officially before 1924.”) But if you think therefore that there were not any, including in Jamaica… well, you could be a climate journalist.

Melissa looks bad, to be sure. But to take just one example of what really happened in Jamaica even within recorded history:

“August 28, 1722 – The eye of an intense hurricane crossed Port Royal, bringing a 4.9 m (16 ft) storm surge and causing extensive damage throughout the island. Half of the port’s buildings were destroyed, with those built during British rule suffering worse than those built under Spanish rule. Roughly 400 people were killed, and only 4 crew among the 50 ships moored at Port Royal survived. The sinking of the slave ship Kingston alone claimed the lives of two hundred people. Surviving colonists were stricken without basic necessities. The storm’s passage was documented in John Atkins’ A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West-Indies (1723).”

Would a rational person take a bet that it wasn’t Category 5?

When it comes to reliable records for for Atlantic hurricanes overall, “Data for the North Atlantic region remained sparse as late as 1964 due to a lack of complete satellite coverage.” So any series showing an apparent increase from before the mid-1960s must be regarded as at least in part a statistical artefact due to measurement methods, not a real-world one. But even so, it is clear that really strong storms are mercifully rare but unfortunately do happen, and the one in 1935 has not been surpassed.

So it’s not a trend. Instead:

“Officially, the decade with the most Category 5 hurricanes is the 2000s, with eight Category 5 hurricanes having occurred: Isabel (2003), Ivan (2004), Emily (2005), Katrina (2005), Rita (2005), Wilma (2005), Dean (2007), and Felix (2007). The previous decades with the most Category 5 hurricanes were the 1930s and 1960s, with six occurring between 1930 and 1939.”

Takeaway: weather is variable, including the bad kind.

Undaunted, or unschooled, Scientific American tried to manufacture a trend, writing:

“As it bears down on Jamaica, Hurricane Melissa has become the third Category 5 storm of the 2025 Atlantic season – just the second season on record to ever see more than two Category 5 hurricanes. The only other Atlantic season to achieve this feat was the blockbuster one of 2005, which featured four Category 5 storms: Emily, Katrina, Rita and Wilma.”

What they don’t say is how long the record is, or how much variability it shows, or how long a run of data you’d need with that kind of variability to detect a trend. Especially if, say, you decided to look at the trend line for Category 4 and Category 5 hurricanes combined and found, um, nothing.

Which is precisely the issue. If climate change is fuelling storms there should be more of them. So if there aren’t, and there aren’t, just repeating your plausible explanation for something that’s not happening doesn’t make you smart and it doesn’t make you look smart.

As with the constant pronouncements that the coral is moribund, the constant predictions that the hurricanes are coming for us like Valkyrie must at some point undermine the credibility of those making them not just on this one subject but on climate far more broadly. For instance Heatmap which still has not learned to post newsletters online, which is not exactly meteorology science, but as late as September 29 hollered “Atlantic storms approach as shutdown looms” to lure readers to a story saying:

“Everyone in Florida is watching news reports, five-day paths, and brightly-colored maps as one hurricane churns in the Atlantic and a tropical system forming near eastern Cuba and the southeastern Bahamas is expected to become Tropical Storm Imelda within a day or so. What happens if the government shuts down? Do the updates stop coming, during a newly invigorated hurricane season?”

A newly invigorated hurricane season. We don’t even understand why concern for the environment would necessarily link to enthusiasm for bureaucracy, let alone why it would prevent someone from figuring out that “The only other season in the weather satellite era to have no named storm active between the end of August and mid-September was the 1992 season” does not spell newly invigorated, it spells b-u-s-t.

source  climatediscussionnexus.com

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