When the winds finally slowed, Jamaica looked like a shredded map. Roofs lay scattered like torn paper. Bridges bent under invisible weight. The coastline had become a wound.

The smell of salt and diesel hung in the air, and piles of mangled metal marked where houses once stood. Twenty-five thousand people were in shelters, and the UN called it “a level of devastation never seen before.” Across the island, families left everything behind, haunted by a nightmare they already knew was coming.

Because Hurricane Melissa was nothing but the expected monster of a supercharged atmosphere.

At its peak, Melissa struck Jamaica with 298 km/h (185 mph) winds, tying the 1935 Labor Day Hurricane as the strongest landfalling Atlantic hurricane on record. It became the most intense late-season storm ever recorded in the Atlantic basin — a statistical ghost made flesh. By the time it tore through Haiti and Cuba, it had killed at least 40 people and caused over $52 billion in damage.

While the U.S. dispatched a limited disaster team, relief efforts relied on volunteer meteorologists and scrambled NGO networks. My friend Francisco is among those still displaced. He was on a holiday trip before the hurricane hit. Now his messages arrive only sporadically. He is the one who tells me the air smells, paradoxically, like diesel.

It’s easy to treat these tragedies as weather stories. But this is not weather. The people least responsible for the emissions heating the oceans are the ones living through their consequences: without insurance, without political leverage, without a way out. The winds that flattened houses in Montego Bay and tore power lines from Havana weren’t random.

This is climate physics meeting inequality, powered by human choices.

The Physics of a Hot Tub

Melissa’s power came straight out of the water.

The ocean has absorbed 90% of the excess heat from human emissions. That’s why we’re seeing not just more hurricanes, but stronger ones: storms that rapidly intensify and hold their strength longer. In the past, hurricanes slowed when they hit cooler patches of ocean. Now, those cool patches barely exist.

Beneath its swirling core, the Caribbean Sea was 1.4°C (2.5°F) hotter than normal, heat made up to 900 times more likely because of human-caused climate change, according to Climate Central. And that heat wasn’t just at the surface — it extended deep below, providing an enormous reservoir of energy to fuel the storm’s explosion into a Category 5 monster.

In the scientific shorthand, this is “rapid intensification”: when a hurricane’s wind speed jumps by at least 56 km/h (35 mph) in 24 hours. Melissa did it twice. Meteorologists called it “an extreme version of rapid intensification.”

Translation: the atmosphere is now turbocharged for chaos.

Warm water acts like lighter fluid. Evaporation injects moisture into the air. That moisture condenses into heat. The storm feeds on it, converting the planet’s fever into rotation. Every degree of extra heat means faster winds, heavier rain, higher tides, longer floods.

As Brian Soden, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Miami, said in Inside Climate News, Melissa is “a textbook example of what we expect in terms of how hurricanes respond to a warming climate.”

A textbook the world refuses to read, until it hits our shores.

A Dark Ceiling to This Math

Attribution science (the field linking specific events to climate change) is often treated like an academic footnote. In the Caribbean, it’s rent due.

The Imperial College Storm Model (IRIS) simulated millions of tropical cyclones across versions of Earth: one with pre-industrial carbon levels, one with today’s. In that cooler world, a hurricane as severe as Melissa would have hit Jamaica only once every 8,000 years. Today, it’s once every 1,700. Fourfold increase , and a guarantee that such storms are no longer “once in a lifetime.”

The rapid attribution study found climate change made Melissa four times more likely and boosted wind speeds by about 7%. Climate Central puts that increase closer to 10%.

Wind damage doesn’t add up; it multiplies. A Category 1 hurricane (121 km/h or 75 mph winds) doubling to Category 2 (161 km/h or 100 mph) doesn’t cause 33% more damage. It can cause 10 times more. Destruction scales exponentially: faster winds tear through structures, flood coastlines, and spawn tornadoes.

So when climate change boosts a hurricane’s winds “just” 10%, that small jump can double total damage. A roof that might hold at 266 km/h (165 mph) gets ripped off at 293 km/h (182 mph). A storm surge that floods one block drowns an entire neighborhood at higher speeds.

There’s a dark ceiling to this math: once winds cross extreme Category 5 territory, the damage curve flattens in places with vulnerable infrastructure. Not because the storm is weaker, but because there’s nothing left to destroy.

This isn’t random chaos. Each tenth of a degree added to sea surface temperatures means roughly 3% more moisture in the air; for every degree Celsius of warming, the atmosphere holds up to 7% more water vapor, leading to heavier rainfall, flooding, and amplified disasters.

The physics are simple to add, impossible to escape. When the eye passes above, the quiet is unbearable. The air is heavy, charged, almost apologetic. Francisco said it first-hand.

Climate change made Melissa four times more likely, and it struck a country like Jamaica with a GDP of just $20 billion. Total damages triple that figure. The numbers alone indicate that recovery is almost impossible.