Hurricane Beryl's Impact Reinforces Urgency of Addressing Climate Change, Says Professor Michael Taylor

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.