Our Caribbean Sea simmered all summer. Then Hurricane Melissa became its vessel, and its vehicle. A juggernaut of heat and moisture, it tore into Jamaica with winds nearing 185 mph, tied for the strongest hurricane ever to strike land in the Atlantic.

This was more than a weather event; it was a verdict, a test of thermodynamics and conscience alike. Its energy drew from waters about 1.4 Celsius warmer than usual, a warmth scientists say was made hundreds of times more likely by human-driven climate change.

Hurricane Melissa left behind a trail of devastation in our Caribbean homelands. Experts confirmed that its explosive intensification from 70 mph to 140 mph in one day, then 140 mph to 175 mph the next, was tied to unusually hot seas. It was, in the words of one scientist, “nature reaffirming the basic laws of thermodynamics”.

In September, UN Secretary-General António Guterres had lamented that “the truth is that we have failed”, warning that surpassing the 1.5 degrees Celsius target would unleash “devastating consequences”. For our Caribbean, Hurricane Melissa’s landfall was as eloquent a warning as any speech from the podium of the United Nations.

Hurricane Melissa exposed the widening gulf between scientific certainty and political retreat.

Kerry Emanuel of MIT noted this was the third Category 5 hurricane in the Atlantic this year, and evidence that “the proportion of global tropical cyclones reaching high intensity is increasing”. Jim Kossin, formerly of NOAA, was even clearer: “The very warm water almost certainly has a human fingerprint on it, and there is no question that this warm water played a key role in Melissa’s intensity.”

These are not speculative claims; they are the physics of a planet out of balance.

Across the region, Caribbean editorial boards have recognised what global leaders continue to sidestep: that every storm season now doubles as climate testimony. Stabroek News was more forthright, noting that the world’s largest economies are “backtracking on climate pledges”, pursuing oil profits while our homelands bear the cost.

Brazil’s auctioning of 47 offshore blocks near the mouth of the Amazon, the US decision to open 1.56 million acres of Alaska’s Arctic refuge to drilling, and Guyana’s paradoxical position as both carbon-negative and an oil-producing nation reveal the same conflicting: extraction persists even as extinction takes its first steps onto the shore.

From our Caribbean diaspora in the GTA and beyond, the anguish is both scientific and personal. For our communities whose ancestral homes lie in hurricane paths, each event is not an abstract indicator, it is kinship undone by heat. While the physics of warming are global, the grief it brings arrives at a postal code. Hurricane Melissa, vessel and vehicle of this truth, reminds our diaspora that what begins in the Caribbean basin does not stop at its shores.

Meanwhile, some like Bill Gates are urging the world to move on, insisting that “although climate change will have serious consequences… it will not lead to humanity’s demise”. That may comfort those living far from the tropics. But survival is not justice. Thriving “in most places on Earth” excludes those whose coastlines no longer exist.

Scientists acknowledge that not every aspect of Hurricane Melissa, such as its slow drift, can be directly attributed to warming. Yet the consensus remains: warmer oceans amplified its power and nourished its rainfall. Its signature may be meteorological, but its propulsion, that juggernaut momentum, is fueled by politics.

Hurricane Melissa’s churned waters are both mirror and messenger, vessel and vehicle of our planet’s rising fever. It carried the heat we continue to store, the choices we delayed, and the debts we continue to deny.

As delegates prepare for COP 30 this month in Belém, Brazil, a host nation itself expanding oil frontiers, Hurricane Melissa’s wrecking ball should stand as the first agenda item. Hurricanes like Melissa are not seasonal anomalies; they are the human index of our warming world.

We do not need another pledge, but integrity; the kind that measures leadership through lives saved. Meanwhile, our Caribbean simmers, awaiting the next juggernaut.