Bad-mind Beryl

GLOBAL warming and the extraction of fossil fuels have wrought this: a hurricane of such explosive force it made history even before it made landfall.

But bad-mind Beryl is just the start.

This is a storm that went from being an unnamed depression to a category 4 hurricane in less than 48 hours.There is no record of any other system doing so in the month of June.

On July 1, it shattered another record, becoming the earliest category 5 hurricane in the Atlantic basin.

Of such frightening force, it upends our understanding of the outer limits of the hurricane season itself.

And it was all foretold.

Even before Beryl, meteorological forecasters earlier this year warned the season was set to be extremely active, with almost two dozen named storms, a dozen hurricanes and cyclonic energy of greater intensity.

For years, climate activists have been bewailing rising global temperatures. Like Cassandra, all have been ignored by the global powers that be.

What cannot be ignored now is this: the process of rapid intensification witnessed this week was fuelled by surface sea temperatures above normal by about two degrees Celsius. It is easier for thunderous storms to rise higher and higher into the atmosphere.

At least half a dozen people have already been killed by Beryl.

In several Caribbean islands, buildings have been destroyed, power cut off, roads rendered impassable.

In minutes, Carriacou, off Grenada, was flattened. Immense destruction has been reported in St Vincent and the Grenadines.

All of it is but a prelude of what is to come. The toll of death and destruction will only get worse.

Will the world finally take note?

The major economies of the planet, and some of the biggest emitters, are almost all currently embroiled in political turmoil.

In the US, the UK and even France, the pre-eminent political obsession on the eve of elections is not fighting climate catastrophe but fighting immigrants.

Elsewhere, warmongering leaders have unleashed forces of disarray which further dilute attention.

Embittered at the scenes of devastation around him, St Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minister Dr Ralph Gonsalves this week lashed out at COP, the UN’s annual climate conference, saying it was little more than “a talk shop.”

Caribbean leaders have been consistently calling for climate justice, including through the disbursal of funds to finance recovery and the green transition, to little avail.

This country’s narrow escape from Beryl, for which our systems mobilised relatively well, might appear to reaffirm a pattern in which “God is a Trini.”

But all the patterns are being broken.

It is pure folly to tether ourselves to complacency.

And it is pure hypocrisy to offer charity to our Caribbean neighbours while hitching our wagon to petrostate ideology.