Source: TomDispatch
by Juan Cole
“In late October, Hurricane Melissa (that should have been called ‘Godzilla’) battered western Jamaica with 185-mile-an-hour winds. It tossed the roofs of buildings about like splintering javelins, demolished municipal buildings and hospitals, snapped telephone poles like matchsticks, flattened crops, and dumped torrential floodwaters everywhere, leaving $8 billion in damage. That Category 5 storm’s unprecedented ferocity was driven by an overheated Caribbean Sea, produced by 275 years of industrial civilization that has spewed obscene amounts of heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually. The same week that U.N. officials spoke of an ‘apocalypse’ in Jamaica, American billionaire Bill Gates expressed a certain unease about officials and scientists concerned with climate change who, he thought, were being hysterical.” (11/24/25)