Tech
Climate Change Made Hurricane Melissa 4 Times More Likely, Study Suggests
This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Fueled by unusually warm waters, Hurricane Melissa this week turned into one of the strongest Atlantic storms ever recorded. Now a new rapid attribution study suggests human-induced climate change made the deadly tropical cyclone four times more likely.
Hurricane Melissa collided with Jamaica on Tuesday, wreaking havoc across the island before tearing through nearby Haiti and Cuba. The storm, which reached Category 5, reserved for the hurricanes with the most powerful winds, has killed at least 40 people across the Caribbean so far. Now weakened to a Category 2, it continues its path toward Bermuda, where landfall is likely on Thursday night, according to the National Hurricane Center.
Early reports of the damage are cataclysmic, particularly in hardest-hit western Jamaica. Winds reaching speeds of 185 miles per hour and torrential rain flattened entire neighborhoods, decimated large swaths of agricultural lands and forced more than 25,000 people—locals and tourists alike—to seek cover in shelters or hotel ballrooms. According to the new attribution study from Imperial College London, climate change ramped up Melissa’s wind speeds by 7 percent, which increased damages by 12 percent.
Losses could add up to tens of billions of dollars, experts say.
The findings echo similar reports released earlier this week on how global warming contributed to the likelihood and severity of Hurricane Melissa. Each of the analyses add to a growing body of research showing how ocean warming from climate change is fueling the conditions necessary for stronger tropical storms.
Hurricane Melissa is “kind of a textbook example of what we expect in terms of how hurricanes respond to a warming climate,” said Brian Soden, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Miami, who was not involved in the recent analyses. “We know that the warming ocean temperatures [are] being driven almost exclusively by increasing greenhouse gases.”
The storm has disrupted every aspect of life in this part of the Caribbean.
“There’s been massive dislocation of services. We have people living in shelters across the country,” Dennis Zulu, United Nations resident coordinator in Jamaica, said in a press conference on Wednesday. “What we are seeing in preliminary assessments is a country that’s been devastated to levels never seen before.”
The Climate Connection
For the rapid attribution study, researchers at Imperial College used the peer-reviewed Imperial College Storm Model, known as IRIS, which has created a database of millions of synthetic tropical cyclone tracks that can help fill in gaps on how storms operate in the real world.
The model essentially runs simulations on the likelihood of a given storm’s wind speed—often the most damaging factor—in a pre-industrial climate versus the current climate. Applying IRIS to Hurricane Melissa is how the researchers determined that human-induced warming supercharged the cyclone’s wind speed by 7 percent.
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I first encountered LetPot as a brand earlier this year while testing its LPH-SE Senior hydroponic growing system for my guide to the best indoor gardening systems. Positioned as alternatives to the long-beloved OG Aerogarden tabletop hydroponic systems, LetPot’s countertop gardens (which are popular enough to have their own subreddit) allow you to grow any seeds you’d like—no proprietary pods needed—using inexpensive baskets and sponges that are ubiquitous on Amazon and run about 20 cents each. (LetPot’s sets come with enough baskets and sponges to get you started, but no seeds.) I regularly recommend LetPot’s version as the best budget option for anyone looking to get into hydroponic gardening.
Since then, I’ve tried a variety of smart gardening devices from the brand, which has been established in Hong Kong since 2007 but expanded into the US in 2019. If you’re shopping for a plant lover or gardener this holiday season, these are the products I’ve had the best success with in my own home and gardening setups and would buy myself.
The 12-pod LPH-SE Senior, featured in my indoor gardening guide, has been a trusty tabletop companion for several months now, producing organic baby chard that can be clipped every few days for fresh salads. (Food doesn’t get more local than greens grown inches away from your dinner plate!)
The LetPot app is kind of funky, but it’s not needed once you’ve set the timer for the 24-watt LED lamp, which both raises and lowers and flips up for easy harvesting access. A pop-up gauge tells you at a glance what level the water is, the pump runs every 30 minutes on its own, and instructions on when and how to add nutrients are right on the bottle. (Two bottles with dehydrated nutrients are included.)
I’ve also tested a couple of Aerogardens alongside the LetPot, and while the Aerogardens’ app, design, and interfaces are a bit slicker than LetPot’s, the end result is the same. LetPot’s LPH-SE is not only less expensive than the comparable Aerogarden Bounty, it has spaces for three more plants.
LetPot
100-Watt Grow Light
Second on my list of LetPot hits is the brand’s grow light for houseplants. (Though it would also be perfect for seedling trays.) It also works with the LetPot app, but like the LPH-SE, the app’s not totally necessary once you’ve set the timer, and if you don’t want to deal with the app at all, there’s a corded remote that also lets you turn the light on and off and adjust the light intensity.
The powerful 100-watt light can either hang from the ceiling or sit on its telescoping stand, rotating around 360 degrees to shine where you need it. (Keep in mind 100 watts is pretty hot—you won’t want it too close to any leaves.) I appreciate that the light itself is large (2 x 3 feet), so it keeps plants from becoming too leggy. One downside to note: While the description says the stand can extend to 72 inches, it really only goes to about 60 inches, so if you have tall plants, you’ll want to keep this in mind—or use the hanging feature.
LetPot’s SS Pro seed starter is brand-new, but promising. It’s still in preorder right now, but I’ve been using it for the past couple of months to grow onion, carrot, and parsnip starts. A full-coverage, 24-watt light (12 x 7 inches) sits over a plastic vented dome, which rests atop a seed tray. The tray is set into a shallow container, underneath which sits a 24-watt heating pad. Fill the container with water, pour whatever medium you’d like into the tray (you’ll need to purchase this separately; I used expandable seed starting soil, $12), and plant your seeds.
The LetPot app’s auto mode will recommend a temperature range and light duration based on what you’re growing and turn the system on/off accordingly, or you can choose your settings manually. A temperature and EC sensor (electrical conductivity, which measures dissolved solids—essentially, the amount of nutrients in your soil available to the plants) goes in the soil, and a digital screen on the front tells you all you need to know at a glance: current temperature, EC level, and how many days it’s been since the seeds were planted. LetPot boasts a 99 percent germination rate, and while mine wasn’t quite that high, I appreciated that the finished seedlings were noticeably healthier and less leggy than those grown with only a small grow light. The power adapter makes a high-pitched sound when the lights are on, the temperature and EC sensor give some occasionally buggy readings, and auto-mode erases whenever it’s unplugged, but if those minor foibles don’t bother you, the SS-Pro is unique in this space and worth a look.
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Tech
IT Sustainability Think Tank: How IT sustainability entered the mandate era during 2025 | Computer Weekly
As the calendar turns the final pages on 2025, the information technology sector stands at a critical juncture regarding its environmental commitments. This year was not marked by technological breakthroughs solving decarbonisation, but by the decisive maturation of sustainability from a strategic differentiator into an operational and regulatory imperative.
This transition involved a painful reckoning with data complexity, supply chain reality, and the sheer energy appetite of modern computing, driven primarily by the rapid proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI).
We entered 2025 with goals framed by aspiration; we exit under the binding mandate of actuality. The central shift is profound: IT sustainability is no longer a parallel environmental, social and governance (ESG) initiative.
It has become deeply intertwined with core business continuity, geopolitical supply chain risk, and mandatory financial disclosure. While this shift signals progress, momentum is driven more by necessity and the threat of liability than by shared ethical commitment.
The conversation evolves from aspirational to accountable
The most profound shift over the past year has been the forced elevation of the sustainability dialogue directly onto the executive committee’s core risk portfolio. This movement is not voluntary; it is driven by impending regulation and the sobering realisation that environmental failure now carries direct, auditable financial penalties and board-level liability.
Only a year ago, discussions circled around unquantifiable reputational benefits. Today, the lexicon is dominated by acronyms signalling mandatory compliance: CSDDD, CSRD, and the tightening of the SBTi Net-Zero Standard V2. These frameworks compel executives to move past narratives and confront the granular, auditable data attached to every asset, vendor, and cloud usage.
For the CIO, this manifests in two critical areas. First, energy efficiency is decisively reframed as a cost of doing business, crucial for operational expenditure control amid volatile global energy markets. Second, the sudden energy demand of generative AI has triggered a rapid, internal debate on responsible compute architecture.
Leaders are increasingly compelled to justify AI investment not solely on traditional ROI, but via a nascent “return on compute” model that necessarily integrates and accounts for carbon expenditure. This makes the environmental cost of IT an integrated input in the total cost of ownership calculation, rather than a polite footnote.
Despite this high-level engagement, progress remains complicated. The IT function often lacks the authority to enforce change across complex internal silos, and the necessary budget and risk tolerance for truly transformative shifts remain stubbornly limited.
Genuine progress where the green shoots are taking hold
Despite systemic inertia, 2025 delivered solid, tangible progress in certain operational domains, offering a partial blueprint for future net-zero efforts. Our confidence is bolstered by three examples, though it is crucial to understand that wide-scale adoption across the average enterprise remains nascent and often confined to pilot programs:
1. Decoupling cloud growth from carbon: Hyperscale cloud providers have largely won the battle for renewable energy procurement. The next frontier — optimising physical operations — has seen enterprise engagement. We saw accelerated adoption of advanced liquid cooling technologies (still primarily concentrated in hyperscale environments, but critical for future AI scaling). Enterprises optimising workloads for low-carbon regions and utilising serverless architectures successfully decoupled rapid cloud expansion from a proportional rise in emissions. This success belongs predominantly to the hyperscalers, and enterprise optimisation remains an ongoing campaign.
2. Maturing the circular IT model (As-a-Service): The year 2025 saw the Managed Device-as-a-Service (MDaaS) model transition into a critical environmental enabler. By outsourcing the entire device lifecycle, enterprises commit practically to refurbishment and robust reverse logistics. Successful enterprises leverage these contracts to guarantee asset re-entry into the value chain via certified refurbishment, drastically reducing e-waste. The caveats are two-fold: MDaaS adoption is far from universal, and the verification of these circular chains still lacks necessary, robust third-party scrutiny.
3. The nascent rise of green software engineering: The formal emergence of green software engineering (GSE) is perhaps the most encouraging development. For too long, the environmental focus was only on hardware. This year, organisations began measuring code energy consumption — optimising algorithms and refactoring applications to reduce reliance on resource-intensive computing.
An important development this year was the publication of the W3C Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG) Draft Note. Developed through a global, collaborative effort — in which I was pleased to participate — the guidelines offer a structured and internationally relevant set of best practices for reducing the environmental footprint of web products and services. While the scope focuses specifically on the web rather than the full breadth of enterprise IT, the Draft Note nonetheless represents a significant step forward for the industry.
The persistent gaps undermining net-zero momentum
For all the genuine acceleration, 2025 was equally defined by two persistent, critical gaps that threaten to derail net-zero pathways and demand urgent attention.
1. The Scope 3 emissions chasm: The most pervasive and frustrating gap remains the measurement and meaningful reduction of Scope 3 emissions, particularly from purchased goods and downstream asset end-of-life.
Despite regulatory urgency, the vast majority of enterprises still rely on highly aggregated, industry-average supplier data (spend-based or activity-based), which is neither auditable nor sufficient for mandatory disclosure. The necessary mechanism — detailed, granular product carbon footprints (PCF) provided by every vendor — is simply not available at scale or with sufficient fidelity.
The problem persists because it requires collaboration across complex, often proprietary global supply chains. Suppliers are reticent to disclose granular data, citing competitive concerns, while buyers lack the leverage to mandate it. The result is a ‘Scope 3 plateau’: targets are set, but underlying emissions remain stubbornly high, creating a significant credibility risk. We are still largely measuring a reflection, not the reality.
2. The generative AI energy debt: While AI is a powerful tool for sustainability optimisation, the immediate, unmanaged energy demand of Large Language Models (LLMs) represents a profound and growing gap. The speed of AI adoption, combined with the inherently expensive High-Performance Computing (HPC) required, creates an “energy debt” that offsets hard-won gains elsewhere.
The challenge is governance. Enterprises are deploying AI solutions without robust, mandatory policies on model selection, inference efficiency, or resource decommissioning. Crucially, most organisations remain focused on achieving initial ROI metrics, relegating energy efficiency to an optional performance tweak. Failure to enforce a framework for ‘responsible compute’ risks the transformative power of AI being negated by its own expanding environmental impact. This is the single greatest risk to the IT sector’s net-zero journey.
Strategic priorities for 2026 and beyond
As the IT Sustainability Think Tank looks towards 2026, the focus must shift from identifying the problem to systematically closing the remaining gaps with institutional discipline. We must treat these priorities as non-negotiable elements of future business resilience:
- Mandate data granularity for Scope 3: Leverage procurement influence to force supplier compliance on verifiable Product Carbon Footprints (PCF). The mandate must be non-negotiable, enforced with clear vendor scorecards and contractual requirements.
- Institutionalise green software engineering: Invest heavily in training and tooling to embed energy efficiency into the software development lifecycle (SDLC). Software architecture must be treated with the same environmental scrutiny as data centre cooling, making efficiency an audited requirement.
- Govern the AI energy cost: Implement a Responsible AI framework that includes mandatory energy consumption metrics and resource allocation policies for all Generative AI deployments.
The year 2025 was when IT sustainability moved into the board’s audit file. Next year must be the year we finally gather the granular data, enforce the necessary discipline, and manage the rapidly growing energy appetite of our own invention. The time for aspirational statements is definitively over; the urgent task now is to move these nascent efforts into full, verifiable accountability.
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