The terrible destruction wreaked by hurricane Katrina will cost billions in money and estimates of a thousand dead, and tens of thousands more injured. Citizens of New Orleans may have to wait up to four months before returning to what's left of their homes and their wrecked lives. People are stranded, without food, clean water, medecine. It's reminiscent of the dreadful tsunami earlier this year, or the flooding recently in Mumbai.

And still the Whitehouse is in denial. Despite evidence that increased surface temperatures of the ocean increases the ferocity of such storms, Harlan L. Watson, the U.S. envoy for negotiations on climate change, dismissed talk of a link between global warming and the strength of storms. “Our scientists are telling us right now that there’s not a linkage,”   he said in Geneva. “I’ll rely on their information.”

In that light, I give you the following -

‘To allow the climate to stabilise requires humanity to cut its use of coal and oil by 70%. That of course, threatens the survival of one of the largest commercial enterprises in history. In 1995, public utility hearings in Minnesota found that the coal industry had paid more than $1 million to four scientists who were public dissenters on global warming. And ExxonMobil has spent more than $13 million since 1998 on an anti-global warming public relations and lobbying campaign.

In 2000, big oil and big coal scored their biggest electoral victory yet when Bush was elected president - and subsequently took suggestions from the industry for his climate and energy policies.

As the pace of climate acceleration accelerates, many researchers fear we have already entered a period of irreversible runaway climate change. Against this background, the ignorance of the American public about global warming stands out as an indictment of the US news media. When the American press had bothered to cover global warming, it has focused almost exclusively on its political and diplomatic aspects and not on what warming is doing to agriculture, water supplies, plant and animal life, public heath and weather. For years, the fossil fuel industry has lobbied the news media to accord the same weight to a handful of global warming skeptics that it accords the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - more than 2000 scientists from 100 countries reporting to the UN.’

Sir David King, the British Government's chief scientific adviser, has warned that global warming may be responsible for the devastation reaped by Hurricane Katrina.

"The increased intensity of hurricanes is associated with global warming," Professor King told Channel 4 News yesterday. "We have known since 1987 the intensity of hurricanes is related to surface sea temperature and we know that, over the last 15 to 20 years, surface sea temperatures in these regions have increased by half a degree centigrade.

"So it is easy to conclude that the increased intensity of hurricanes is associated with global warming." [British Independent]

The ferocity of Katrina may be coincidental with the earth warming or part of some sort of cycle, but everywhere I have traveled in the last 18 months the weather has been extreme; droughts in the rainy seasons, ferocious storms in the summer, fires across Europe and people muttter darkly about the weather being unusual.

The US is the world’s biggest polluter, the world’s biggest consumer of its natural resources. And it refuses to accept what the rest of the world accepts. Global warming is real, it is happening and human beings are in no small way contributing to that warming. Instead of leading by example and beating China and India about the head to curb their own contributions to global warming, the Bush administration uses these countries as an excuse to do nothing.

Ignorant, superstitious, murderous, morally corrupt, indebted, bloated and filthy; what has happened to America?

yechydda,