A further blow was dealt to the US Oil and Gas production and distribution system, with the majority of the oil rigs operators and refineries being forced to shut down and evacuate their people. The RigZone website has an interactive map of the infrastructure in harm's way here. Oil rigs have just disappeared or been forced miles out of position, and an unknown amount of damage has been caused to the underwater pipelines and refineries.

A tsunami by any measure

News of the disaster has fueled speculation that climate change has affected the intensity of the Hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico. Ross Gelbspan has written an impassioned piece for the Boston Globe, calling on the government and the press to make this important subject a priority:

"Although Katrina began as a relatively small hurricane that glanced off south Florida, it was supercharged with extraordinary intensity by the relatively blistering sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico. The consequences are as heartbreaking as they are terrifying."

The German Environment Minister, Juergen Trittin, told the ZDF television network that "The increasing frequency of these natural events can only be explained through global warming which is caused by people." Trittin, a member of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Green Party, was also quoted in the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper criticizing the Bush administration for not fighting climate change.

Kerry Emmanuel, atmospheric researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said his studies indicated that the increases in storm intensity are directly related to increases in the average surface temperature of the world's tropical oceans:

"...Emmanuel found that hurricane wind speeds have increased by about 50 percent since 1949. Hurricane duration has increased by roughly 60 percent over that period, Emmanuel said. At the same time, the study showed, sea surface temperatures have increased at rates that suggest something at work beyond normal swings that would be caused by El Nino or other Atlantic cycles.

"'My results,' Emmanuel wrote, 'suggest that future warming may lead to an upward trend in tropical cyclone destructive potential, and -- taking into account an increasing coastal population -- a substantial increase in hurricane- related losses in the twenty-first century.'"

Lastly, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. came out strongly in favour of more government acceptance of the problem, chiding Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour's "part in derailing the Kyoto Protocol and kiboshing President Bush’s iron-clad campaign promise to regulate CO2". Kennedy went on to state:

"'A moment of truth is arriving,' Barbour wrote, 'in the form of a decision whether this Administration’s policy will be to regulate and/or tax CO2 as a pollutant. The question is whether environmental policy still prevails over energy policy with Bush-Cheney, as it did with Clinton-Gore.' He derided the idea of regulating CO2 as 'eco-extremism,' and chided them for allowing environmental concerns to 'trump good energy policy, which the country has lacked for eight years.'"

Intimidating the climate scientists

Certainly, there could be a more responsible attitude from some in the US House of Representatives, where Joe Barton, the chairman of the House of Representatives committee on energy and commerce, has attempted to launch an investigation into three of the US's leading Climate Scientists, widely criticised as political intimidation. The following excerpts are from the UK Guardian:

"Some of America's leading scientists have accused Republican politicians of intimidating climate-change experts by placing them under unprecedented scrutiny. A far-reaching inquiry into the careers of three of the US's most senior climate specialists has been launched by Joe Barton, the chairman of the House of Representatives committee on energy and commerce. He has demanded details of all their sources of funding, methods and everything they have ever published.

"Mr Barton, a Texan closely associated with the fossil-fuel lobby, has spent his 11 years as chairman opposing every piece of legislation designed to combat climate change. He is using the wide powers of his committee to force the scientists to produce great quantities of material after alleging flaws and lack of transparency in their research. He is working with Ed Whitfield, the chairman of the sub-committee on oversight and investigations.

"The scientific work they are investigating was important in establishing that man-made carbon emissions were at least partly responsible for global warming, and formed part of the 2001 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which convinced most world leaders -- George Bush was a notable exception -- that urgent action was needed to curb greenhouse gases. The demands in letters sent to the scientists have been compared by some US media commentators to the anti-communist "witch-hunts" pursued by Joe McCarthy in the 1950s.

"The three US climate scientists - Michael Mann, the director of the Earth System Science Centre at Pennsylvania State University; Raymond Bradley, the director of the Climate System Research Centre at the University of Massachusetts; and Malcolm Hughes, the former director of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona - have been told to send large volumes of material...

"...Eighteen of the country's most influential scientists from Princeton and Harvard have written to Mr Barton and Mr Whitfield expressing 'deep concern'. Their letter says much of the information requested is unrelated to climate science. It says: 'Requests to provide all working materials related to hundreds of publications stretching back decades can be seen as intimidation - intentional or not - and thereby risks compromising the independence of scientific opinion that is vital to the pre-eminence of American science as well as to the flow of objective science to the government.'

"Alan Leshner protested on behalf of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, expressing 'deep concern' about the inquiry, which appeared to be 'a search for a basis to discredit the particular scientists rather than a search for understanding'. Political reaction has been stronger. Henry Waxman, a senior Californian Democrat, wrote complaining that this was a 'dubious' inquiry which many viewed as a 'transparent effort to bully and harass climate-change experts who have reached conclusions with which you disagree'.

"But the strongest language came from another Republican, Sherwood Boehlert, the chairman of the House Science Committee. He wrote to 'express my strenuous objections to what I see as the misguided and illegitimate investigation'. He said it was pernicious to substitute political review for scientific peer review and the precedent was 'truly chilling'. He said the inquiry 'seeks to erase the line between science and politics' and should be reconsidered."

I couldn't agree more.