A lot of skeptics are converted over to the human induced global warming point of view.   That's OK with me.   The number of people convinced to one side of an argument doesn't make that argument right.   But what disturbs me is the number of people who were converted by the damage done by Hurricane Katrina.   If the temperature of a single year is not indicative of climate change, and it isn't, then the average temperature for one month is certainly not.   The climate may very well be heating up but you cannot walk out of your house one day and say, "wow, it's hot out, must be global warming" anymore than you can say "geeze, it's cold out, I think we've solved the problem."   So it is with individual hurricane seasons and so it is with individual storms like Katrina.

Nobody in the scientific community is still saying Katrina and her damage are directly attributable to a 1 degree average temperature increase.   They have said that it is inevitable for a city beneath sea level with substandard flood control mechanism to flood due to a storm.   They have said that the development in at risk areas will eventually lead to larger and larger disasters.   But nobody with any credibility is claiming today that Katrina was caused by anything more than a normal cycle.   If water temperatures were slightly higher than they would have been anyway and this is due to global warming, then perhaps Katrina was slightly enhanced by global warming, whatever its cause.   But the leading science on tropical cyclones cannot say with any degree of certainty that 90 degree water will produce a more severe cyclone than 89 degree water.   In fact, absent certain conditions which have never been linked to global warming, cyclones don't even form.   Without the right mix of high and low pressure systems, an otherwise category 5 storm might never even exceed tropical depression status.   The difference between a heavy ocean rainstorm and a hurricane has more to do with happenstance than it does with water temperatures.

Even Kerry Emanuel, the MIT scientist who became the darling of the media when he claimed there was direct correlation between hurricane incidence and intensity said, "It is tempting to ascribe Katrina, Rita and now Wilma to global warming effects, but I am not sure that would pass statistical muster."   He also said, "What has everybody in my profession so concerned -- and we've been concerned for decades -- is the confluence of a huge upsurge in the coastal population with a natural upswing in the number of storms in the Atlantic." [emphasis added]

Emanuel went a bit further in an interview with "Democracy Now" in which he said, "So if you look at just the Atlantic, and everyone's always focused on the Atlantic, which has only 11% of the total number of storms in the world, what you see is a dominance of perfectly natural cycles that tend to last a few decades.   So, unfortunately in the 1970s and 1980s, we were in a lull, and during that lull, the population of the coastline in the U.S. increased quite a bit, and a lot of construction went on very close to the coastline.   Those natural signals very much dominate any signal you would see from global warming.   So, of course, it's tempting.   We have had this very active last ten years, along the U.S. and gulf coasts to blame that on global warming, but looking at it statistically, that's a very difficult connection to make.   I think what you are seeing mostly is a natural cycle in this case."

So it is with scientists.   They work very hard to understand entire systems and shy away from ascribing individual events to global phenomenon.   Well they should since the two, while connected, cannot be directly correlated.   That's the whole impetus for the development of chaos theory.   We simply cannot trace weather events to a single source.

Yet many of the converts are citing Katrina as the watershed mark in their conversion.   David Attenborough, published in the "Independent", announced his conversion and said, "The most dramatic evidence I have seen was New Orleans, after Hurricane Katrina.   Was that climate-change induced, out of the ordinary?   Certainly so."

Al Gore said, "You can only create your own reality for so long.   Mother Nature has joined this debate with a strong voice; Hurricane Katrina was a wake-up call."

The Boston Globe said, "The Hurricane that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name is global warming."

The voices of scientists who live in the world of hurricanes, who eat it, breath it, spend their lives exclusively devoted to the study of the phenomenon, do not claim Katrina as support for global warming.   So many others, however do.   And they make the second leap from "Katrina is evidence of global warming" to "Katrina is directly attributable to mankind's burning of fossil fuels" rather easily.   It is precisely this ease which makes me uneasy.   Katrina ought to be left out of the global warming debate, if there still is a debate.   It weakens the argument.