But then she hit the blistering fossil-fuel-warmed sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico and became supercharged to Category

But then she hit the blistering, fossil-fuel-warmed sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico and became supercharged to Category Five. Yet it’s hard to prove a definitive link.Even when a person smokes for 50 years and dies of lung cancer, a doctor cannot definitively say the patient died because of her puffing: there’s always a slim possibility she would have contracted the disease anyway. So when the other factors line up to cause a storm, a warmer ocean makes it last longer and be more destructive.”The likely effect on Katrina? She was a baby hurricane when she was first glanced off the coast of South Florida, blowing along at Category One. But at the moment, sea surface temperatures all over the tropics are running at 1.8 to 3.6 degrees above normal because of global warming.

But there is an emerging scientific consensus that global warming is making hurricanes more intense and more destructive. It turns out that Katrina fits into a pattern that scientists and greens have been trying to warn us about for a long time.Ruth Curry, research specialist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, explains the facts. “Ocean and atmospheric circulation is the engine of a hurricane, but heat is the fuel. In order to form, a hurricane must have an ocean temperature of at least 80 degrees [fahrenheit] down to a depth of 164 feet If that isn’t there, the hurricane dies out. Hurricanes happened before man-made climate change, and they will happen long after the last lump of coal and the last drop of oil have been burned. Christian Kleinert should be alive today and he is dead and, as a journalist, I add him to the list of our “martyrs”, those of us who die in road accidents and storms and train crashes as well as from bombs and trigger-happy soldiers and occupation troops and gunmen.And still, I wake each morning in Beirut and hear the wind in the palm trees outside my bedroom window and ask myself what we all ask ourselves these days – or should ask ourselves: what horror waits for us today?
More from Robert Fisk. We may have just witnessed a global warming 9/11 at the heart of the United States.

A million American refugees from the weather, the transformation of New Orleans into a New Atlantis: is this the face of climate change?

As the South wades through the aftermath of its soggy apocalypse, a Category Three debate is tearing through the world of climatology as scientists try to figure out what role (if any) the rapid warming of the world played in Hurricane Katrina.

At first glance, this might seem like a distasteful bout of environmental ambulance-chasing. That special line at the end – “thanks again from both of us” – in which Andrea had recreated, reborn her dead man, made Christian come alive again to send his wishes to Beirut – was heartbreaking.But what was the message here? I kept asking myself this question. A murdered man, a child crushed on a Baghdad bridge, an old man dead in a chair because his president did not care about global warming, a prime minister who refuses to acknowledge that his citizens die on a London Tube train because of his folly in Iraq All this has a meaning. But Munich?Oddly, it was not the first time I had received heartbreaking news from that city But this death had no meaning. I called Andrea.”I had run to the window to wave goodbye that morning,” she said. “He turned and waved at me.”The German cop who first reached the scene told Andrea that Chris had not suffered.