If not the worst ever to batter the US, Hurricane Katrina has certainly the worst in living memory. At least 80 people have been killed, the small Mississippi town of Biloxi suffering the worst in terms of tragedy with 30 dead in one single apartment block. Over a million people were left without electricity. The cost of the damage inflicted is put at a staggering $25 billion.
As Americans now embark on the grim task of cleaning up and rebuilding shattered communities, will they, we wonder, reflect on the unusual severity of the storm and make a connection with global warming? The fact that Katrina was downgraded from a Category 5 hurricane (the worst possible) as it neared landfall to a Category 4 and then 3, and that New Orleans was not smashed into splinters as feared is a great relief. But it should not be allowed to obscure the fact that one of America’s most famous cities had to be evacuated; hundreds of thousands of its inhabitants fled; New Orleans survived but it was still flooded and devastated. This was America’s own tsunami.
In the same way that Americans started to think differently about defense and terrorism after 9/11, there is every possibility that Hurricane Katrina’s destructive rampage will alter views about climate change. Until now there has been no stimulus to rethink ideas. There were no home-based massive natural disasters to bring the American media, the American public and American politicians face to face with the erratic weather patterns that are the consequences of global warming and which have had such disastrous impact elsewhere on the planet. In the US, it has been a glorious summer, just like summers have always been. True, last winter saw massive snow storms across the eastern United States, but the violent weather then did not threaten to destroy one of America’s most famous cities, did not leave a bill of $25 billion.
Of course, Washington’s belief that global warming is a myth and its opposition to the Kyoto treaty on greenhouse gas emissions are well-known. Given Washington’s determination to turn a blind eye to all the evidence of global warming and a deaf ear to the loud international concern about it, it would be a miracle if the Bush administration suddenly changed its tune now, regardless of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina. But the American pubic? The American media? That may be a different matter. This time, hit in the pocket where it matters, ordinary Americans may now think differently about what the weather is doing, and why.
That is the key. If public opinion decides that Hurricane Katrina and global warming are linked, then the disaster that has unfolded along the Gulf of Mexico will not be such a disaster after all. It will not matter what the US administration presently thinks; it is what US public opinion and the US media think that matters. They drive the thinking of American politicians. If public opinion decides that Katrina was a hurricane too many, if that change of mind batters some fresh thinking into the US administration, then much good will have come out of this tragedy.
