No water. No power. No shelter. Homeless people scavenging for food and armed looters running amok on the street. New Orleans after the deluge was like the scenes we have become used to from developing countries. Songs have been written about when the levee breaks, and last week it did, turning the city into a toxic swamp. The death toll may run into tens of thousands; repairing the damage may cost tens of billions.
For most people, the initial response to the disaster has been the right one - an outpouring of deep sympathy for those who have been bereaved or lost everything. Some, however, have taken the view that now America knows what it is like to feel the full force of nature's terrible power and that the people of New Orleans brought the tragedy on themselves by their gas-guzzling lifestyles. Not only does this attitude lack common decency and humanity, it spectacularly misses the point. The SUV drivers had sped down the freeways to safety long before the storm arrived; those left behind to feel its full force were black, car-less and trapped. In this respect, New Orleans is just like every other disaster: the poor suffer most.
Concern for those affected by the disaster should not, however, prevent questions being asked. A seminar conducted by the American Meteorological Society less than three months ago concluded: "Dramatic land loss currently occurring in coastal Louisiana and projections of a period of possibly more powerful hurricanes in the Atlantic basin warrant a closer look at New Orleans as a case study in resiliency, with broad-sweeping implications regarding risk, human lives and the fate of a major coastal region."
It added that there were an estimated 57,000 households without cars in the city and that these were expected to bear the brunt of the casualties (estimated at 60,000-plus households in a category 4 or 5 storm).
Evacuation
"The possibility of infrastructure improvements to facilitate evacuation is not promising. Projections of over a decade before major improvements to the levee system and to Lake Pontchartrain portend many hurricane seasons of continued significant risk." Clearly, there are people in positions of authority - right up to George Bush - who have a lot of explaining to do.
A second question, with global rather than domestic US ramifications, is whether Hurricane Katrina is a sign that something big and dangerous is happening to the weather. One school of thought is that the Gulf of Mexico has always been prone to violent storms at this time of the year, which was why it was possible for me to buy a lurid but potent cocktail called a Hurricane in a bar in the French Quarter in 1978.
Yet Hurricane Katrina needs to be put in context. In July, parts of the US were suffering from a heatwave so brutal that homeless people were dying in the streets in some of the south-west states. Europe has had a summer of droughts, forest fires and floods. Barely a week goes by without TV pictures of a parched savannah in Africa or a glacier in retreat.
The fact that the weather is behaving strangely does not automatically mean that we are suffering the ill-effects of climate change. Fluctuations in temperatures have been common down the centuries; the reason London was able to hold fairs on a frozen Thames three or four centuries ago was because it was colder and the winters were harsher. It is a possibility that we are simply experiencing a series of unfortunate events; that the tsunamis and the droughts, the floods and the rising temperatures are random occurrences that arrive from time to time. New Orleans just got unlucky, in other words, just as Florence did in the floods of 1966.
Others are less sanguine. Writing in the August edition of Nature, Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, concluded that the power of hurricanes had increased since the mid-1970s. He said this was "highly correlated with tropical sea surface temperature, reflecting well-documented climate signals ... my results suggest that future [global] 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 21st century."
This prompts two final questions. If we can expect ever-more violent weather as a result of climate change, how much is mankind to blame? And if mankind is to blame, what are we going to do about it? It could be the case, as some argue, that rising temperatures cannot be blamed on increasing carbon emissions. Scientists overwhelmingly, though not exclusively, reject this view. Their take on the data is that it proves beyond reasonable doubt that global warming is a reality and that it is caused by the activities of man. Some of those most concerned about climate change say the world is perilously close to a tipping point, after which the damage will be irreversible. Dismissing violent extremes of weather as inconsequential, in other words, is rather like an individual who shrugs off a series of violent headaches and refuses to go to the doctor.
My guess is that the majority view of scientists is now widely accepted. On a visit to the US this summer, it was notable how many times the phrases "global warming" and "climate change" came up unprompted in conversation. Hurricane Katrina will add to the concerns, and there is now perhaps the best chance in many years of persuading Washington that global warming is a reality and needs to be tackled with urgency. Last week was an opportune moment for the launch of Stop Climate Chaos by a coalition of environmental and development groups.
Sharing
But let's not get carried away. It is one thing to accept that global warming is a reality and needs to be tackled; it is quite another to agree to the practical steps that would be necessary to bring about change. The Stop Climate Chaos proposals are admirable in many ways, but disappointingly make no mention of the best method that has been worked out to deal with climate change in an equitable, global fashion: the contraction and convergence process aimed at shrinking and fairly sharing out greenhouse emissions.
However, this is not just a question of what policymakers decide. If the argument is that global warming threatens the future of the planet, then we may need to question the entire basis of the modern industrial economy. At one level this is a conceptual process: should growth be the prime objective of economic policy? Do the arguments in favour of free trade stack up once environmental costs are taken into account? Is globalisation the irresistible force of progress meeting the immovable object of the environment? How these policy debates are resolved will have practical implications. If our way of doing things is a dead end, it would mean more limited choice when we shop. It would mean cut-price flights would be a thing of the past. There would have to be a dramatic change in lifestyles. Some economists believe the price would not be worth paying, and that the best option is to allow capitalism to respond as it has to other challenges, so the market throws up technological solutions to the problem, from solar power to hybrid cars.
By and large, policymakers are more comfortable with this approach than with the change to energy policy and trade and consumer behaviour that would be necessitated by a more radical approach. They believe, perhaps rightly, that while we may tut-tut about climate change, we also see it as somebody else's problem. Whatever the solution, it doesn't mean giving up that weekend in Prague or freshly squeezed guava juice.
Instead, we will follow King Lear's example and say: "Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!" Lear was mad, of course.
