Bodies are still being discovered, horror stories are still being heard, and the news has barely sunk in that New Orleans may be uninhabitable for months due to the worst hurricane to hit the Gulf cost since God-knows-when, and already the global warming crowd is trying to turn this disaster to their political advantage.

RFK, Jr. blogs on the Huffington Post (there’s a name for a Liberal site!) about who should be blamed, blamed! for Hurricane Katrina. The corpses haven’t even been counted yet and little Bobby is trying to make a political statement.

He writes:

As Hurricane Katrina dismantles Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, it’s worth recalling the central role that Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour played in derailing the Kyoto Protocol and kiboshing President Bush’s iron-clad campaign promise to regulate CO2.

Toward the bottom of the article, he says:

Well, the science is clear. This month, a study published in the journal Nature by a renowned MIT climatologist linked the increasing prevalence of destructive hurricanes to human-induced global warming.

Now we are all learning what it’s like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence which Barbour and his cronies have encouraged. Our destructive addiction has given us a catastrophic war in the Middle East and–now–Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children.

First off, it is my personal, non-scientific opinion that if, as I’ve heard, the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Tokyo can affect the weather the next week in North America, then it was probably my own agitated breathing from watching The Animal Batista whoop the cush out of John Bradshaw Layfield on last week’s WWE SummerSlam pay-per-view that caused Katrina.

Secondly, we’re the most technologically advanced nation on earth, but if we quit cold turkey tomorrow, what about the third-world countries still using fossil fuels? You want to shut them down, too? I mean, after all, they’re not using the state-of-the-art emissions-reducing technology that we are. China, India, and other eastern nations are contributing to global warming much worse than we are. Oh, that’s right, they get a pass, because we’re the Evil Americans (mwuhahahahaaaaaaaa!).

Thirdly, man, get over yourself! If Bush went to war for oil, why in the name of Holy Saint Sheehan did gas go from $2.42 to $2.82 in the time it took me to work 8 hours today and return home? Where is he hiding it? If you want to believe that, fine, I’ll never argue with an idiot. Like my daddy says, “they’ll drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.” But I defy you to show me one shred of concrete, courtroom-acceptable evidence that this is the case. Sheesh!

Now if you want science, please allow me to expand your narrow-minded Liberal views just a little. In the online edition of the UK’s “The Independent”, we have a few paragraphs of interest.

Sir David King, the British Government’s chief scientific adviser, has warned that global warming may be responsible for the devastation reaped by Hurricane Katrina.

Wow, maybe I was wrong. Global warming may be responsible for Katrina! Uh, oh, wait a minute:

Professor Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology also claimed, less than a month ago, that ocean surfaces had become warmer, which doubled the destructive potential of tropical storms in the past 30 years.

But he said that Monday’s storm “is part of a natural” cycle of powerful Atlantic storms that have struck since 1995. He told The Independent: “I don’t think you can put this down to global warming.”

Other scientists point out that the 150-year record of Atlantic storms show there is ample precedent for hurricanes of Katrina’s power. They say it is part of a natural upswing that has taken place since the mid-90s.

A “natural cycle” and a “natural upswing”? Gee, doesn’t sound to me like the science is really clear at all. That is unless your mind is already made up, and you refuse to look at conflicting views! How about a little intellectual honesty there, Bobby?

But it isn’t just the Libs in America placing blame. Some Germans are blaming Bush, too. Spiegel Online reports:

The toughest commentary of the day comes from Germany’s Environmental Minister, Jürgen Trittin, a Green Party member, who takes space in the Frankfurter Rundschau, a paper friendly with the Social Democrats, to bash US President George W. Bush’s environmental laxity. He begins by likening the photos and videos of the hurricane stricken areas to scenes from a Roland Emmerich sci-fi film and insists that global warming and climate change are making it ever more likely that storms and floods will plague America and Europe.

Trittin continues:

Greenhouse gases have to be radically reduced and it has to happen worldwide.

OK, I’m confused. If it has to happen worldwide, and if Trittin supports the Kyoto protocol, then why does TechCentralStation.com report that “Many of the world’s most prolific emitters of greenhouse gases, including China, India and South Korea, were exempt from the requirements of the protocol”?

Here’s the way that I see it: if the “world’s most prolific emitters of greenhouse gasses” are:

1. Exempt from the Kyoto Protocol, and
2. Rarely hit by “global warming” hurricanes

then doesn’t it make sense to conclude at the very least that greenhouse gasses are not responsible for the destructive hurricanes we’ve seen lately? I won’t go so far as to say that greenhouse gasses prevent hurricanes, but we can’t deny the fact that in the world’s most polluted areas, hurricanes aren’t as big a problem.

Besides, if we want to stop global warming, a strip of duct tape four inches long taped horizontally one-half inch below the noses of all Liberals would soon put an end to it!

Oh, and by the way, what kind of idiots would establish a city below sea level in a coastal area? The French!

UPDATE: Without knowing it, it looks like Publius Rendezvous and I are barking up the same tree from different sides. Read his take on the subject.

TD