I've grown tired of the rhetoric from around the globe which blames Katrina's strength and devastation on global warming.  What pseudoscience books are you people reading?

Katrina was a category 4 storm — nothing more.  They happen regularly and are normal cycles of nature.  If Katrina was some kind of biblical storm, why does the hurricane rating system go up to 5?

What made Katrina so destructive was where it hit.  The warning over a catastrophic hurricane strike on New Orleans has been on the lips of scientists for many decades, spurred on by historical evidence which shows it has happened regularly in the past and the worry of what impact such a storm could have on the precariously weak levee system around the city.

There is no evidence to show that this is global warming.  On the other hand, there's more than enough evidence to show it's part of the planet's normal cycle and was predicted many decades before environmentalists jumped on the bandwagon.  Now that it's happened, those with political agendas are screaming Kyoto and global warming and the like.  How small minded.  How uninformed.

Where is the evidence?  There is none.  We as yet do not understand the planet's weather systems.  We can't predict what the weather will be like tomorrow, yet we feel as though we fully understand man's impact on the weather?

We know that decadal oscillations in the oceans cause dramatic and significant weather patterns.  We don't fully understand the mechanics that make El Niño and La Niña happen, but we do understand how they impact global weather.  We know the planet goes through weather cycles which span decades and are naturally occurring.  We know that the planet has heated up and cooled down — in dramatic ways that caused mass extinctions — many times in its history, all without help from man.

A perfect example of that is the decades-long season of increased hurricane activity we're now facing.  This is a normal cycle of the planet which we've known about for some time and predicted long ago.  This particular cycle occurs regularly based on many global variables which, from time to time, combine together to increase hurricane intensity and activity for, on average, 10-30 years at a time.  This is nothing more than Mother Nature doing her own thing as she's done for a very long time, something she's been doing since long before man arrived.

Hurricanes happen.  This was not a category 5 storm which would have been significantly worse.  It happens to have been a category 4 storm which hit an area of the coast that was susceptible to such an event and has been since the country was founded.  People have been warning of such a strike for a long time, since long before talk of global warming ever crossed a single human lip.

Yes, Katrina was bad.  It was a strong storm that hit us where we were weakest and most susceptible to a catastrophe.  But that's all it was.  Remember that Andrew was bad, too, and happened many years ago, yet we did not point and say "proof of global warming."

It disgusts me to see and hear of people saying things like "sorry 'bout that, but you got what you deserved because you won't follow Kyoto or act more dramatically on global warming."  That's just disgusting and is completely and absolutely inaccurate from a scientific point of view.  It's an unprovable and unsupported leap of faith, attempting to mask a normal weather phenomenon behind political ramblings.

Just shut the fuck up about it already.  Stop politicizing a horrific event with significant loss of life and property.  Stop spewing junk science like it's fact instead of fiction.