Warning Unheeded...

But nevertheless accurate:

Meteorologists performed admirably in alerting public officials to Katrina's rising destruction, allowing them to evacuate New Orleans and other Gulf Coast cities in plenty of time. But Emanuel said that other warnings by meteorologists have gone unheeded in past decades -- warnings to go easy on the housing and commercial development in areas like Florida that are highly at risk to Atlantic hurricanes.

"A lot of people in my business had been, even in the 1980s, warning anybody who would listen -- which was very few, it turned out -- that there was going to be this upswing in hurricanes," Emanuel said. "It's not rocket science. We've been building all this stuff in Florida during this lull that lasted 20 years. We built all this stuff, and it's waiting to get creamed. There's been a fantastic amount of construction. A lot of people have built homes on the water. And nobody really listened. And now all of those predictions are exactly coming true. But it doesn't have much to do with global warming."

To Emanuel, Katrina is not an unusual hurricane. "Not that many hurricanes get that powerful, but we've had hurricanes like Katrina before," he said. "Camille was about the same strength. Andrew was about the same strength. Katrina was just unfortunate, because it happened to hit a very densely populated area."

Ultimately, Emanuel said, it's not a vengeful Mother Nature but man's politics that are to blame for the destruction. As long as people insist on erecting homes and businesses, aided by low insurance rates and business lobbyists, in vulnerable areas like the Gulf Coast, there's little scientists can do to prevent the havoc. "I like to say that there is no such thing as a 100 percent natural disaster," Emanuel said. "We have to put stuff in harm's way for there to be a disaster, and we're very good at doing that, and subsidizing people who continue to do it."