Friday, September 23, shortly after 8 p.m. Meteorologists at the National Hurricane Center in Miami have hardly slept in days, consuming energy drinks by the case to stay awake.

The researchers here are staring at their computer monitors as if spellbound. Rarely have they seen such a perfect storm. In less than eight hours, a hurricane the people at CNN have taken to calling "Monster Rita" will hit the coast of Texas and Louisiana, and everyone in America wants the scientists in Miami to tell them what this monster has in store for their country.

Max Mayfield spent hours repeating his warnings in front of the cameras of news teams that traveled to Miami to cover the story. The head of the National Hurricane Center in Miami talked about "power outages," "catastrophic damage" and "tremendous flooding."

The phone rings. A staff member motions for everyone to quiet down -- the White House is on the line. US President George W. Bush wants to talk to the crew of reconnaissance aircraft 309, which at this moment is flying about 7,000 feet above New Orleans, heading straight for the eye of the hurricane. The scientists in the center's utilitarian building on the campus of Florida International University -- with their graphs, computer models and tables -- have found their way into the center of the political arena.

The president wanted to be there in person when the hurricane hit this time. Even if he knew that his presence would do nothing to limit the storm's severity, it was clear to him that he could not afford another leadership breakdown like the one that helped fuel the post-Katrina disaster in New Orleans.

Apocalyptic harbingers

And the pressure on Bush has been intense in the weeks following the flooding of the Big Easy. At first, the public's outrage was directed primarily at serious official lapses in disaster management and protection.

But now the critical voices of those who fault Bush for his climate policies are becoming increasingly vocal. Two monster category 5 storms within only four weeks, critics point out. Can this still be a coincidence? Or are Katrina and Rita early apocalyptic harbingers of a global greenhouse gas catastrophe? Until now, the answer to this question has been the subject of internal debate among scientists. But now the dispute is being taken to the public.

As it turned out, Hurricane Rita lost some of its strength just before it hit the US coast. Nevertheless, the suggestive power of the images of destruction brought about by the two hurricanes could be enough to bring about a decisive change in the US debate over climate change and global warming.

The Bush administration is still taking a defensive stance on the issue, claiming that nothing has been proven and that scientific uncertainty is just as big as it was before the storms. But in light of the $200 billion Katrina may end up costing the federal government, the American public is becoming increasingly doubtful as to whether the country can afford to stand by and wait for researchers to settle their dispute over the weather.

US states taking the lead

"Katrina is the first sip, the first taste, of a bitter cup that will be proffered to us over and over again," Gore said. He has been warning for years about the dangers of degrading the environment and of not taking global warming seriously.

Even before the 2005 hurricane season, George W. Bush had essentially isolated himself with his obstinate climate policy. His new energy bill includes big tax breaks for fossil fuel providers but lacks mandatory emissions targets. Although Bush, in secret negotiations, has pasted together a climate treaty with Australia, India, Japan, South Korea and China, it contains little more than elaborate statements of intent. It's a further example of environmental laissez-faire that has prompted even some fellow Republicans to question the president's course.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger heads a coalition made up of almost half the 50 states, which promises to enact its own measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. "I say the debate is over," declared Schwarzenegger in a quintessential Terminator speech. "We know the science. We see the threat. And we know the time for action is now." The coalition also includes more than 300 American cities, including New York, Los Angeles and the flooded New Orleans.

Even industry seems coated with a thin dusting of green these days. General Electric is promising clear power plants, and American Electric Power has said it plans to reduce CO2 emissions by 10 percent by 2006. The industry giants are investing in cleaner technology of their own free will, mostly in an effort to keep up with the global race for low-emissions power plants. Besides, they also realize that America's resistance to binding climate objectives will not last forever. One day, says American Electric Power CEO Michael Morris, the USA will also have to sign a treaty.

Former Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Stuart Eizenstat, who negotiated the Kyoto Treaty for the Clinton administration, says that the response by US industry has been exemplary. And the Petroleum Economist, a trade journal for the oil industry, has urged companies that are still dragging their feet to pick up the pace. It's not longer a question of whether to act, but how to act, the journal opined in a recent editorial.

Political climate change in Washington

"It is clear that something is happening with the earth's climate," admits New Mexico Senator Pete Domenici, the chairman of the powerful Energy Committee in the US Senate. Two potential presidential candidates, Republican Senator John McCain and Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton, traveled to Alaska together to debate the issue with concerned scientists. "It was pretty scary," says McCain, who wants to see a freeze imposed on US carbon dioxide emissions in 2010 that would cap emissions at year 2000 levels. "There has been a tremendous increase in support," says a pleased Phil Clapp, President of the "National Environmental Trust." According to his count, in 1997 -- the year of the Kyoto Treaty -- all of 20 senators were firmly behind climate protection. That number, says Clapp, has more than doubled today.

The political debate has focused a great deal of attention on climate researchers, but that attention is sometimes problematic. The public desperately wants answers of the kind that researchers are often unable to provide. Besides, scientists say, the public must be dissuaded from its erroneous belief that reducing greenhouse gas emissions will protect against hurricanes. "That can only be done with proper levees," says Kerry Emmanuel, a climate research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Emmanuel is one of the environmentalists' star witnesses. He has analyzed about 4,800 tropical storms that have raged in various parts of the world in the last 30 years. He concludes that these storms have more than doubled in strength within this time period.

"This goes hand-in-hand with rising temperatures on the surfaces of tropical oceans," the MIT researcher explains. According to Emanuel, the greenhouse gas effect caused by human activity is largely responsible for this warming activity.

Tom Knutson of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) comes to a similar conclusion. Knutson has run a number of computerized climate models to simulate how rising amounts of CO2 in the earth's atmosphere affect the intensity of hurricanes.

According to Knutson's calculations, every degree Celsius by which the planet's temperature increases results in a five percent increase in hurricane strength. In other words, says Knutson, "by the year 2080, the average storm will be half a category stronger on the hurricane scale."

But these predictions are not without detractors. NOAA meteorologist Christopher Landsea, for example, questions whether it is even possible to make concrete statements about the future development of hurricanes at this point. To protest the excessively vigorous statements of his colleagues, Landsea withdrew from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, deriding its work as "scientifically unreliable and motivated by a preconceived agenda."

Simplistic answers to complex questions

Lennart Bengtsson, former Director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, is also critical. "Some scientists," says the Swedish hurricane expert, "give the public precisely those simplistic answers they want to hear." Bengtsson believes that scientists are irresponsible when they say that weather catastrophes of any nature must increase in an overheated world.

Bengtsson prefers to see scientists taking a more differentiated view, and points to the most recent climate simulations that the MPI presented in Hamburg last Friday. According to these results, the global trend is for dry regions to become dryer and moist regions moister. In Germany, it will rain more, as well as more heavily. But, according to the latest analysis performed on the group's mainframe computer in Hamburg, storms will decrease.

"Our northern latitudes are heating up more quickly than subtropical regions," Bengtsson explains, "and this is leads to a decrease in the temperature differential and, as a result, a decrease in the amount of energy available to feed these storms."

The Hamburg data also provide information about hurricanes. "We do not see any evidence of an increase in the frequency or intensity of hurricanes," says Bengtsson. The effects, he explains, offset one another.

Bengtsson agrees with fellow scientist Knutson on one issue, and that is that warmer oceans pump more energy into hurricanes. On the other hand, however, the greenhouse effect has also heated the upper atmospheric layers, which, Bengtsson says, weakens the force of hurricanes. Indeed, Bengtsson believes that a warming of the water surface could even prevent hurricanes from forming in the first place. This is because warmer water causes stronger surface winds, which destroy the hurricane's fragile structure, "before the hurricane has caused any damage at all."

Bengtsson's statements quickly drew criticism. Bengtsson, says Knutson, chose a computer model that divides the world into quadrants 100 kilometers long on each side. "This is too vague to permit one to make any conclusions about hurricanes."

Climatology in danger of becoming over-politicized

The researchers' jobs would be much easier if the only issue in dispute were the correct method. But there is far more at stake here. Politicians and society want answers, information, certainty. Will Rita and Katrina be followed by even more monstrous sisters and brothers? And, more importantly, what do we have to do to protect ourselves? A few researchers already see their profession at risk of being torn apart by politics, the economy and the environmental lobby.

The credibility of climatology is at stake, warns NOAA meteorologist Landsea. Scientists today say they are still far from understanding the relationship between climate change and tropical storms. But environmentalists are not at all pleased with this modesty, because they know that the only way they can exert sorely needed pressure on politicians is to serve up catastrophic scenarios.

Since last week, diplomats from all over the world have been meeting in Ottawa to prepare for a major climate conference set to take place in Montreal in November. The key issue there will be the future of the Kyoto Treaty or, to be more precise, the emissions levels treaty states will still be allowed in 2012.