And gives a great speech.
http://www.yubanet.com/artman/publish/article_26982.shtml(Excerpt)
I joked earlier about hubris in personal terms, but hubris has a distinguished pedigree as a noun. When we exceed the boundaries that creation has placed around our place in creation we run the risk of consequences. Fifty-five years ago, a little less, another kind of storm was brewing on the continent of Europe. Winston Churchill, in England, warned his countrymen that this storm was different from anything they had ever experienced before. The marriage of the industrial revolution, electronic mass communication, and totalitarian politics created a concentrated destructive force that was new and much more powerful than anything politics had ever encountered.
And he said the time for vacillation, for dithering, for indecision is now over. We are entering a period of consequences. Hurricane Katrina convinced many Americans that we have now entered a period of consequences. The images of Americans starving, in extremis, abandoned, helpless, fearful, nowhere to go, no salvation in sight, labeled as refugees in one of our great cities was a startling realization that we have entered a period of consequences.
More than 200 American cities set all time records for high temperatures this year. One of them was New Orleans. And the waters around New Orleans also set an all time record. When Katrina hit the southern tip of Florida it was a category 1 hurricane, but then it crossed over the Gulf, and the extraordinarily warm waters of the Gulf, warmed beyond the boundaries of previous human experience, fed the energy of that hurricane and it grew to a category 5. And it collected much more water than hurricanes have in the past and it drowned one of our greatest and most elegant cities.
There were warnings, but they went unheeded. The chief meteorologist in Louisiana working for the Federal government was beside himself trying to get attention for the clear scientific consequences of what he saw developing. We will see conditions, he said, that are unprecedented in modern times.