Are Katrina and Tina the result of global warming? This is the burning question which most enviromentalists and campaigners to reverse climate change are oh so keen to be able to answer. For the last number of years, forces within the Bush administration have been engaged in a concerted effort to discredit those accusing the US of contributing to alarming Carbon emissions and furthering the all too obvious process of Global Warming.

But the jury is out. Reports at the BBC inform us that Hurricanes have been getting notably stronger over the course of the last 35 years, but that the exact link to global warming simply can't be established just yet.

Scientists at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, have analysed global tropical cyclone statistics since satellite records began.

They found that there has been a sharp rise in the number of category 4 and 5 tropical cyclones - the most intense hurricanes that cause most of the damage on landfall - over this time period.

Jeffrey Kluger at Time magazine also wrote an interesting study of the claims linking global warming to Katrina.

So is global warming making the problem worse? Superficially, the numbers say yes—or at least they seem to if you live in the U.S. From 1995 to 1999, a record 33 hurricanes struck the Atlantic basin, and that doesn’t include 1992’s horrific Hurricane Andrew, which clawed its way across south Florida in 1992, causing $27 billion dollars worth of damage. More-frequent hurricanes are part of most global warming models, and as mean temperatures rise worldwide, it’s hard not to make a connection between the two. But hurricane-scale storms occur all over the world, and in some places—including the North Indian ocean and the region near Australia—the number has actually fallen. Even in the U.S., the period from 1991 to 1994 was a time of record hurricane quietude, with the dramatic exception of Andrew.

But it's not just environmentalists who are wading into the debate. German Environmental Minister Jurgen Tritten wrote an article in a German newspaper saying that "Greenhouse gases have to be radically reduced worldwide. The US has, up until this point, had its eyes closed to this emergency." He made an explicit link from Katrina to global warming and America's refusal to reduce emissions.

But the story doesn't end there. There are others who maintain that blaming global warming for the devastation wrought on the Gulf coast of the United States is alarmist and that, in fact, the current crop of venemous storms battering the US are the product of a natural cycle which takes 60 to 70 years to complete.