The good news about Katrina ...

...is that it's lost some strength and dropped to a Category 4, with "only" 140mph sustained winds.  (Having made landfall, it will now continue to weaken.)  Pressure in the eye has softened from its lowpeak of 907 millibars to 923 millibars.  The storm has also veered slightly more north than expected, and its center will pass just east of New Orleans.

The bad news, of course, is that this is still plenty bad enough.  New Orleans is still going to get a terrible pasting, the levees may still fail -- and there's reports the roof of the Superdome, where around 10,000 people are sheltering, is leaking.

Er, correction to that ...

N'Awlins resident alobar says there are 26,000 people in the Superdome, and popefelix reports chunks of the roof are now missing.

What can you say ...

...in response to this?

New Orleans 2, Katrina 1, this round...?

As jilara so correctly pointed out, "Any one you walk away from is a good one."  The Big Easy is battered, bruised and bleeding ... but it's still there, by the grace of whatever disrupted Katrina's eyewall during the night, causing it to veer east and dramatically weaken.

However ... if global warming is proceeding as many of the indications are it is, they're only going to get bigger and nastier from here.  We'd better all get our asses in gear and start getting prepared -- because right now, we aren't, and gambling that the warming is not as bad as it appears could turn out to be a very expensive bluff if it's the wrong call.  The recent thaw of a vast expanse of the western Siberian permafrost is a very bad sign in this regard, as it is estimated it could result in the release of as much as several billion tons of methane into the atmosphere.  Right now, there's a lot of fuss about carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, but methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.  We don't know have enough data on such large-scale releases yet to know how that would affect sea-surface temperatures, but it's likely to be significant.

The critical temperature for hurricane formation is about 80°F; right now that encompasses, in this hemisphere, a belt along the equator, the Caribbean, the Sea of Cortez, and a chunk of the north Atlantic extending about as far north as the Carolinas and about two thirds of the way across to Africa.  A 3-4 degree rise in sea surface temperature, maintaining the current distribution, would extend that band as far north as New York and eastward almost to the coast of Europe.

Looking at the sea surface temperature map for today, sea-surface temperatures in the lower 90s throughout the Caribbean and out into the Atlantic would make the Gulf's hurricane patterns a lot nastier.  On the West Coast, the hurricane-forming area would expand by, from the look of this map, probably on the order of two thousand miles in the direction of California.  Hawai'i, instead of being on the edge of the region, would be deep inside it.  It'd take more than that to inundate California, but Hawai'i could be in for a world of hurt, and Mexico could become as bad a hurricane playground as the Gulf Coast is now.

If we don't start taking all of this shit seriously, instead of pooh-poohing it because we can find a handful of scientists willing to disagree with the majority in their field in return for the President's favor, we're in for a world of hurt.  Literally.