Global warming and hurricanes

An article in the Independent (a British newspaper) entitled, "This is global warming, says environmental chief" explains the relationship between global warming and current hurricane intensity:

The growing violence of storms such as Katrina, which wrecked New Orleans, and Rita, now threatening Texas, is very probably caused by climate change, said Sir John Lawton, chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. Hurricanes were getting more intense, just as computer models predicted they would, because of the rising temperature of the sea, he said. "The increased intensity of these kinds of extreme storms is very likely to be due to global warming."
...
Referring to the arrival of Hurricane Rita he said: "If this makes the climate loonies in the States realise we've got a problem, some good will come out of a truly awful situation." As he spoke, more than a million people were fleeing north away from the coast of Texas as Rita, one of the most intense storms on record, roared through the Gulf of Mexico. It will probably make landfall tonight or early tomorrow near Houston, America's fourth largest city and the centre of its oil industry. Highways leading inland from Houston were clogged with traffic for up to 100 miles north.
...
Asked about characterising them as "loonies", he said: "There are a group of people in various parts of the world ... who simply don't want to accept human activities can change climate and are changing the climate."

"I'd liken them to the people who denied that smoking causes lung cancer."
...
A paper by US researchers, last week in the US journal Science, showed that storms of the intensity of Hurricane Katrina have become almost twice as common in the past 35 years.

Will the powers that be in the U.S. come out of denial any time soon? I'm not holding my breath.

UPDATE: Here's a comment about this article that I found on AMERICAblog by someone named Jonathan:

It's pretty simple really...global warming exists. In the last ten years, global water temperatures have risen by 1 degree Celsius, and another one degree C in the fifty years before that.

A calorie is defined as the amount of energy required to heat one gram of water (at 15°C and 1 atmosphere of pressure) by one degree celsius.

Consider how many grams of water there are in the ocean and how much extra energy the planet would have to absorb from the sun to warm the oceans that much. That's global warming.

The wholesale consumption and combustion of oil based energy products in the last century has created gasses that trap energy that should be radiating back off of the planet and into space.

There's no way for us to bleed that energy off, short of preventing the energy from being trapped by the greenhouse gasses in the first place. Short answer is: we're fucked.

That's putting it bluntly. And scarily.