Relief from an unexpected source

Germany has volunteered to aid in relief efforts. Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer of all people (he was quite the anti-american radical in his youth and was actively opposed to coalition involvement in Iraq). From Bloomberg.com:

Germany's Fischer Offers Help to U.S. After Hurricane Katrina
German Foreign Minister Joschka offered assistance to the U.S. government in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which has caused devastation on the U.S. Gulf Coast.

"The federal government is prepared to give any assistance or support to bring this terrible natural disaster and its effects under control," Fischer said in an e-mailed statement today, without elaborating on the offer.

But there are still plenty of moonbats over there:

Fischer's offer of assistance came two days after his Green Party colleague, Environment Minister Juergen Trittin, argued in an article in the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper that disasters such as Katrina showed that Bush was ignoring the necessity for a worldwide reduction of greenhouse gases.

'Eyes Closed'
"The American president closes his eyes in the face of the economic and human damage inflicted on his country and the global economy by natural disasters such as Katrina, caused by neglecting environmental protection," Trittin said.

Trittin argued that although no single storm can unambiguously be traced back to climate change, the man-made emission of greenhouse gases is responsible for more frequent and larger natural catastrophes.

Talk about 'eyes closed' -- Trittin fails to look at the historical record:

Cycles of hurricane activity:
These records reflect the existence of cycles of hurricane activity, rather than trends toward more frequent or stronger hurricanes. In general, the period of the 1850s to the mid-1860s was quiet. The late 1860s through the 1890s were busy, and the first decade of the 1900s was quiet. (There were five hurricane seasons with at least 10 hurricanes per year in the active period of the late 1860s to the 1890s and none in the quiet periods.) Earlier work had linked these cycles of busy and quiet hurricane periods in the 20th Century to natural changes in Atlantic Ocean temperatures.

Hat tip to Crumb Trail for the link to the NOAA Hurricane Research Division