The scientists, unfortunately, are turning out to be unerringly right.

For, as Jamaicans and many other millions of people who live in, or near, the path of Atlantic hurricanes, including the United States, will attest, these tropical storms are becoming far more frequent and increasingly dangerous.

The scientists will remind us that what we have observed this year was bound to happen. It is not a new phenomenon that has suddenly crept up on the Caribbean or the world.

It has been long in the making and the evidence was there last year and the year before that - the result of the way we have mismanaged the global environment and our failure to act aggressively, and in concert, to fix the mess we have created.

In that regard, we hope that the 2004 hurricane season will become a defining point, and, perhaps more critically, a catalyst for ordinary Americans to engage their government and for the government to seriously engage the rest of the world on this issue.

In a matter of weeks, the United States has been hit by hurricanes Charley, Frances, and Ivan, which, yesterday, having moved far north up the US east coast as a disruptive depression, was threatening to regroup as a tropical storm in the Gulf.

There seems to be no scientific doubt that the increased frequency and ferocity of tropical storms is being driven by global warming, as rising world temperature provides fuel for these weather systems which emerge in the Atlantic.

Those of us who live in small island states understand the impact, the power, and danger, of these highly-charged storms.

But the threat is not only from storms. The corollary to a warming world is melting ice caps, which translate to higher sea levels, which ultimately will mean the drowning of large areas of what we now call our homes. This applies not only to small, poor island states like Jamaica, but to the entire planet. Rich countries, too, are in danger.

Indeed, the uncharacteristic flooding in Britain and elsewhere in Europe in the recent past underlines the dangers.

These things are not just happening. They are not the unexplainable results of the unseen hand of Nature.

They are very much the result of what we have done to deplete the Ozone Layer, over scores of years, with the unrelenting release of greenhouse gases.

Importantly, the world has recognised this and has begun, in some way, to do something about it via the United Nations Framework in Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol - the latter outlining targets for the reduction by the world's polluters of carbon dioxide and other gases.

By the time Kyoto was agreed to, it was already a watered-down version of its original self, yet the United States, which emits a quarter of the world's greenhouse gases, opted out of the agreement.

The current administration did not wish to be constrained by Kyoto's disciplines.

Clearly, as the people of Florida and other areas of the US can now attest, global warming is an issue for the ordinary US citizen, as it ought to be for the people of Jamaica.

Any post-Ivan reconstruction of Jamaica cannot only be about rebuilding homes, repairing infrastructure and ensuring that the systems are in place to generate economic growth. It also has to be about how, in the future, we live in harmony with the natural environment. And how we engage the world on the issue.

We in this region have to make the case. We are likely to find plenty of allies in Florida.

Trousers in Denim

Cream of the 'Crop'

Cheeky's World