The tremendous destruction caused by Atlantic tropical cyclones, such as Hurricanes Katrina and Wilma, caused a substantial upsurge in interest in the subject of global warming by news media and the wider public, and concerns that global climatic change may have played a significant role in those events.

Time Magazine, for instance, published an article titled, “Is Global Warming Fueling Katrina?”-however, the article itself addressed hurricanes in general, rather than Katrina specifically, and was inconclusive

Soon after the hurricane, former Boston Globe reporter Ross Gelbspan wrote an op-ed piece for the Globe titled, “Katrina’s Real Name“, declaring that the hurricane’s “real name is global warming.” Gelbspan went on to assert:

Though Katrina began as a relatively small hurricane that glanced off south Florida, it was supercharged with an extraordinary intensity by the blistering sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico.”