GERAMNY: The German chancellor will have a lot to say when he addresses the upcoming Climate Change conference in Johannesburg. The flood waters surging through Germany will, one hopes, have subsided but the blame game already in full swing will no doubt still be rolling on.
Already the disaster has proved too great a temptation for some politicians hoping to score a few points ahead of next month's election.
"We are now carrying the can for 100 years of industrialisation," said Mr Jürgen Trittin, the environment minister and leading Green Party politician.
The Greens declared that the catastrophic floods justified the unpopular eco-tax on fossil fuels, a central plank of their coalition agreement four years ago.
Even the Chancellor seems convinced of the merits of the tax, one of the most stringent in Europe. "We will continue on this route," Mr Schröder said yesterday. The reduction in greenhouse gases agreed in the Kyoto Protocol were "minimum standards", he said, a point he will make clear in Johannesburg.
The floods are a foretaste of looming climate change, according to the German branch of the Worldwide Fund for Nature. "This is the end result of a half-degree rise in temperatures because of the burning of fossil fuels," said Ms Regine Günther, the fund's press spokeswoman.
Germany's conservatives, normally loud opponents of the eco-tax, have been shaken by the floods and some former sceptics have already had a conversion.
Dr Klaus Töpfer, a former environment minister, is now general director of the the UN's environment programme.
"No one can doubt any longer, in the wake of what has happened in Germany, that the world climate, and with it our weather, is changing," he said.
