It just makes you wonder what caused gales before jet transport was discovered.

And so it may not have anything to do with a commie country called China that opens a new coal fired power station on average every 5 days???

Not that I'm normally one to respond to trolls, as certain 'funky' administrators will have noticed, and I'm not entirely unskeptikal myself about climate change being down to solely human causes,
BUT I do believe that those who live by the sword die by the sword and that there is some poetic justice there. There is a scientiific basis, ie. the gaia hypothesis, for thinking that the earth is a self regulating system and that this extreme weather we're having is due in part to climate change. It's not as simple as this so called skeptic would have us believe. Humans are the means by which the planet becomes sentient and self-aware. It is therefore valid IMO to observe that this event palys out as if the planet is taking revenge on climate criminals selectively. It's worth taking advantage of this random event and making sense out of it. It's called seeing the positive side. To take another example from the current extreme weather conditions, the BBC is reporting a pensioner and a child were separatey crushed by walls which were blown over. One bit of sense we can make from these random events, an opportunity for positive awareness is to say well, if we lived in the more trusting, mutually co-operative society were all working towards then maybe we wouldn't NEED all these brick walls which then wouldn't blow over and crush people to death. At the very least we should take these events as evidence of hubris, evidence that our human institutions are a tiny part of a much bigger system that we should perhaps re-learn to integrate with rather than ignore. Or the consequences will be fatal.

As for 'Commie China', come off it. First, you missed the point that neither Indymedia nor climate change activists are pro-communist the co-opted sense of the word. Second China has been pursuing a capitalist economy since 1985 as is well known, and their increasing carbon emmissions are driven by global demand, ie. Western led globalisation and consumer demand created by our rigged 'free' market.

"Humans are the means by which the planet becomes sentient and self-aware."

What a totally arrogant statement. In terms of ecology, humans are just and more walking bags of bacteria. We as humans should be in utter awe of how much more intelligent the biosphere is compared to our pitiful achievement of ending on the top of the bacteria league table. As an organic system the planet outruns us in intelligence by miles.

I wonder how much good has come of what humans call 'sentience.' As far as I can see, were are still so laden with animal instincts that our self-congratulation is a little premature since we are possibly stumbling with open eyes into self-made extinction.

There may be irony to be derived from an airport boss getting taken out by a tree, but I to hold it up as evidence of the planet's revenge is a tad superstitious and if not cynically opportunistic.

Interestingly, Lovelock of Gaia Hypothesis fame, actually endorses nuclear power as a tool of climate control and likens the problems of plutonium storage as no more complex than the problems of handling mercury.

I guess if the options are WW3, The War for Oil or a few centuries of nuclear power till we sort out our mess, I'm with him.