Almost a year after Hurricane Katrina, researchers are still wringing their hands over the continued failure to start thinking about how to stop it happening again. The time has come, they say, for some drastic solutions… just don’t expect them to be popular.

“We have to get people out of wishful thinking,” says Paul Keddy of Southeastern Louisiana University. “The next one is only a matter of time.” With huge swathes of land along the Gulf and Florida coasts just a few feet above sea level, the optimism of those trying to carry on as normal is similar to the naivety of the Trojans in letting in the Greeks in their wooden horse, he reckons.

Instead of letting more drown in floods, it’s time to get serious, he says. Step one – close the ouflow canal at the end of the Mississippi River (which incidentally flows just metres from the conference hall). This artificial channel was responsible for much of the floodwater surge. Keddy’s other ideas are more drastic: stop people building on waterfront property (Keddy says that many Louisiana parishes do not have land-zoning laws because they are viewed as a communist conspiracy); decide which cities you want to keep (New Orleans, Tampa, Miami, etc), build walls around them and declare everything else a ‘storm and flood zone’; and give millions of hectares of the southeastern United States back to Mother Nature.

These solutions are as necessary as they are incendiary, Keddy argues. “Don’t shoot the messenger,” he pleads. “We have to think now about protecting these cities.” But resistance from those in the “zone of denial”, as he calls it, will be inevitable. Scientists have to meet the challenge head-on, he argues, if they want to remain true to themselves: “What is the function of scholars in an irrational or even anti-rational culture?”