HAMBURG: As thousands flee flooding in Central Europe, many people in Germany are convinced they know where to put blame for the catastrophe — on President George W. Bush’s refusal to sign the Kyoto climate accords.

As floodwaters crested on the Danube and on the Elbe at Dresden, German news commentators and editorial pages on Wednesday focussed on global warming as the direct cause of the worst flooding this country has seen in decades.

“Monsoon rains are sending our rivers over their bands as meanwhile the Alpine glaciers are receding at an alarming rate and it is all due to global warming and the failure of the Kyoto accords due to Bush’s refusal to sign,” an RTL television news reporter told his viewers against the backdrop of swirling flood waters.

“The floods have washed away all doubts by the skeptics,” the nation’s biggest newspaper trumpeted in an editorial on Wednesday.

“This disaster is proof to any sensible person that failure to act on the environment is a very costly mistake,” Greens environmental spokesman Reinhard Loske said in an interview with the Chemnitz Freie Presse Wednesday. “The deteriorating weather situation shows it is five minutes to twelve.”

With an eye to the Bush administration in Washington, he added, “Anyone who continues to baulk at this clear-cut evidence is digging his own grave and the graves of his grandchildren.”

“This natural disaster is a gift from heaven for the Greens,” the Stuttgarter Nachrichten newspaper said on Wednesday. “At this late date in the election campaign they have been handed a watertight issue at the same time that conservative standard-bearer Edmund Stoiber finds himself under a cloud of consternation.”

Another prominent Green leader, Germany’s Minister of the Environment Juergen Trittin, came out meanwhile flatly attributing the flooding to “100 years of industrialisation”. Saying the Kyoto accords would remedy the situation, he warned of dire consequences.

“Failure to ratify the treaty effectively makes it useless,” he said, “and that means we will be unable to stop this climatological change, and we can expect these weather phenomena to accelerate.”

The leftist Tageszeitung agreed, saying the floods prove once and for all that “Bush is not omnipotent. He has made a big mistake. The question is now what impression the TV images of flooding here will have on America. He can be voted out of office,” the paper added optimistically.

A bit more diplomatically, Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer put the immediate blame closer to home. Not Bush but more likely Stoiber is to blame, according to the most prominent Greens politician.

Drawing parallells between global warming and “rampant development” in Stoiber’s political power base in southern Germany, Fischer said, “Stoiber’s Bavaria was plastered over with cement by developers and now we see what the result is.”

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder entered the fray on Wednesday by saying he did not want to point the finger of blame at Bush or Stoiber or anyone else.

BUT HE ADDED: “Germany, in any case, has not failed regarding moves to prevent global warming. As almost the only country in Europe we have met or exceeded the agreed reduction targets.”