Bjorn Lomborg on the Future of Geoengineering

Nearly a year after the Japanese tsunami and subsequent meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear plant, the good news is that the risk from radiation doesn’t seem to be as high as many initially feared. Take the Pacific Ocean, for example, where most of the radioactive fallout from the plant eventually ended up. Nicholas Fisher, a marine science professor at New York’s Stony Brook University, took samples of the seawater three months after the accident. He found levels of radiation that were elevated, but still just a fraction of the amount of radioactivity sea life is exposed to from naturally occurring potassium in seawater.

It’s Presidents’ Day as I write this, so if you were lucky enough to have the day off, give some thanks to Washington, Lincoln and all the other chief executives — even stinkers like James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson. Of course in modern American politics, every day is really Presidents’ Day — so central is the occupant of the White House to the perceived state of the nation. Good news or bad news, foreign or domestic, the President gets the credit — and he gets the blame, whether he actually deserves either.