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Temperatures in New York City today, where I live, breaching 90 F and feeling more like 100. And New York is not alone—this map from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows that nearly every corner of the country is suffering from unusual heat:
Pretty disgusting. And the bad news is that should climate models hold, today’s heat wave will be tomorrow’s rare cool day.
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.
There are no shortage of reasons why the Keystone XL pipeline has become such a hot button issue for environmentalists. Many worry about the risks the project could pose to the Ogallala aquifer in Nebraska, where the pipeline was originally designed to pass. Indeed, when President Obama rejected Keystone XL in January, his stated concern was the potential threat to local water supplies.
