Political Quotes

“I am back for my weekly ``Time to Wake Up'' speech, which, given the theme of the week in Washington, it is going to focus on the health consequences of what is going on in climate change. It is timely to do so because just recently the National Weather Service issued an excessive heat warning for the Southwestern United States. In California, San Diego County set a record at--hang on--124 degrees. As a result of this heat, the National Weather Service warned of ``a major increase in the potential for heat-related illness and even death.'' In Phoenix, AZ, it got up to around 120 degrees. It got so hot that flights had to be grounded at the Phoenix airport because the hot air was too thin for the jet engines to get enough bite on the air for the planes to fly safely. The emergency rooms saw patients coming in with burns caused by walking barefoot on hot pavement or touching their cars that had gotten so hot in the sun that they were burned. There were several heat-related deaths reported in the Las Vegas area and in California. This heat wave problem is not going away. ``Heat waves like the one we are seeing in the Southwest are becoming much more frequent,'' said Robert E. Kopp, director of the Coastal Climate Risk and Resilience Initiative at Rutgers University. He went on to say: ``Looking forward, we expect the amount of extreme heat on the planet to continue increasing even more'' with obvious health effects. It has gotten deadly serious in many places.…”