Residents across New Mexico might be wondering what they did to anger Mother Nature. Ever since 2011 arrived on the scene, the weather has been nothing but ugly, beginning with a terrifying winter and now terrifying fires with the nebulous possibility of nuclear contamination. It began with a mass of arctic air in early February that sent temperatures plummeting to depths never seen in the state before. Pipes froze and many schools and government offices were closed ...

If you're anxious about life today, TV this fall is inviting you to journey to a happier time. A time when ketchup was a vegetable, when Saddam Hussein was a strategic ally, when children went to school, teenagers courted and families thrived with no greater worries than the possibility that they might at any moment be incinerated in a global nuclear war. If programmers are correct, the state of the American psyche is such that suicide attacks and anthrax ...

Nuclear power was the energy of Tomorrowland — in the 1950s it was going to make electricity too cheap to meter — until it came to a standstill over the past couple decades. It's now poised to make a dramatic comeback. At least, that's what many politicians and the media say. As the Senate this week debated the Warner-Lieberman carbon cap-and-trade bill, which would put a federal limit on greenhouse gas emissions, many doubtful senators said they ...

This may sound too good to be true, but the U.S. has a renewable-energy resource that is perfectly clean, remarkably cheap, surprisingly abundant and immediately available. It has astounding potential to reduce the carbon emissions that threaten our planet, the dependence on foreign oil that threatens our security and the energy costs that threaten our wallets. Unlike coal and petroleum, it doesn't pollute; unlike solar and wind, it doesn't depend on the weather; unlike ethanol, it doesn't accelerate deforestation or ...

John Kenneth Galbraith, one of the most famous practitioners of the high-minded guessing game known as economics, once noted that in the dismal science, "the majority is always wrong." How else to explain the fact that so many economists upgraded their growth forecasts for the American economy at the end of last year, often to well above 3%, when the numbers so far this year have come in below 2%? The plunge is due to many things, from higher food ...

Just as wars -- two World Wars and, equally important, the cold war -- dominated the geopolitical map of the 20th century, economics will rule over the 21st. All the big questions confronting the world in the century ahead are basically economic. Is the U.S. in an irreversible decline as the world's premier power? Will Japan continue its competitive conquest of international markets? Can Europe manage to hold together the world's largest trade bloc in the face of strong centrifugal ...

By sheer demographics, it's the world's most important relationship. China and India comprise 40% of humanity and boast economies that are expected to loom large over the 21st century. They also represent two of the world's fastest-growing militaries, armed with nuclear weapons, and are expanding their spheres of influence across oceans. Jonathan Holslag, a Brussels-based scholar of Chinese foreign policy and author of the recent book China and India: Prospects for Peace, is among a growing number ...

When researcher Karen Clark developed the first probability-based model for measuring the threat of natural disasters in the U.S. in 1987, almost no one cared. Clark, then 30, started her own company in Boston and used tens of thousands of data points--from the wind speeds of hurricanes to the lengths of fault lines--to help insurance firms estimate how often a disaster might strike and how much harm it might do. Then, in 1992, Hurricane Andrew struck, wreaking more havoc than ...

In November 1989 word went out that Mikhail Gorbachev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, would stop in Rome en route to a summit meeting with President George Bush. In Rome he would have an audience with Pope John Paul II. This was glasnost, 200 proof. The head of the communist world had bumped into the answer to Stalin's question: How many divisions has the Pope? And the Pope was engaging in spiritual geopolitics at summit ...

It's the latest evidence that the health and environmental effects of the Fukushima nuclear-power-plant accident will be devastating and long-lasting. After a review of data on the amount of radiation leaked by the damaged plant following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, Japanese nuclear-safety officials raised their assessment of the crisis to Level 7, the highest ranking on an international scale of nuclear-incident severity--which puts the Fukushima disaster on par with the Chernobyl explosion in 1986. The new rating reflects ...