Brian Lair on WNYC, now our climate story of the week, which we do every Tuesday on

the show. We'll talk mostly about a critique by the group River Keeper of the Storm Surge

Protection Plan for New York City, developed by the US Army Corps of Engineers. It's supposed

to go to Congress for approval next month, but it turns out a number of environmental

groups do not like this environmental protection program one bit. And our guest from River Keeper

is also well placed to give us an update on in some context for the flooding in the Hudson

Valley this week that Governor Hoko has called a one in a thousand year weather event.

But first, we have to note these climate headlines from the past week since last Tuesday

show. Scientists reported, did you hear this? That last Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday,

with the three hottest days on Earth since they started keeping records. What they call

the average global temperature hit 62.6 degrees. For the first time since they started keeping

that stat in 1940, that's a running average of all the daytime and nighttime temperatures

at many recording stations around the globe. And you know about some of the extremes in

parts of this country and others that pushed the Earth to that spike.

So last week, the journal Nature Medicine published a study that counted around 61,000

heat-related deaths from that major heat wave last summer in Europe. They suggest that

whatever Europe has been doing to adapt to the global warming era is proving not to

be enough. 61,000 heat-related deaths just from the major heat wave last summer according

to that study in nature medicine. And on not doing enough to adapt to the global warming

era, well, that brings us to the controversy over how to adapt around New York City and

up the Hudson Valley. With us now, we're very happy to have Tracy Brown, president of the

group, River Keeper, based in Austin, which is dedicated centrally to protecting the Hudson

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