Crazy Weather and Keystone XL Pipeline

Crazy Weather (1:02) Guests: Deke Arndt, monitoring branch chief of NOAA’s National Center for Environmental Information  Robert Gillies, Climate Expert and Director of the Utah Climate Center  “The planet is warming, but not equally all over the planet. The arctic is warming up far faster," Giles said. This winter has been unusually warm for the United States. That’s looking at the national average, temperature, though. While record snowfalls were widespread in the East, record warmth engulfed much of the West. Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah and Washington all had their warmest winter on record, according to data released today by the National Climatic Data Center of NOAA.  “I think it’s safe to say that for most of the U.S., things are different than they were 20 years ago," Arndt said. “\[Our storms are] more intense and having more capacity to deliver precipitation.” On Top of Mind, we look at the weather disconnect between the East and West of the United States.  Keystone Pipeline (50:24) Guests: Jeremy Pope, Assistant Professor in the Political Science Department at BYU  Larry Baxter, Chemical Engineering Professor at BYU studying sustainable energy  Kevin Book, Managing Director of Research at ClearView Energy Partners.  It’s been six years since TransCanada, a Canadian energy and infrastructure company, applied for the approval of the Keystone XL Pipeline, submitting the proposition for the 1,179-mile long pipeline to the U.S. State Department. The plan? To carry oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. This bill has been nothing short of controversial, as some look at this legislation as a way to create jobs, while other see it as a threat to the environment. President Obama just vetoed this bill, but that does not necessarily mean this bill is going away.  “It’s difficult to get that oil from Montana out to real markets," Baxter said.  "The shale oil is pretty high quality oil from a viscosity standpoint.”