How the science magazines are covering global warming

It’s gotten too darned hot lately to sleep without running the A-C. Of course, this means that now we’re losing sleep over our electricity bill, and whether global warming is going to threaten our retirement. Time to crack the science books.

Don’t look for comfort from Popular Science, whose climate change-focused issue heaps on enough weather-related worrying to give us the hot shivers.

We got a chuckle over the scientific quest to make it snow by seeding clouds with silver iodide. “There’s something seductive about the idea of controlling the weather,” writes Sarah Scoles, appealing to the inner Zeus in all of us. The idea is to help drought-afflicted areas while also ensuring that Aspen has enough snow for ski season. Priorities, folks.

Worst was the 10-page spread on cute animals endangered by extreme weather. As temperatures climb, pandas may be forced to quickly migrate to colder regions, even though bamboo, their staple dish, may not be able to grow there. And koala bears are finding eucalyptus leaves increasingly poisonous because of rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.

Is weather talk getting you down? Not to worry: Scientific American will give you plenty of other things to worry about.

A crop of “super lice” has become immune to over-the-counter shampoo treatments, for example. The Food and Drug Administration has approved three new lice treatments since 2009, but some say doctors aren’t properly rotating them to ensure that the super lice don’t become immune to those treatments, too.

“Lice seem poised to keep researchers — and the rest of us — scratching our heads for quite some time,” says mag contributor Karen Weintraub.

If your skin isn’t already crawling, writer Steve Mirsky claims there are “eleventy bazillion” spiders lurking in our surroundings.

“Wherever you sit as you read these lines, a spider is probably no more than a few yards away,” says arachnologist Norman Platnick. “As most spiders have eight eyes, it’s probably looking at you, too.”

The top science mag even managed to make us worry about pizza pies. In Naples, Italy, Bruno Siciliano has been developing a pizza-making robot to see if it can master the “extraordinary level of agility and dexterity” required to work the dough. That sounds creepier than lice and spiders.

Enquirer slammed on Trump coverage

The New Yorker, taking a page from The Post’s own Media Ink column, puts a spotlight on President Trump’s cozy relationship with American Media chief David Pecker, which owns the National Enquirer.

The gossip tabloid once considered “newsmakers” of all stripes fair game, according to a former staffer, who called the Trump administration “the ultimate target-rich environment.”

Yet under Pecker, the Enquirer has turned a blind eye to this “golden opportunity,” according to this week’s New Yorker.

The lives of Trump and Pecker have “intersected in myriad ways” for decades, writes Jeffrey Toobin, who quotes a source describing Pecker’s role in the relationship as that of “a little puppy.”

But the possibility of Pecker expanding his empire to include top Time Inc.’s titles “makes the story of the Enquirer and its chief executive a little more important and a little less funny,” Toobin says.

Meanwhile, Time’s cover story, “Someone’s not telling the truth” to special counsel Robert Mueller as he investigates Trump, invokes the “first law of holes” to yawning effect.

“If you’re in one, stop digging,” the piece says, dusting off a platitude so shopworn it (almost) goes without saying.

Elsewhere, the author shifts the metaphor to cancer treatment: “Live or die, it will be a draining, miserable experience.”

New York’s cover story, “How the Presidency Ends,” compares the White Houses of Trump and Richard Nixon.

“If you look through a sharp Nixonian lens at Trump’s trajectory in the office to date, short as it has been, you will discover more of an overlap than you might expect,” writes Frank Rich, as if such expectations among his left-wing readership weren’t already immeasurably high.

A Trump resignation or Nixon-like impeachment may not happen, Rich admits — a contingency that clearly irks the author.