Archive: Freedman
Freedman: Why Is James Hansen So Worried?
James Hansen, the head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, has had it with policymakers' lack of progress to address global climate change, and he is not afraid to let them know it. In commemoration of landmark climate change testimony he gave in 1988, which first...
By Andrew Freedman | June 30, 2008; 10:30 AM ET | Comments (50)
Freedman: Increasingly Going to Extremes
As a swollen Mississippi River breached levees last week, the U.S. Climate Change Science Program released a report that warned of more heavy precipitation events and associated flooding in the coming years due to global climate change. The report, entitled "Weather and Climate Extremes in a Changing Climate," is possibly...
By Andrew Freedman | June 24, 2008; 10:00 AM ET | Comments (41)
Freedman: Explaining an Extreme Spring
This spring's weather sounds like it was crafted from a pitch meeting between a hapless Hollywood screenwriter and a studio executive. The pitch? "It's a movie in which flooding inundates downtown middle America, tornadoes strike boy scouts, strong winds lash the nation's capital, and record heat wave has New Yorkers...
By Andrew Freedman | June 17, 2008; 10:15 AM ET | Comments (40)
Freedman: Becoming Reaquainted with the Sky
Last week I was reminded of something lofty that I had neglected during a year of graduate school study in global climate change policy: clouds. By clouds I'm not speaking of the question of how global climate models represent future changes in cloud cover due to warming, which is a...
By Andrew Freedman | May 26, 2008; 12:00 PM ET | Comments (6)
Freedman: Arctic Sea Ice May Set Record Low
The Interior Department's decision last week to list the polar bear as a "threatened" species under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) may soon be seen as either a prescient move, or possibly even as too little too late, if scientists' ominous predictions for this summer's Arctic sea ice melt and...
By Andrew Freedman | May 19, 2008; 10:30 AM ET | Comments (36)
Bangladesh's Example for a Post-Nargis World
Tropical Cyclone Nargis, which exacted a staggering human toll on the politically isolated and poor country of Myanmar, has demonstrated once again that there is an urgent need for a more robust infrastructure in developing countries for issuing and disseminating warnings of natural hazards. Unlike when the deadly Indian Ocean...
By Andrew Freedman | May 14, 2008; 10:30 AM ET | Comments (35)
Freedman: Global Warming Has Not Been Canceled
Many stories were written last week about a study in the scientific journal Nature [subscription required] showing that, during the next few years, naturally shifting ocean currents may offset some of the greenhouse gas-induced warming trend for parts of North America and Europe. The trouble with the study was that...
By Andrew Freedman | May 5, 2008; 11:00 AM ET | Comments (10)
Freedman: Three Statistics for Climate Change Talks
Recently, representatives of 17 nations met in Paris as part of the Bush administration's initiative to engage the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitters to reduce the emissions that are contributing to global climate change. You can probably guess how much progress was achieved... none. But there was at least some...
By Andrew Freedman | April 28, 2008; 11:00 AM ET | Comments (29)
Freedman: A Harsh Climate for Optimism
While there are many reasons to be enthusiastic about environmental progress on this Earth Day week, it's difficult for people in the climate science community to be in a celebratory mood at the moment. Despite the abundant attention devoted to climate change since the last Earth Day, many climate scientists...
By Andrew Freedman | April 22, 2008; 11:00 AM ET | Comments (49)
Freedman: Sale May Improve The Weather Channel
In this era of media company layoffs and mergers, perhaps it was only a matter of time before The Weather Channel (TWC) was put up on the auction block. But while its loyal viewers should view the potential sale of the venerable network with some skepticism, there is plenty of...
By Andrew Freedman | April 14, 2008; 11:00 AM ET | Comments (12)
Freedman: The Price of Al Gore's Climate Battle
To a climate change contrarian, Al Gore is a one-man axis of evil. By publicizing the dangers of global climate change, and now launching one of the most expensive and far-reaching issue advocacy campaigns of at least the past several years, Gore has helped to vault climate change to the...
By Andrew Freedman | April 7, 2008; 11:00 AM ET | Comments (246)
Freedman: Climate Change Low on Public Agenda
The American public does not view global climate change as a top tier problem facing the country today, according to a recent Gallup poll. The poll found that "the economy in general" topped the list, followed by the Iraq War and about two dozen other issues, including "lack of money,"...
By Andrew Freedman | March 31, 2008; 11:00 AM ET | Comments (11)
Freedman: A 'Push' Beyond Weather Radio in Cities
The tornado that struck downtown Atlanta, Georgia on March 14 came perilously close to being a "worst case scenario" - packed stadium, downtown traffic, expensive real estate, little warning. City residents were incredibly lucky to escape without a single casualty and with only about $250 million in damages. The Atlanta...
By Andrew Freedman | March 24, 2008; 11:00 AM ET | Comments (23)
Freedman: The Winter That Was (Everywhere Else)
The winter of 2007-8 served as a reminder for much of the country, and indeed much of the world, that despite the starring role now being played by global warming, Old Man Winter has not completely exited the stage. In fact, wintry weather enjoyed a dramatic comeback this year compared...
By Andrew Freedman | March 17, 2008; 11:00 AM ET | Comments (13)
Towards An Interactive Weather Index
Two weeks ago we asked you to brainstorm with us about how to create a new weather index or scale that will be used to communicate our weather forecasts. Many of you responded with excellent suggestions, and I'd like to respond to some of them here and add my...
By Andrew Freedman | March 10, 2008; 11:00 AM ET | Comments (7)
Freedman: To Be Renovated
In a small corner of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, past the dinosaur exhibit with its throngs of stroller-pushing tourists and beyond the Dinosaur Cafe that sells overpriced salads, lies an exhibit on ice ages that proclaims that the earth is not in fact warming due to human...
By Andrew Freedman | March 3, 2008; 11:00 AM ET | Comments (11)
Help us Create a New Weather Index
At the Capital Weather Gang (CWG), we strive to make weather information fun, interesting, and above all, relatable to daily living. To that end, we're exploring the idea of creating a new index, or scale, that would fuse numerous bits and pieces of weather forecast information together with other...
By Andrew Freedman | February 25, 2008; 11:00 AM ET | Comments (31)
Freedman: The Meaning of an Asterisk
What do last year's abnormally warm year worldwide and Barry Bonds' home run record have in common? They both may need an asterisk to signify that someone has been cooking the books. When baseball slugger Bonds broke Hank Aaron's home run record last year, many in the baseball world sought...
By Andrew Freedman | February 10, 2008; 10:30 AM ET | Comments (22)
Freedman: Super Tuesday Spin
Tornado outbreak competes for Super Tuesday attention It was a tough decision on Tuesday evening of what story to follow more closely: the presidential primaries or the unfolding tornado tragedy in the South. As of early this morning, the death toll stood at more than 50 from the abnormally violent...
By Andrew Freedman | February 7, 2008; 11:00 AM ET | Comments (8)
Freedman: How Should we "Focus the Nation?"
This past week, more than 1,000 institutions of learning, mainly colleges and universities, participated in "Focus the Nation," a national "teach-in" on global climate change science and solutions. The event was aimed at raising awareness of climate change and ways to address the challenge that it poses to the global...
By Andrew Freedman | February 3, 2008; 11:00 AM ET | Comments (8)
Freedman: In Defense of TV Weathercasters
TV weathercasters are a paranoid lot. They have good grounds for living in fear, because they're often a scapegoat in the television age. As the adage goes, they have the only gig around where they can be wrong and suffer few, if any, consequences. Even before their bright, abnormally happy...
By Andrew Freedman | January 27, 2008; 05:00 AM ET | Comments (11)
Freedman: Ground Truth
"Seeing is believing" is a saying that can mean a great deal in life. It is typically used in conversation to refer to something strange that happened that no one would have believed could happen until it actually happened, like a window-washer falling 47 stories and surviving or a penguin...
By Andrew Freedman | January 20, 2008; 11:00 AM ET | Comments (16)
Freedman: Another Strange Year
Is the weather getting stranger or is it just me? More people asked themselves this question in 2007, as temperatures edged ever upward. This was, after all, the year when battling global warming turned into a worldwide social and political movement, thereby making odd weather suspicious. The weather of 2007...
By Andrew Freedman | January 13, 2008; 09:00 AM ET | Comments (51)
