Andrew Freedman

The one good thing you can say about Andrew Freedman's "Cold weather in a hot climate" entry at the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang blog (HT James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web) is that he's at least not hiding his bias.

Boiling it down, Freedman believes that weather broadcasters should use the occasions of heat waves and serious storms as global warming teachable moments, yet become strict info relayers when it's extraordinarily cold. In doing so, he advocates a continuation of what Julie Seymour at the Media Research Center's Business & Media Institute has already observed:

The news media constantly misuse extreme weather examples to generate fear of global warming, but when record cold or record snow sets in journalists don’t mention the possibility of global cooling trends. While climatologists would say weather isn’t necessarily an indication of climate, it has been in the media, but only when the weather could be spun as part of global warming.

Freedman, whose post quotes Julie's work without linking to it, confirms that the bias she has observed is in his case quite conscious. In the process, he goes to a leading apologist for the "Hide the Decline" Climategate charlatans who have fraudulently been manipulating their so-called scientific research while "somehow" losing critical raw data, propagandizing and scrubbing supposedly objective reference sources like Wikipedia, and attempting to discredit, intimidate and marginalize skeptics for a decade or more:

Another biased story about another alarmist warming “model.”

It might be easier to work up a proper sense of dread at a scary new “climate change model” if the group doing the scaring didn’t use a roulette wheel for illustration. And “The Greenhouse Gamble” graphics only make the Washington Post’s one-sided report on the model more laughable.

On the Feb. 23 “Capital Weather Gang” Web site, the Post’s Andrew Freedman reported that MIT's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change revised its predictions about just how hot the Earth will become in this century. Not surprisingly, the MIT group said that if governments don’t institute drastic, economy-killing policies to reduce man-made greenhouse emissions, the global temperature could end up hotter than previously thought.

As Freedman explained it, The MIT Integrated Global System Model, “showed significantly increased odds that by the end of the century warming would be on the high end of the scale for a so-called ‘no policy scenario.’”  Essentially, there is a one in 11 chance that by the end of the century, the average temperature will have risen by about 12.6 degrees. On the other hand, the odds are one in 100 that warming would be limited to below 5.4 degrees.