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When Dr. Heidi Cullen talks, people listen. A climate expert at The Weather Channel, Dr. Cullen is also a scientist with Climate Central at Princeton University. This newly formed, non-profit, non-partisan organization is dedicated to providing the public as well as policy makers with the latest peer-reviewed information on global climate change. Heidi is a well-respected journalist and will continue reporting on issues of climate change for The Weather Channel. On the topics of global climate change, weather-related disasters, and predictions for the future, Heidi has all the facts, figures, and up-to-the-minute trends. Formerly with the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the International Research Institute for Climate Prediction Heidi also hosts The Climate Code with Dr. Heidi Cullen, the first weekly television series to focus on climate issues. She has welcomed guests, including Dr. James Hansen who heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City (Hansen is best known for his testimony on climate change to congressional committees in the 1980s that helped raise broad awareness of the global warming issue); Andrew Revkin who has been reporting on the environment for The New York Times since 1995; Jeffrey Sachs, currently a professor and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University ; and Al Gore, Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker and former Vice President of the United States, with whom she shared a podium at the Sundance conference with Robert Redford. Dr. Cullen brings a broad base of experience and education to her presentations, having received a B.S. in Engineering/Operations Research from New York’s Columbia University and a Ph.D. in climatology and oceanatmosphere dynamics at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. Her dissertation focused on understanding the impacts and dynamics of the North Atlantic Oscillation (a climatic phenomenon in the North Atlantic Ocean of fluctuations in the difference of sea-level pressure between the Icelandic Low and the Azores high. Through east-west rocking motions of the Icelandic Low and the Azores high, it controls the strength and direction of westerly winds and storm tracks across the North Atlantic). A decade ago, Cullen was extracting sediment cores from the bottom of the Persian Gulf for Columbia University, studying the interaction between climate and societies. She said “The Climate Code” tries to extract global warming from the bottom of inner-city agendas by featuring community activists, who are trying to reach people unmoved by Hollywood eco-celebrities and untouched by Al Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth.” She said the show attempts to get across the fact that “the weather isn’t apolitical and not an act of God.” She added, “Our hand is now helping to guide it.” In an August 2006 address in Indianapolis, Cullen addressed the members of the National Association of Black Journalists and stated that the extreme effects of global warming may hit hardest in low-income, disproportionately African-American urban areas, as exemplified by Hurricane Katrina. (The Harvard Medical School’s Center for Health and the Global Environment warns that rising levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide may promote asthma, which is already costing $3.2 billion a year to treat children nationally. Asthma increased 160 percent for preschool-age children between 1980 and 1994, according to the center.) Bright, plain-speaking and a no-nonsense authority, Heidi delivers the cold, hard facts to an ever-warming planet.
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