Stephen H. Schneider, a Stanford University climate scientist who for decades built the case that global warming, while laden with complexity, justified an aggressive response, has died. Ralph Cicerone, the president of the National Academy of Sciences, of which Schneider was a longtime member, said he had confirmed the news. Schneider, who was 65, spent decades studying the forces influencing climate and the policy implications of human-driven warming, as well as pressing the case for action to curb emissions of greenhouse gases even as he battled and subdued a rare cancer in recent years. In an e-mail message to a group of contacts, his wife, Terry Root, a biologist at Stanford, said it appeared that he died of a heart attack today as a flight he was on was landing in London.
I first interviewed Schneider in the early 1980s while trying to make sense of the percolating notion of nuclear winter, which Schneider always following the data ended up determining would more likely be a nuclear autumn. It was his caustic honesty about the complex nature of global warming, and the inherent uncertainties in the science, that kept me returning to him for input from 1988 onward. He was a participant in the assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change from the beginning until the last days of his life. He encouraged scientists to get out and communicate directly with the public, maintaining a Web page, Mediarology, describing the challenges attending such a move.
In a phone chat, Cicerone at the academy described Schneider's core traits, particularly his approach to forging policies that made sense even in the face of the persistent uncertainty about the worst-case impacts from warming:
His biggest goal in life was to see a rational approach to policy about climate change, where he tried to evaluate the odds and show people, just like in many other decisions in life, with climate they had to play the odds. He was trying to produce probabilistic ways to make evaluations that could work. In his lifetime, his approach on this became progressively more sophisticated. He noted Schneider's early work charting "the co-eveolution of climate and life" (the title of an early Schneider book):
It was that intellectual journey that convinced him most things are connected to climate. Just in the last few weeks, Schneider was all over the Web, having co-authored a paper laying out the difference in expertise in the camps often cited by the media in climate coverage. Read a long Q&A Schneider conducted with Rick Piltz at Climate Science Watch for some background. Andrew Freedman at the Capital Weather Gang recently excerpted an interview Schneider gave to Stanfords magazine.
Schneider will be missed by many for his energy, wit, ferocity, overloaded e-mail messages, guitar strumming and many other facets. Ill be writing more shortly.