6/1/2021 Stephen H. Schneider, Climatologist, Is Dead at 65 - The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/science/earth/20schneider.html

Stephen H. Schneider, Climatologist, Is Dead at 65

By Douglas Martin

July 20, 2010

Stephen H. Schneider, an influential climatologist who used the results of complex scientific models he developed to become a leader in pressing for action to address global warming, died Monday in London. He was 65.

His wife, Terry L. Root, said he died of a heart attack or an embolism on a flight from Sweden as the plane was landing in London.

Dr. Schneider wrote books on the effects of climate change on areas as diverse as politics and wildlife. He advised the administration of every president from Richard M. Nixon to Barack Obama and was part of a United Nations panel on climate change that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore.

In 2001, Dr. Schneider was found to have mantle cell lymphoma, a rare type of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and he applied the same sort of analysis to the disease that he used in his scientific work. He wrote a book four years later when the disease was in remission, “The Patient From Hell.”

“Am I going to apply to my own treatment the principles that I’m advising government and industries to apply to deal with climate change uncertainties?” he asked in a 2005 interview with the National Academy of Sciences, of which he was a member. “Hell, yes.”

In a statement, Mr. Gore called Dr. Schneider “a prolific researcher and author, co-founder of the journal Climatic Change and a wonderful communicator” who greatly contributed “to the advancement of climate science.”

In an interview on Monday, the biologist and population expert Paul R. Ehrlich said, “I don’t think anybody has worked harder and longer to educate the public on climate issues in particular and science issues in general.”

That human beings release warming gases into the atmosphere has been known since the early 19th century. But in recent years, scientists have employed satellites, computers and other technological means to construct complex mathematical models to predict future changes in temperature.

The resulting consensus — which Dr. Schneider helped form with models that combine interrelated processes like ocean dynamics and cloud changes — is that temperatures are rising and that potentially disastrous climate changes could result.

Skeptics have questioned both the science and the need for costly expenditures to stop the predicted warming, like cutting coal consumption. But Dr. Schneider fought so tenaciously for a forceful approach to stop the warming that The New Republic last year called him “a scientific pugilist.”

He rejected hyperbole, readily conceding that uncertainty was unavoidable in something so complicated and long-term. The conference he had attended in Sweden before his death was partly to discuss how climate-change skeptics use that uncertainty to advance their cause.

But because the costs of global warming — from the melting of icecaps to the flooding of islands — is so high, Dr. Schneider maintained, not acting is riskier than acting. He demanded action from national, international and corporate leaders.

Stephen H. Schneider in 2005. Dr. Schneider served on a United Nations climate panel that shared a Nobel Peace Prize. Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

His case was buttressed by the “accumulated preponderance of evidence” scientists had amassed, he said. In an interview with the magazine American Scientist this year, he said his opponents relied on “the political chicanery of ideologists and special interests.”

His worry, he told the magazine, was that lobbying and advertising by “greedy” corporations would obscure this increasingly clear science. He asked, “Can democracy survive complexity?”

Stephen Henry Schneider was born in New York City in 1945 and grew up on Long Island, where he made a telescope at age 13 and was thrilled to see the rings of Saturn. At Columbia University, he earned an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering in 1966, and a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering and plasma physics in 1971.

Dr. Schneider was elected to serve on a new student-faculty senate that was established at Columbia after a wave of student demonstrations in 1968. He told the National Academy of Sciences that this experience taught him to strive to see both sides of every question.

“Let’s discover our differing value systems, and then look for a foundation of shared values where we might find a way to live together,” he said.

Dr. Schneider said his decision to become a climate scientist was “a marriage of convenience and deep conviction.” The conviction came from his decision on Earth Day 1970 to devote himself to the environment. The convenience was ample opportunity in the climate field.

“My God, all that low-hanging fruit, all the simple discoveries are waiting to be made in this important field,” he said. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/science/earth/20schneider.html 1/2 6/1/2021 Stephen H. Schneider, Climatologist, Is Dead at 65 - The New York Times Dr. Schneider began postdoctoral study at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies of NASA, then moved to the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. He helped found the agency’s climate project and helped start the journal Climatic Change there. He worked on the impact that nuclear war could have on the climate.

In 1992 he joined the Stanford faculty, where he held several positions. That year he was awarded a MacArthur fellowship, in part for his contributions in communicating scientific information.

As a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, established by the United Nations in 1988, Dr. Schneider helped write papers that were influential in framing the climate-change discussion. In sharing the Nobel Peace Prize, the group and Mr. Gore were cited “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change.”

Global warming skeptics liked to point to an article Dr. Schneider wrote that appeared in the journal Science in 1971 to suggest that he vacillated. In it, he predicted that the future climate danger could be global cooling, not global warming. He later explained that the cooling forces were regional, while the warming ones were global.

In either case, people were thinking about climate in more dynamic ways. In an interview with The New York Times the next year, Dr. Schneider paraphrased Mark Twain.

“Nowadays,” he said, “everybody is doing something about the weather but nobody is talking about it.”

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