Stephen Schneider

Stephen Schneider, a Stanford University scientist who served on the international research panel on global warming that shared the 2007 Nobel Prize with former Vice President Al Gore, has died. He was 65.

Dr. Ben Santer has said, "We honor the memory of Steve Schneider by continuing to fight for the things he fought for – by continuing to seek clear understanding of the causes and impacts of climate change. We honor Steve by recognizing that communication is a vital part of our job. We honor Steve by taking the time to explain our research findings in plain English. By telling others what we do, why we do it, and why they should care about it. We honor Steve by raising our voices, and by speaking out when powerful “forces of unreason” seek to misrepresent our science. We honor Steve Schneider by caring about the strange and beautiful planet on which we live, by protecting its climate, and by ensuring that our policymakers do not fall asleep at the wheel."

 
For more on the passing of Stephen Schneider see Real Climate

Data Basin lead Climate Scientist, Dominique Bachelet writes, "I remember meeting Steve Schneider in the late 1980s when he came and visited the EPA research lab in Corvallis, Oregon where I worked at the time as a contractor. I was involved in a project studying the effects of climate change on rice paddy ecosystems in Asia. It was an ambitious project partly funded by EPA, partly by the German government supporting methane measurements in the field at the Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, partly by the Dutch government supporting modeling efforts. Because we were also involved with Chinese scientists, Steve started sending me a lot of papers to review that had been submitted by Asian scientists to Climatic Change, the journal he had founded and continued to be its editor. Several months after his visit, I remember writing him a letter saying that as a non native speaker, I would lose all my semblance of good English writing if he continued to send me these hard to read, hard to understand papers written by Asian colleagues, could he please edit them first so at least I would get the gist of them! For a long time, I did not receive any manuscripts to review from Climatic Change.  Then I met him again when I was working with a USFS research team focusing on the effects of CC on terrestrial systems and the manuscripts to review reappeared. I also remember much later sitting in a dark room next to this knitting woman with whom I engaged in conversation about the speaker, Steve. It took me a while to realize I was talking to Terry, his wife. We talked about his cancer and the way he had pulled from it, his scientific approach to the disease, his “Patient from Hell” approach to it. I was impressed. I saw him again at WWF climate camp a couple of years ago and actually approached him again to get his series of climate change cartoons that illustrated with humor the critical points he was making. He had a great library for those. Steve was a committed individual, a good scientist and an effective activist. The climate change community has lost a valuable member and we all feel the loss."

Click here see Steve's book "Patient from Hell" on cancer