(UPDATES*)Obits on Stephen Schneider. Climate scientist, policy consultant, and campaigner dies on the job.
I’d known Steve Schneider from chance encounters but my most memorable long conversation with him was in the hot sun on the parking lot of the National Center for Atmospheric Research above Boulder. He was walking in, I was walking out. It was 1988, a scorching summer, and somewhat before NASA man Jim Hansen told Congress the signature of global warming was rising from the noise. Schneider told me the same thing, filled with caveats and his standard evasion of being made to look absolutely certain about things – but pretty darned sure. This cimate thing is important, he kept saying. The press has to take it more seriously. He gently poked his finger at my shoulder. Call me anytime.
And the last time I spoke with him in person, maybe two years ago, was at a small workshop on climate change in Berkeley. His prognosis this time came during a moment of exasperation that the nation seems petrified of doing anything that requires any short term pain at all among Americans. The fact is, he said with no maybes, “We’re screwed.”
As a whirl of obituaries explain today, Stephen H. Schneider, Stanford University physicist and biologist, died aboard an airliner while flying to London following a scientific meeting in Stockholm. He had been ill for some time with a rare cancer, seemed to have beaten it, even wrote a book about it (an eerie parallel to Stephen Jay Gould’s arc), and then suddenly as he regained his stride, is gone. He was a warrior.
Some of the Obits and Stories:
- LA Times – Elaine Woo :
- Washington Post - T. Rees Shapiro ;
- The Guardian – Michael Mann, Ben Santer ; The authors are climate scientists close to Schneider. They give him more credit than anybody on the planet – more than Al Gore or Jim Hansen – for shining a public light on human-caused climate change.
- NY Times – Douglas Martin ; NYTimes Dot Earth: Andrew C. Revkin ;
- Sydney Morning Herald/AAP: Thomas Conlin ;
- AP – Jason Dearen ;
- Discover Magazine – Chris Mooney ;
- San Jose Mercury News – Paul Rogers ;
- San Francisco Chronicle – David Perlman ;
- Huffington Post - Matt Petersen ;
- Time Magazine – Michael Lemonick ;
- AAAS ScienceNow – Richard A. Kerr ;
*More odes and updates:
- Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media – Bud Ward : Mourning the Huge Loss of a “Giant’;
- Columbia Journalism Review – Cristine Russell: Stephen Schneider: Climate Communicator / Remembering an esteemed scientist’s contributions to the media over three decades;
- Columbia Journalism Review / Observatory – Curtis Brainard: Obits for Schneider Roll In / Reporters pay respect to climate scientist and “mediarologist” ;
Stanford University – Louis Bergeron, Dan Stober ; Official obit from the university.
- Charlie Petit
