Renowned Climate-Change Scientist Dies

Outspoken researcher had received death threats in past year
By: Gerry Shih

Stephen H. Schneider, a pre-eminent Stanford climatologist who persistently called for action to curb global warming, died early Monday. He was 65.

Schneider suffered an apparent heart attack while flying to London from Stockholm, where he was attending a conference, according to an e-mail sent by his wife, the Stanford biologist Terry Root.

For four decades, Schneider studied the Earth’s climate and the natural and human factors that govern it. A well-regarded researcher, Schneider also spent considerable energy shaping government policy and the public’s opinion of global warming.

As a rising researcher in the early 1980s Schneider began to advocate sharp reductions to greenhouse gas emissions. He believed in an activist role for the climate scientist: He made appearances on shows from Johnny Carson's "The Tonight Show" to "Good Morning America" and published a string of books on the subject.

He also maintained a website, “Mediarology,” that urged scientists to go out and “debunk climate change myths” and chastised journalists for creating artificial balance and giving voice to deniers of global warming.

He was a central figure in the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore.

In the past year in particular, Schneider received a barrage of hate mail and even death threats from extremists who reject the powerful evidence that accelerating global warming is a largely human-driven phenomenon.

Schneider had acknowledged the slim possibility that climate change was not driven by human factors, but he leaned on a bit of Pascalian logic: however distinct that possibility, the stakes were simply too high to not take action to reduce carbon emissions.

In the final months of his life, Schneider said that the intense politicization of the debate had begun to exact a toll. Schneider and Root, a well-known faculty couple on the Stanford campus, delisted their home address and fitted extra alarms at the house.

In a Guardian article from July Schneider and other prominent scientists said that the volume of hate mail spiked every time right-wing commentators like Glenn Beck attacked their research, and peaked during the Copenhagen climate-change summit last December.

“He really got on the nerves of these climate skeptics because he was very vocal and bringing the truth,” said Mark Z. Jacobson, an atmospheric scientist at the Woods Institute for the Environment, where Schneider worked.

Schneider began working as a researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research shortly after receiving a doctorate in mechanical engineering and plasma physics from Columbia in 1971.

He waded quickly into policy, at first working with scientific officials in the Nixon administration. He has advised every presidential administration since. 

Schneider received the MacArthur Fellowship in 1992 and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2002.

In the early 2000s Schneider began battling a highly lethal type of cancer of the lymph nodes. He took an active role in his treatment, pushing his doctors to try new methods to control the cancer. He believed he had beaten the disease before he died Monday.

“In my work on climate, I have one client, the earth,” Schneider told The New York Times in 2005, during his struggle with cancer. “It was the same with the cancer. In both cases, there was no room to be wrong.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story referred incorrectly to the state of climate change science. At present, the vast majority of climate scientists believe that there is conclusive evidence that global warming is driven by human behavior. Corrections page.