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Contact
Jim: jdipeso@rep.org
(253) 740-2066 / 2011
Archive / 2010
Archive
Stephen Schneider: A Great
Science Communicator
July 20, 2010
Stephen
Schneider, the plainspoken climate scientist who died unexpectedly July
19, was one of those uncommon academics who successfully bridged
the world of ivory tower research and the rough and tumble of politics
and media.
Schneider was at the center of climate change research, from the early
days four decades ago when it was an esoteric niche through its
evolution into a global enterprise with deep ramifications for human
society.
 He was
equally at home in
front of a computer running a climate model, arguing with his fellow
scientists about this or that research finding, testifying in front of
frowning senators at congressional hearings, or appearing on the
Tonight
show, where he upstaged an unamused Johnny Carson and was never
invited back.
With a booming voice, quick wit, and a native New Yorker’s impatience
with beating around the bush, Schneider often was seen and heard at the
collision-prone intersections where science, politics, and journalism
come together.
With climate science, those collisions can be especially dangerous, as
climate
is a public policy issue afflicted with an unusually thick miasma of
misinformation, misrepresentations, and ideological agendas. Schneider
received more than
his fair share of scorching e-mails, a few including threats.
Still, he carried on with his showman’s knack for telling a story,
cracking a joke, or using analogies to help scientifically untrained
audiences understand the significance of climate change and to prod
politicians to act on the problem.
Schneider had no patience for arguments that scientists should not go
public with information that is not 100 percent definitive. He believed
that scientists have an obligation to tell citizens and their elected
representatives the extent of what they know, what the possible
outcomes are, and the odds of those outcomes occurring.
Better, he argued, for scientists to tell politicians what they know,
with full disclosure of caveats, than for scientifically untrained
politicians to guess and make poorly informed decisions.
Part of the problem with gaining a broad understanding of climate
change, Schneider believed, was what he called "mediarology" – a
tendency by journalists to highlight dramatically opposite possible
outcomes that scientists judge to be the least likely to occur – an
apocalypse that threatens humanity with extinction versus a greening of
the earth that will be good for us.
"What I'm trying to do is get media and the political world to stop
framing climate change in either/or terms, when we're really looking at
a bell curve of possibilities," Schneider told an interviewer once.
Instead, Schneider asked citizens, journalists and policymakers to ask
scientists three clear, penetrating questions about climate change:
What could happen? What are the odds that it could happen? And how do
you know?
Clarity, in both scientific and moral senses, was what Schneider
brought to the table on an issue that will engage human society for
generations. He will be greatly missed.
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