Global Green News
Stanford climate scientist Stephen Schneider dies at 65
SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS. JULY 19, 2010. by Paul Rogers
Stephen Schneider, a Stanford University biologist and one of the nation's leading climate scientists, has died.
Stanford officials announced Monday that Schneider, 65, suffered a heart attack today while flying from a science meeting in Stockholm to London.
Over a career that spanned 40 years, Schneider was an outspoken and visible voice about how the buildup of carbon dioxide has been steadily warming the earth. He published more than 400 scientific papers, proceedings and legislative testimonies and more than 200 book reviews, editorials and other works.
A Stanford professor since 1992, he was a lead author on the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore.
Schneider received his doctorate in mechanical engineering and plasma physics from Columbia University in 1971. In 1975, he founded the journal Climatic Change. In 1992, he won a MacArthur Fellowship.
He had been a White House consultant in the Nixon, Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama administrations.
"Steve, more than anything, whether you agreed with him or not, forced us to confront this real possibility of climate change," said Jeff Koseff, his colleague at Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment.
Schneider was the Melvin and Joan Lane Professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies, a professor of biology, a professor of civil and environmental engineering, and a senior fellow in the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University.
After receiving his doctorate, he studied the role of greenhouse gases and suspended particulate material on climate as a postdoctoral fellow at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. He was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in 1972. From 1973 to 1996, he was a member of the scientific staff there, where he co-founded the Climate Project.
Schneider also served as editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Climate and Weather and author of "The Genesis Strategy: Climate and Global Survival;" "Global Warming: Are We Entering the Greenhouse Century?," "The Coevolution of Climate and Life and Laboratory Earth: The Planetary Gamble We can't Afford to Lose."
