Honoring Dr. Stephen Schneider and Acknowledging His Guidance

By Andrew P. Jones
July 19, 2010

We were saddened to hear of the death of a great scientist and sustainability leader, Dr. Stephen Schneider.

As others have chronicled, he was a brilliant champion for rigorous and decision-maker-oriented climate science. True to Science and true to Relevance.

Here at Climate Interactive, his guidance as one of the members of the scientific review committee for C-ROADS has shaped and will continue to shape our simulations and how we use them. Look at the shaded blue areas on the Climate Scoreboard (showing the uncertainty range) and you can see his counsel. And, ironically, Tom Fiddaman at Ventana is just starting to build new structure for handing uncertainty in C-ROADS — the world will continue to benefit from his guidance.

Dug into my email archive and found some sage advice from him to us regarding C-ROADS and any simulation. He wrote:

“A simple caveat to take these C-ROADS patterns as reasonable approximations, rather than absolute forecasts, is still needed in framing the utility of this approach in my view for C-ROADS’ credibility. … In a push to be simple for comprehensibility for the political world, we don’t want to open ourselves up to any legitimate criticisms.”

Ben Santer, on RealClimate, wrote the following as the last paragraph of a lovely eulogy:

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.