Stephen H. Schneider (1945–2010)

keeps you guessing: This was a great book. Although you are kept guessing I would say that all the loose ends are tied up in the end. It was not predictable so that by the middle of the book you are able to put the pieces together. Was it believable? Some reviewers thought the story line was a bit far-fetched. I didn't find it far-fetched per-se, perhaps improbable, but its fiction. I didn't expect it to read like a newspaper. I think the fact that it was so unexpected added to the suspense. Just don't start reading this if you have work the next day. You will not want to put it down.… (mere)

Climate scientist Stephen H. Schneider (who died in July, 2010) here organizes 49 essays from noted experts to explore the state-of-our-knowledge of "global climatic disruption" and potential related policy initiatives. The essays are scholarly and, in some cases, quite technical, with charts, maps, and detailed sourcing.

There are five main sections. "Impacts of Climate Change" ranges over extinction, ecosystems, water, hurricanes, wildfires, forests of Amazonia, crop production and food security, human health, and unique and valued places. "Policy Analysis" looks at economic impacts, assessment modeling, risk perceptions, political feasibility, carbon taxes/trading/offsets, and the economic cost of reducing COs emissions. "International Considerations" include treaties, EU climate policy, population, inequities and imbalances, ethics and rights, developing countries, the Clean Development Mechanism, and climate change and policy in China, India and Australia. There is a large section (9 essays) on the United States, including an interesting look at California's approach to combating climate change and at the role of media and public education in shaping policy. The fifth section, "Mitigation Options to Reduce Carbon Emissions", discusses renewable energy, hydrogen and nuclear energy, coal capture and storage, "avoided deforestation" policy for tropical forests, and the pros and cons of engineering the climate.

The information presented here, current to late 2009, is quite alarming, even for someone who has been following climate change for some years. I guess someone has to make an effort to pull things together and hope to change the future, but the more I read in this field, the less hope I have that we as a species can cooperate in time and to the extent necessary to avoid changes for which we aren't prepared and wouldn't want if they were to happen today. In addition to the fact that the many, many consequences of climate change are endlessly layered and interconnected, they are also global, the scope of which most people don't fathom. We aren't talking about simple temperature warming, but massive changes in food production and water availability, location of growing seasons, food chain extinctions, and unprecedented illness and death from starvation, lack of drinking water, and political unrest as huge populations can no longer survive within their countries' borders. It doesn't help that industrial countries have the most to lose in lifestyle but the least in safety, at least for the next few decades. It is also possible that some wealthier countries will see short-term benefits from climate change, which will add to the unwillingness to alter our ways. However, the lag time in climate change is several human lifetimes, and it is too easy to indulge our species' short attention span and need to fulfill immediate wants. Add to that the political improbability of international trust and cooperation for what is needed to stop catastrophe, and the future seems quite bleak.

While this book is difficult for the non-specialist to read, it is full of data and the scientific proofs rarely found in more popular books on the topic. This is the book to read to find out exactly why most scientists are extremely concerned and some terrified by what we've set in motion. Most of the writers make an attempt to just present the facts without sounding an alarm, and the effect is perhaps more disturbing: the bald facts lay out a future we really, really don't want but seem incapable of fully grasping. And therein may lie our fate.… (mere)

Stephen Schneider is one of the world's most esteemed climate scientists. He has spent most of the last four decades on the forefront of the scientific research involving global climate change. His latest book, Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to Save Earth's Climate, is a career biography—in other words, a chronological history of his distinguished career as one of the world's preeminent climate scientists.

This is an outstanding book. It will appeal to those scientists and nonspecialists interested in global climate change and scientific history. As a retired academic librarian, I recommend, unequivocally, that this book be purchased by all academic libraries as well as by those major urban and suburban public libraries that serve a significant professional scientific clientele. This is an important book that documents an extraordinary period of worldwide scientific inquiry.

Unfortunately, when I signed up to get this book and review it, I misread the marketing summaries. I did not realize that the book was a career biography. I thought I would be reading a book that might provide insight into why, as the blurb starts out saying, it has "taken so long for the world to agree on action to combat the biggest threat facing mankind?" I believed the marketing blurb when it went on to suggest that "the answers are both simple and complicated, and Stephen Schneider addresses them all in the blockbuster scientific tell-all "Science as a Contact Sport…". I should have known that tell-all means biography…but I was truly famished for revelations that might help me understand why there are so many otherwise intelligent and highly informed individuals who still do not believe in man-made global warming or are unwilling to back public policy to combat the problem.

Early in the Introduction (page 4), the author states that the answers to this question are "both simple and complicated. The simple can be summed up in five easy pieces: ignorance, greed, denial, tribalism, and short-term thinking… The complicated aspects will require most of the chapters in this book to answer." The following chapters do reveal many specific instances of ignorance and duplicity by world leaders of all kinds, i.e., political, business, media, scientific, etc. But I did not find these surprising nor insightful—although they are, of course, of great historical significance. I wanted to know more about the simple—the "ignorance, greed, denial, tribalism, and short-term thinking." Perhaps it was naïve of me to think that I'd get insight on that front from a climate scientist.

But the author did have at least one startling insight for me about these issues that was revealed in the last chapter of the book. Here, the author asks himself the question (page 260): "Can democracy survive complexity?" It is a question that keeps him up at night. He fears that "democracy has a hard time dealing with slowly evolving, large scale, complex problems such as climate change. " He tries to be optimistic but he is clearly out of his area of scientific expertise wrestling with the social scientific aspects of this profound question.

Personally, I am extremely pleased I read the book because it led me to recognize and think about this final fundamental question: Has our world grown too complex for democracy to continue to succeed? Is global climate change failing to be adequately addressed and resolved, at least in part, because of democracy?

I have read Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed and Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies so I have a passing familiarity with complexity theory. I am acutely aware that world civilization is spiraling toward ever higher levels of complexity—that eventually there may be a small, unforeseen rip in the fabric of that complexity that could bring down the entire web of modern civilization. I don't let this knowledge keep me up at night because it is truly something that cannot be controlled.

But global climate change may yet still be controllable. Let us hope so…and let us also hope, as the author does, that democracy may not fail us in our efforts to save the planet.… (mere)