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If there's one climate change-related interview you read today (just in case you're one of those people who read dozens of them), check out the piece over at the New Republic featuring Dr. Stephen Schneider.
Perhaps no man has been more misrepresented by the media in the scientific community than Schneider, and all because of one little paper he wrote back when he was still a student. TNR explains that while he was studying plasma physics at Columbia and moonlighting at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (ah, sounds just like my college career), "he co-authored an article for Science arguing that the warming effect caused by rising amounts of carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere would be swamped by the cooling effect caused by aerosol pollution like dust and smoke." That was in 1971.
So essentially, this paper formed the basis for what became popularly known as global cooling--the idea pointed to by climate change deniers as evidence that global warming today is just a over-hyped, big-government power grab. The thing is, that paper was debunked long ago--it turns out that "they neglected to account for the fact that aerosols were regional while CO2 was global"--which wildly threw off the calculations.
Schneider accepted the critique, realized he'd made a major error, and continued on to do some of the most important work in climate science in his field:
in addition to his work as Professor of Biological Sciences and Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies at Stanford, he has been heavily involved in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a scientific body tasked with assessing the climate risks facing the planet. (Its most recent report, in 2007, concluded that most of the twentieth-century increase in global average temperatures was "very likely" due to human activities, and that world temperatures could rise between 1.1 and 6.4
Along the way, a funny thing happened. Some of the most prominent climate change deniers in the media dug up Schneider's old paper--the first, error-ridden one--and started proclaiming that global cooling was coming again. Famous conservative writer George Will led the charge.
Now, Schneider's paper has become one of the most cited papers by global warming deniers--even though it has been debunked years ago, and even its author is a vocal climate action proponent. Read the full fascinating story in an interview with the man himself over at Times New Republic.
