Matt Beardsley

Stanford scientists Mike Toney and Johanna Nelson inspect a transmission X-ray microscope, a powerful device that takes nano-scale images of chemical reactions in batteries while they are running.

Imagine if Tesla, Nissan and GM could cut the price of their electric cars by 25%. That electric dream may be a wee bit closer than you think, thanks to researchers at Stanford University.

Recently a team from Stanford’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory announced a new method to analyze and potentially improve rechargeable battery technology in a radical way. A cheap, reliable rechargeable battery is the holy grail for electric carmakers that rely on costly lithium ion batteries for power. Instead of the usual pairing of a lithium compound with graphite, the study examined lithium-sulfur batteries, which in theory can store five times more energy at a significantly lower cost.

“Sulfur is an earth-abundant element and offers the greatest potential to reduce cost,” said research co-author Michael Toney, head of the Materials Sciences Division at SLAC’s Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource.

The affordability factor has long been a challenge for climate-conscious carmakers who want to fuel their vehicles with oil-free energy. Batteries can cost as much as half of the electric vehicles they power, so significant cost reductions in battery production could potentially make electric cars cheap enough to gain mass market appeal.

The study used high-power X-ray imaging to analyze what happens inside a lithium-sulfur battery when the battery is running. To date, such batteries have had short life spans, failing after only a few dozen charges and discharges. This made them unsuitable for powering electric cars, which require thousands of cycles over their lifetime.

In previous experiments, this short lifespan was attributed to the chemical reactions that were thought to deplete a key part of the battery known as the sulfur cathode. But the new analysis by the study’s co-author, Johanna Nelson found “only negligible changes in the size of (sulfur) particles.”

These detailed images help researchers understand exactly what happens when the battery material swells and cracks, ultimately leading to failure. Solutions such as “encapsulating” the sulfur in a carbon shell can then be explored. In the future, Michael Toney anticipates that three-dimensional images, X-ray diffraction and X-ray spectroscopies will offer even greater insights and other ways to improve the performance of lithium-sulfur batteries.

Sion Power, the Arizona based company, is already working on a lithium-sulfur battery in collaboration with the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and received funding from the Advanced Research Project Agency – Energy (ARPA-E). Earlier this year, BASF, the German chemical company invested $50 Million in the company.

But it’s still a long road from the lab to cheap batteries and affordable electric cars. To put this in context, Silicon Valley’s Envia Systems got worldwide kudos for its recent breakthrough in energy density testing for an advanced lithium-ion battery, but safety and lengthy life cycle testing is still ongoing.

The race for the holy grail of cheap reliable battery technology is heating up. Researchers from the University of Southern California just published results of significant efficiency gains for iron-air batteries, ideally suited for solar power storage.

Earlier this month, two advanced battery companies, Palo Alto Research Center and Robert Bosch LLC, received a total of $7 Million in funding from ARPA-E to improve performance and reliability.

Researchers at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland are researching the rather incredible  lithium air battery, using gold electrodes. Other multinationals like IBM, Panasonic, LG Chem are also working on new battery technology, but that game-changing breakthrough has proved elusive so far.

Meanwhile, every electric car maker will be paying close attention and willing the researchers to put their pedals to the “right” metal and make a commercially viable and cheap battery sometime soon. Like tomorrow…

NNSA/flickr.

Installing white roofs (or painting them white) has been promoted as a way to help slow global warming. New research shows that white roofs may actually add to global warming.

By Alyson Kenward

If you’re interested in staving off climate change without trying too hard, painting your roof white seems like a complete no-brainer. It’s far cheaper than trading in your SUV for a Prius, and it turns the laws of physics to best advantage. Dark roofs absorb sunlight that heats up your house, office tower, or apartment building. That means you’re bound to crank up the energy-intensive air conditioner to keep pace in the summer months — and since electricity in the U.S. comes largely from fossil fuels, the net result is more heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions, and more global warming.

But a white roof does just the opposite. It bounces sunlight right back into the sky, just as light clothing helps you stay cool in the summer. Cooler buildings need less air conditioning, which translates to fewer emissions of heat-trapping gases. That’s why Energy Secretary (and Physics Nobel prizewinner) Steven Chu endorsed the idea back in 2009 and why cities like New York and Philadelphia have launched white-roof projects.

Unfortunately, what seems obvious is not always true, and a new study available online and soon coming out in the Journal of Climate reveals some potentially bad news for white roofs. When Stanford University engineer Mark Jacobson, and his grad student John Hoeve modeled the total climate response to white roofs and other urban surfaces, they found the lightening may actually cause more global warming.

Here’s why: the sunlight that bounces off white roofs doesn’t all fly out into space. A lot of it is absorbed by particles of soot and other dark-colored pollutants that float around in the atmosphere (those same particles are already responsible for a good portion of global warming). The particles heat up, just like your house would have, and the net result is a warmer atmosphere. You house might be cooler, but it would be at the expense of heating the planet.

In short, says Jacobson in a press release: “There does not seem to be a benefit from investing in white roofs. The most important thing is to reduce emissions of the pollutants that contribute to global warming.” So much for trying to take the easy way out.

On the other hand, says Jacobson, there is another way to use your roof in the fight against climate change: cover it with solar panels. The panels intercept sunlight before it hits the roof, so your house doesn’t heat up so much. They don’t bounce the light back into the atmosphere where it can heat up soot particles. And they generate at least some electricity without emitting greenhouse gases. It’s not quite as cheap as painting your roof. But unlike that feel-good solution, it’s actually likely to be effective.

This article originally appeared on Climate Central.

Stanford News Service

Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich points to population and consumption as equally responsible for producing environmental damage.

By Sarah Jane Keller
Stanford News Service

Today’s the day that, according to a United Nations tally, world population reaches seven billion — and could top ten billion by the end of the century.

In his 1968 book, The Population Bomb, Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich warned of the threat of unchecked human population growth. Over the past four decades, the book has brought attention to the question of how many individuals our planet can sustain. Today, Ehrlich reflects on what the four decades since have taught him.

Global population has more than doubled since you wrote The Population Bomb. What major consequences of that growth do we see today?

We are seeing climate disruption leading to rising food prices, loss of biodiversity, deteriorating ecosystem services, increased chances of vast epidemics and nuclear resource wars and a general reduction in the odds of avoiding the first catastrophic collapse of a global civilization.

Have any of your prescriptions from The Population Bomb been followed to success in the last 40 years? 

There has been a cheering reduction in birth rates, but sadly not far enough in rich countries such as the United States and Australia, and not sufficiently widespread.

Will the additional 2 billion people projected to arrive by 2050 have the same environmental impact as adding the last 2 billion?

No, they won’t. People are smart. Farmers didn’t first till marginal soils where water was scarce, but rather the most productive, well-watered soils they could find. To support 2 billion more, it will be necessary to farm ever poorer lands, use more dangerous and expensive agricultural inputs, win metals from ever-poorer ores, drill wells deeper or tap increasingly remote or more contaminated sources to obtain water, and then spend more energy to transport that water ever greater distances. All this will require vastly more energy than is now used. As a result, the next 2 billion people probably will do disproportionately much more damage to our life-support systems than did the last 2 billion. Of course, if humanity got serious about protecting the environment, and now especially the atmosphere, the next 2 billion could do less damage.

Sometimes we hear reference to a “cluster bomb” of growth rather than a “population bomb.” What does this mean?

Sadly, this howler slipped through the refereeing system at Science, the world’s premier science journal, in a recent issue on population.  The “cluster bomb” focuses on the population plight of a cluster of poor countries that struggle with rapid population growth and increasing hunger, without looking at the role of rich countries in worsening that plight. More importantly, it doesn’t look at the role of wealthy countries in contributing to the most important population-related problems that are global: climate disruption, toxification of the entire planet, the possibly insurmountable challenge of transitioning rapidly away from fossil fuels, looting of the seas, and increasing the risks of pandemics and nuclear war.

How do you respond to the statement that we should focus on overconsumption, not population growth? 

Most of humanity’s environmental problems trace to too much total consumption, but that consumption is a product of population size and per-capita consumption. Population and consumption are no more separable in producing environmental damage than the length and width of a rectangle can be separated in producing its area – both are equally important.

Can individuals with high per-capita consumption make a difference by changing their behaviors, or do we need to look to systematic changes?
Individual changes can help, but we really need a widespread, bottom-up social movement such as the one which Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere (MAHB) is trying to generate. The MAHB is an outfit you can join if you want to help figure out how society can avoid a collapse. Political action is essential.

Is it possible to increase gross domestic product (GDP) without consuming ever more resources?

GDP is a lousy measure of a society’s health or people’s happiness. That healthy economies can grow forever at 3.5 percent per year may be the most widespread folly in our popular culture. It actually implies that in 20 years the capacity of Earth’s environment to support us could be roughly cut in half, because the scale of the human enterprise will have doubled. It also implies that in a couple of centuries, that capacity could be reduced to something like one-hundredth of today’s capacity. Perpetual growth is the creed of the cancer cell.  One way to see this is to watch the fine new movie, GrowthBusters: Hooked on Growth.

Do leaders have the information that they need to address the consequences of a world with 7 billion people?

There is a small but special portion of our culture that, if widely understood, could greatly increase the odds of reaching a sustainable society.  That portion includes what is known of human evolution, which provides essential background on human behavior.  It also includes understanding what humanity is doing to undermine its own life-support systems and the likely consequences of those activities. If we don’t change how we treat each other and those vital systems, society almost certainly will collapse.

Your pessimism receives a great deal of recognition. But what makes you optimistic about the future?

When the time is ripe, human societies have shown an incredible ability to shift gears and move in a new direction. Examples in my own lifetime are the American mobilization for World War II, which showed that consumption patterns could change overnight; the success of the civil rights and women’s rights movements; the quick drop in fertility in the U.S. around 1970; and the breakup of the Soviet Union, all relatively unexpected. When the time is ripe, I’m optimistic that how we treat our environment and other people will move to the top of the political agenda everywhere. I only fear it will not be in time.

This post originally appeared on the Stanford University News site. Sarah Jane Keller is a science-writing intern at the Stanford News Service.

Rooftop Solar Panels in Vacaville. Photo: Craig Miller

1. MIT study finds IPCC underestimated Arctic ice melt

A forthcoming study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology predicts that Arctic ice sheets are melting four times quicker than was forecast in the latest IPCC report. According to the study, the Arctic may be ice-free several decades sooner than 2100, which was predicted by the Fourth Assessment Report. Study authors say the IPCC data did not include forces such as wind and ocean currents that cause ice to break up.

The Journal of Geophysical Research – Oceans will publish the study next month, but you can read the full news release at MIT’s website.

2. Americans expect higher oil prices to impact economy and public health

More than two of out three Americans think oil prices will triple in the next five years, damaging the economy and public health. That’s according to a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health, which surveyed Americans about the risks of declining oil production.

This article by the survey’s director, American University professor Matthew Nisbet, explains more.

3. Electric cars with a side of solar panels

San Jose’s SunPower Corporation is serving up a discount on solar panels for Ford Focus Electric car buyers. According to the company, the bundled rooftop panels will provide 3,000 kilowatt hours annually, enough energy to charge the vehicles and provide a little extra for households. Total small-scale solar capacity installed in California is 924 megawatts, according to the California Public Utilities Commission.

Read more at the Contra Costa Times.

4. The latest in solar-power racing machines
Stanford engineering students unveiled the Xenith: the half-million dollar, solar-powered racing machine. Twenty-six solar panels are all that power the 375 pound aerodynamic vehicle, which clocks speeds up to 70 miles per hour. In October, the students will compete the World Solar Challenge, a ten-day, 1,800-mile race across Australia.

Check out the Stanford student’s blog as they prepare for the race.

By Katrina Schwartz

Just as many Californians are puzzling over winter-like weather in June, climate scientists are saying hotter days are ahead for most of the West. According to a new Stanford study (available soon at this link), we may be in for permanently hotter summers sooner than expected. Of course, for climatologists, “sooner” is a relative term.

Photo: Craig Miller

Plenty of climate scientists have studied the relationship between climate change and extreme temperature shifts, but until now no one has tried to pinpoint a moment when summer temperatures will permanently shift into a new “heat regime”, in which the coolest summer temperatures will be hotter than the hottest summer temperatures of the previous regime. Findings by the Stanford team suggest that the shift will likely happen sooner and be more widespread than expected.

The research team led by Noah Diffenbaugh of the university’s Climate and Earth System Dynamics Group analyzed more than 50 climate model simulations and estimated a 50% likelihood that a permanent shift will happen in tropical parts of the globe in the next twenty years. In middle latitudes like Europe and North America that shift will likely happen in 40 to 50 years, the study suggests. The authors say that because temperatures don’t vary as widely near the Equator, it won’t take as much warming to bump those regions into a new “seasonal envelope”— a completely new summer temperature range.

The Stanford team applied the same climate models to historical data to see how well they could predict what actually happened between 1979 and 2008. They concluded that many areas of the globe are already experiencing these permanent heat shifts. In central Africa, the authors conclude, 40% of the land area has already experienced a permanent upward shift. The climate models were able to predict the same results, making the observable reality match the simulated prediction. This correlation gives Diffenbaugh confidence in his team’s predictions for the future.

The study has potentially dramatic effects on humans. Drastically warmer temperatures adversely affect human health and agriculture. Morbidity and mortality rates rise. The demand for energy increases while the ability to supply it decreases. Many crops important to the economy of the western United States like grapes, corn, soybeans, and cotton cannot handle extreme heat. While the study found that only the eastern and western parts of the U.S. would experience permanent summer temperature increases, Diffenbaugh was quick to point out to me that his team studied the most dramatic shift possible — a complete shift upward in temperature into a new seasonal range. He says that the effects on areas that don’t experience a permanent shift in the next 50 years — like the Midwest — could still be significant.

Diffenbaugh says he was intrigued by the wintertime comparisons in the study. He explained that the relative seasonal sameness of the tropics causes the bump up in temperature to happen quickly. In the mid-latitudes, however, the move into hotter regimes takes much longer because of overlays like arctic air movement that occur simultaneously to an overall warming trend.

Katrina Schwartz is former KQED News intern, now a freelance contributor to Climate Watch.

Ken-ichi Ueda and Scott Loarie demonstrated the new iNaturalist iPhone app at Stanford's Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve (Photo: Richard Morgenstein)

At Jasper Ridge, a biological preserve and study area on the Stanford campus, a dozen of the preserve’s docents gathered this week to learn about a new iPhone application that could ultimately help scientists study how ecosystems are adapting to climate change.

The new app, called iNaturalist, is the mobile version of a citizen-science website by the same name.  The iPhone app is still in testing and not yet available, but the website, iNaturalist.org, is already an active online community of citizen-scientists around the world who use the site to record and share their sightings.

One of the original iNaturalist creators, Ken-ichi Ueda, has teamed up with Scott Loarie, a post-doctoral fellow at the Carnegie Institute at Stanford. The two are hoping to leverage the site and the mobile application to engage more citizens to contribute to a growing database of field observations that could help scientists track biodiversity.

“One of things that’s most pressing in conservation is that species are going extinct about a thousand times faster than they ever have before,” said Loarie.  “So the scale of this problem is just incredible. It’s way too difficult for a handful of museums and graduate students to stay on top of.”

With the iNaturalist site, and especially with the new iPhone app, which streamlines the uploading process, Loarie hopes to get as many “eyes on the ground” as possible, documenting where species are, and where they aren’t.

“You can think about species around the world like little lights blinking on and off,” Loarie explained. “Whats happening with climate change and land use change is that those lights are blinking off faster than they are blinking on, and a lot of them are happening totally under the radar screen.”

Ueda originally co-developed the iNaturalist site as a project during his Masters studies at UC Berkeley’s School of Information.

“My initial goal with the site was to get people engaged with nature, not necessarily to do the science,” said Ueda. “The scientific data is a really valuable and useful by-product, but my primary motivation is to get people outside and thinking about the plants and animals that they’re seeing.”

But now Ueda and Loarie are trying to take iNaturalist to the next level by finding ways this crowd-sourced data can be useful to scientists.

“It’s really cool if I’m walking around and I see a horned lizard because they are really cool animals,” said Ueda. “But it’s even cooler if I see one here at Jasper Ridge, because no one has seen one here for a long time, and it could be locally extinct.”

An observation like that, he said, could be valuable to scientists. One of the tasks now, he said, is to find ways to connect that data with the scientists who care about it and to establish standards of data quality so that scientists can trust it.

Ueda said the iPhone app may not be ready for the public for another month, but in the meantime, users can easily upload their digital photos from the field to the site, once they get home.   The site is connected with Google Maps, and Wikipedia and the photo-sharing site Flickr, so adding comments, information, and geographical information is easy.  The app, when it’s ready, should make logging observations even easier.

In the field on Friday, Loarie and Ueda were showing off a testing version of the app.

“I think the idea has a a lot of merit,” said Ross Bright, a docent at Jasper Ridge who was at the presentation. “Whether its workable and doable is the problem.  My own personal perspective is that most docents are not necessarily literate in the high-tech gadgetry that’s involved in the this.  There will be a learning curve.”

Ueda and Loarie hope that not only will the docents at Jasper Ridge start cataloging their observations with the new app, but also that the public at large will catch on and record their observations wherever they are.

“There are no geographic or taxonomic restrictions on the site,” said Ueda. “You don’t even really have to know what you’re looking at. You can be like, “Oh, sweet, a tree. There are trees in my yard,”  That’s good to think about.  Anyone can do it.”

Photo: Craig Miller

It reached 113 degrees in Los Angeles on Monday, a record. And while a string of hot days in California doesn’t signify climate change any more than do record snowstorms in Washington D.C., the summer of 2010 did set quite a few records for high temperatures and heat waves. Although for us here in California, this week notwithstanding, we’ve had a pretty cool summer.

But this week’s heat — especially in Southern California — is a reminder of the ripple effects that could become commonplace if predictions of more frequent and severe heat waves come to pass, with a changing climate. Utilities pleaded with customers to conserve power as temperatures triggered record spikes in the electricity load and subsequent strain on the electrical grid.

But as Jennifer Skene writes for the KQED’s Quest blog, research suggests that it won’t take much “global warming” to make heat waves a regular feature:

As heat waves become more and more frequent, will people see them as evidence that global warming is happening? Or will people just get accustomed to the hot weather? New York City had the hottest summer on record; Russia suffered through horrible heat and fires. Are all these heat waves the result of global warming?

Several climate studies have found that heat waves are likely to become more frequent — and hotter  — as the earth warms up. In a recent paper out of Stanford University, two researchers ran several different climate models to see how a one-degree Celsius increase in average global temperature would affect heat waves over the next 30 years. They found that even with this relatively optimistic increase in average temperature, heat waves are predicted to happen more frequently — especially here in California.

One event is just one data point. To know whether there is a trend, we have to look at a whole cloud of data: heat wave incidence across several years. But, 2010 is shaping up to be a really hot year. So far, heat records have been set in 17 countries since the start of 2010.

Heat waves have some serious consequences. Heat stresses and kills organisms. Its effects in the marine intertidal zone have been particularly well documented, affecting seaweed, mussels, barnacles, and more. Heat can make trees drop their leaves, and can damage and kill crops, creating economic havoc. And people, particularly the elderly, can perish, as a result of dehydration and hypothermia.

A key component of new solar panel technology being tested at Stanford. (Photo: Nick Melosh)

In a kind of cruel paradox, heat has always been the enemy of solar panels.  At higher temperatures, photovoltaic cells become less efficient, which is problematic in an industry where efficiency is the name of the game. That heat also represents wasted energy.

Today, researchers at Stanford University announced that they may have helped solve that problem. Nick Melosh of Stanford’s Materials Science & Engineering department set out to make use of the wasted heat. He and his colleagues created a solar cell technology that uses both light and heat to generate electricity. It’s called “photon-enhanced thermionic emission” (or PETE for short). “This is the first time that a process has been reported that can use the heat and the photons together harmoniously,” says Melosh.

Traditionally, solar power falls into two camps; those that make solar power from sunlight, which is what photovoltaic (PV) panels do, and those that make solar power from heat, which is what concentrating solar power plants collect. Melosh is hoping that this technology would bridge the gap between the two.

The PETE process is designed to work at temperatures above 400 degrees F, much hotter than silicon solar panels can stand. For that reason, Melosh sees the panels being used in solar farms in the desert. “It’s probably not something that you would  put on your rooftop, but out in the desert, they would be perfect,” he said. Melosh hopes to see the efficiency eclipse 50%, which would be double that of most solar panels today.  The panels could also be added to existing solar thermal farms, since the high-temperature waste heat from the PETE process could be fed into system.

The technology is still confined to the lab, but Melosh hopes to see a prototype in three years. In the meantime, his lab will be testing different semiconductor materials that could boost the efficiency of the process.

1. Big Coal Donates to Fiorina Campaign

Republican Senate candidate Carly Fiorina received $63,000 in donations  from out-of-state coal mining interests. About a third of that money is from Murray Energy Corporation in Ohio, the largest privately owned coal producer in the U.S.

California has become a political battleground for out-of state energy interests. Proposition 23, which could freeze the state’s 2006 climate change mitigation law known as AB 32 if passed in November, is getting the lion’s share of its funding from two Texas-based oil companies, Valero and Tesoro.  Valero, based in San Antonio, has two California refineries and nearly ubiquitous retail outlets. Tesoro also maintains two refineries here.

Asked whether climate change is occurring, Fiorina has said she’s “not sure.” (Read more at MoJo, SF Gate)

2. Study shows that soot is influential in Arctic ice melt

A Stanford study suggests that soot is the second leading cause in global warming. Researcher Mark Jacobson says that “controlling fossil fuel soot is possibly the only method of preventing the runaway loss of the Arctic ice.”

The study finds that curbing soot emissions could reduce Arctic warming by almost 2 degrees Celsius over the next 15 years. And because soot has a short lifetime in the atmosphere, regulation control on emissions would yield quick results. “We may not be able to save the Arctic ice from disappearing but the controlling of soot will reduce the effects on the Arctic the greatest in the next 10 to 15 years,” said Jacobson.

The Stanford study appears this week in the Journal for Geophysical Research Atmospheres (Read more at Stanford News, SF Gate).

Rendering of a portion of the Alta Wind Farm, in the Mojave. (Image: Alta Wind Energy Center)

3. Giant wind power station  in the Mojave breaks ground

Windmills may not be the first thing that comes to mind when it comes to producing renewable energy in the Mojave Desert. But on Tuesday, construction began on the multibillion-dollar Alta Wind Energy Center, expected to cover thousands of acres in the Mojave. And like its renewable cousin in the Mojave, Alta Wind is dubbed the largest wind power project in the world. This mega-wind farm 75 miles north of Los Angeles is designed to produce energy for the equivalent of about 600,000 homes. It’s scheduled to be finished in the next decade (Read more at Alta Wind Energy Center, LATimes).

(Photo: Stanford University)

That was never an issue for Steve Schneider. He never had any problems communicating. Most colleagues of the Stanford climate scientist, who died this week, remember him not just for his science resume, but also for his laser-like approach to getting the point across.

Ben Santer, a climate modeler at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and a man who’s not given to blurting things out, wrote in an open letter yesterday that “Stephen Schneider did more than any other individual on the planet to help us realize that human actions have led to global-scale changes in Earth’s climate.” Wow. That’s a pretty remarkable statement, given the high profile of some scientists like James Hansen at NASA and yes, non-scientists like Al Gore. Hansen writes in Storms of My Grandchildren that after testifying at a squirmy Senate hearing in 1988:

“I was firmly resolved to go back to pure science and leave media interactions to people such as Steve Schneider…people who were more articulate and seemed to enjoy the process.”

“Steve had the rare gift of being able to explain the complexities of climate science in plain English,” wrote Santer. “He could always find the right story, the right metaphor, the right way of distilling difficult ideas and concepts down to their essence.”

Appearing at a Commonwealth Club event last evening, Climate scientist Joe Romm, best known today for his prolific Climate Progress blog, eulogized Schneider as a great personal inspiration as well as a great communicator. Afterward, Romm told Climate Watch that Schneider “was one of the climate scientists who early on recognized the need to speak to the public and to not pull punches.”

Adjectives like “fearless” and “tireless” tend to recur in remembrances of Schneider, who served as a White House advisor to seven presidents, from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama. Schneider gave to his final book the title: Science as a Contact Sport, which a Newsweek review said “exposes the bare-knuckles infighting, bruising backroom brawls, and arm-twisting that characterize climate science.”

One of Schneider’s Stanford colleagues, Chris Field, who considered Schneider to be a personal mentor, said he was able to bring clarity to chaos within scientific, as well as policy circles. In an email to me last night, Field recalled a grueling session preparing part of the IPCC’s 2007 climate assessment:

“On the last day, negotiations had been going on for 22 hours, and most of the people in the room were napping, surly, or resigned.  But Steve was animated, strategic, funny, and (as usual) right.  He effectively argued for wording that clearly conveyed the core elements of a complicated issue, single-handedly getting an off-track process back on track.”

One of Romm’s comments stands out as a clue to Schneider’s legacy: “He made clear that messaging is as important as doing the actual science,” said Romm. “He was an inspiration to us who wanted to do messaging and how to do it.”

Santer goes even further:

“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.”

Santer’s entire remembrance, including a review of some of Schneider’s core science work, is posted on the RealClimate blog.

And if you have any doubt about Schneider’s credentials as an early harbinger of potential threats from carbon emissions, take two minutes to watch this video from 1979, posted at Climate Science Watch and credited to Peter Sinclair.

Climate Watch intern Chris Penalosa contributed to this post.