Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to Save Earth's Climate

By Stephen H. Schneider

It’s been nearly four decades since scientists first realized that global warming posed a potential threat to our planet. Why, if we knew of the threats way back in the Carter Administration, can’t we act decisively to limit greenhouse gases, deforestation, and catastrophic warming trends? Why are we still addicted to fossil fuels? Have we all just been fiddling for 40 years as the world burns around us?

Schneider, part of the Nobel Prize–winning team that shared the accolade with Al Gore in 2007, had a front-row seat at this unfolding environmental meltdown. Piecing together events like a detective story, Schneider reveals that as expert consensus grew, well-informed activists warned of dangerous changes no one knew how to predict precisely—and special interests seized on that very uncertainty to block any effective response. He persuasively outlines a plan to avert the building threat and develop a positive, practical policy that will bring climate change back under our control, help the economy with a new generation of green energy jobs and productivity, and reduce the dependence on unreliable exporters of oil—and thus ensure a future for ourselves and our planet that’s as rich with promise as our past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Nov 3, 2009
• ISBN: 9781426205613

Reviews for Science as a Contact Sport

[msbaba · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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 historically 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.