From the APR/MAY 2006 issue of Seed:
Laurie David Credit: Julian Dufort
When Laurie David began recruiting scientists to appear in a documentary on global warming, she remembered Stephen Schneider's informed and articulate comments in the wake of hurricane Katrina, and immediately invited him to participate. David's film, Too Hot Not To Handle, aired on HBO on Earth Day, April 22nd, and features Schneider, among other experts. When they caught up recently to deliberate the state of the planet, Schneider and David had no shortage of fodder for discussion.
Laurie David: I want to start with an obvious question: Does the truth matter? How are we going to educate the public if they're not told the truth about the science from our scientists? Obviously, what I'm talking about is what happened recently with James Hansen and NASA.
Stephen Schneider: My students are always saying, "Aren't you frustrated to death? Nothing you do makes any immediate difference." What I keep trying to tell them is, the truth matters, but it's on a generational time frame. In the short run, it's all political spin: media, chicanery and who buys the airwaves. But in the long run, being right and having events occur the way you said they would builds credibility, and then some phenomena comes along and becomes a tipping point. In 1988 it was the super heat waves, which tipped the global warming problem—as I like to say—from the left brain of 100 of us to the right brain of the society. And that of course set up the Global Climate Coalition—the coalition of liars and spin doctors and others who then spent tens of millions of dollars a year repositioning the debate. And for a decade they were successful.
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Now we have another tipping phenomena in Katrina. Nature is cooperating with theory. We continue to break warming records and hurricane intensities are increasing in correlation with warming oceans, exactly as predicted by theory 15 to 20 years ago. Slowly, that works its way through—although in fits and starts from these media-worthy events—so that after a generation or two, when problems become pretty widely understood, the truth matters. But in the short-run it is going to be all spin.
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LD: I would argue—and you're likely going to disagree with this—that scientists are the most cautious people on the planet. And the time for caution on this issue has long passed.
SS: Well it all depends who you're talking about. It's true, most scientists are very uncomfortable saying anything they're not absolutely sure of, but that's certainly not true for the Mike Oppenheimers, or me, or others.
LD: No, there are a handful of you out there.
SS: You dial me on Google and 10,000 sites will say I'm an exaggerating liar because I've long believed—for over 30 years—that when you see the planetary life support system getting messed up, you don't wait for full 99% certainty. You slow it down. We buy fire insurance when there's less than a 1% chance our house is going to burn down. We have a military, and although I may not like everything we do with it, I don't know anybody who says you should get rid of it because you have security precautions against only very low probability—but potentially dangerous—threats. Well, the climate change threat is not 1%. It's better than 50% for really significant trouble, and maybe 10% for absolutely catastrophic trouble. What kind of crazy person would take that chance when you can fix it relatively easily? By which I mean below the growth rate of the GDP.
LD: Right, right.
