经济学人下载:气象学家史蒂夫·施奈德

Obituary;Steve Schneider;
讣闻;史蒂夫·施奈德;

Stephen Schneider, climate scientist, died on July 19th, aged 65.
气象学家史蒂夫·施奈德，于2010年7月19日去世，享年65岁。

“Mark twain had it backwards,” Steve Schneider joked, in a lecture he gave to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 1972. “Nowadays, everyone is doing something about the weather, but nobody is talking about it.” The lecture was on the topic that Mr Schneider, then 27, had been working on for two years and would work on for another 38: what were humans doing to the climate? 

1972年，史蒂夫施奈德在美国科学促进会（AAAS）演讲时开玩笑地说“马克吐温把话说反了！”“而今，每个人时时都影响着气候，但没有人时时都把气候挂在嘴边”发表此演讲时，施奈德先生仅27岁，已经工作了两年并将余下的38年为这一话题而探索：人类正对气候造成了什么影响？

The 1960s had brought a new way of talking about the weather—a way of representing it in punched cards that could be fed into a computer. These models, limited though they were, let their creators ask questions no simply tabulated data could answer, and see processes that the details of the real world obscured.

20世纪六十年代，一种新兴的研究气候的方式产生了：用一种可以插入计算机的穿孔卡片来演示气候变化。这些新的模型，尽管有其局限性，但是这使得模型设计者不仅可以提出总汇表中数据能回答的问题，而且可以通过模型看到现实世界中模糊细节的演变过程。

As a young physical scientist on the lookout for a new field that posed big questions, a former student politician who wanted to make a difference to the world and an inveterate show-off susceptible to the charms of a high profile, these models offered Mr Schneider what he needed. But in giving him a way to play with the world and its processes they gave him something he loved, too.

作为一位年轻物理学家，施奈德在其关注的新领域提出了重大问题。先前他的一位从政学生想改变这个世界和因高姿态影响带来的炫耀癖，这些原型提供给了施奈德先生所想要的研究方法。然而施奈德在得到地球研究方法的馈赠的同时，他也找到了自己所喜欢的（学术方向）。

As a boy growing up on Long Island he had greeted news of hurricanes by going up to the attic to sit with an anemometer, and built his own telescope in order to gasp at the planets it revealed. When computer models gave him the power to spin up winds on planets of the mind, his first big topic was a study of the net effects of smoggy pollutants in the atmosphere, which cool the planet down, and the carbon dioxide which warms it up. Other work focused on the warming and cooling effects of clouds and the climate's sensitivity to greenhouse gases.

作为一位年轻物理学家，施奈德在其关注的新领域提出了重大问题。先前他的一位从政学生想改变这个世界和因高姿态影响带来的炫耀癖，这些原型提供给了施奈德先生所想要的研究方法。然而施奈德在得到地球研究方法的馈赠的同时，他也找到了自己所喜欢的（学术方向）。

Public interest in his work outstripped its acceptance by the academic meteorologists Mr Schneider was working with at the beginning of his career. They found computer modelling of the climate suspicious enough in itself, and Mr Schneider's insistence that it should lead to interdisciplinary interactions with biologists interested in ecosystems—and even social scientists interested in human responses—made things worse. When he returned to his office after the AAAS talk, he found a New York Times article that quoted his Twain gag pinned up on a noticeboard with “Bullshit” stamped across it. His subsequent appearances on “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson” probably did little to improve his reputation with conservative colleagues. Nor did his fairly rapid dismissal of his early belief that cooling caused by pollution might outstrip warming due to carbon dioxide. In later years, when he and his colleagues had pushed climate change, and in particular greenhouse warming, on to the agenda, people keen to ensure a lack of action made much of his about-face over cooling, preferring to accuse him of modish inconsistency than to see him as someone who had worked to improve his models, and as a result had changed his mind. 

公众对他的研究很感兴趣，但施奈德先生刚参加工作时曾同为同事的气象学家们却不大认同他的工作，因为这些气象学家认为计算机模拟气候本身就值得怀疑。施奈德先生还坚持认为这将和生物学家感兴趣的生态系统跨学科互动，其后果可能使生态系统变得更糟糕；同时产生跨学科互动还有社会学家所关心的人体反应。一在美国科学促进会演讲完后他就回到了办公室，他发现纽约时报的一篇文章中以公告栏的形式引用了他当年戏谑马克吐温的话，同时在文字上方印有“一派胡言”等字。接下来他在一个名为“今晚翰尼•卡森与你相约”的节目中亮相，可是在保守的同事面前他的个人名声状况基本上也没有多大改观。虽然有前期的挫折，但是这些并没有使他放弃先前的想法：即大气中污染物带来的冷却效应要超过二氧化碳带来的温室效应。在接下来的几年里，施奈德先生和他的同事将气候变化，尤其是温室效应，推上了大会议程。由于他在冷却效应上态度的急转，人们急于制定一系列的法令，结果很多人控告他的个人思想过于固执，结果导致大家并没有将其视为致力于改进模型的气象学家，最终这令他改变了自己的初衷。

 Mr Schneider's high profile as a proponent of action on climate change—he was the editor of an important journal, Climatic Change, and an influential member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) more or less from its inception—would have made him a favourite target for such antagonists anyway, but he came in for particular scorn because of his willingness to discuss the inevitable tensions between advocacy and academic integrity. Critics of Mr Schneider, including this newspaper, portrayed him as giving in to this tension, and being willing to tell “necessary lies” when it suited his purposes. He countered such attacks vehemently, saying such a conclusion rested on a slanted reading of what he had said on the subject. He had no time for advocacy without truth. 

施奈德曾是一本重要杂志“气候变化”的主编，同时自联合国政府间气候变化专门委员会成立以来，他就是该小组中具有影响力的一员。施奈德先生对造成气候变化的行为持赞成态度的高调姿态使他成为了收到攻击最多的对象。因为他意志坚强，所以面对这些极端的嘲弄，他迎难而上，探讨学术宣传和学术诚信不可避免的紧张关系。在一份报纸中这样描述对施奈德先生的批评：他会在紧张的情况下会做出让步，同时声称施奈德先生在达到自身目的的前提下愿意捏造“必要的谎言”。但施奈德先生对这种学术攻击进行了猛烈地抨击，声称这是由于其他人对他在此主题上的言论偏见理解造成的。一旦没有了真理，学术宣传就是在浪费时间。

Far from being a voice of orthodoxy, Mr Schneider encouraged debate, and doubts, on subjects that some of his colleagues thought beyond the pale. He convened meetings on the Gaia hypothesis and its notion of a self-regulating Earth; he provided space for discussions of geoengineering schemes for cooling the planet. When his friend Carl Sagan (who had recommended him to Johnny Carson) led the charge on the climatic effects of nuclear war as a case for disarmament, Mr Schneider, whose politics were close to Sagan's, damaged their friendship by saying publicly that the models he worked with were considerably less prone than Sagan's to the creation of “nuclear winters”.

和先前大众普遍认同的观点相同，施奈德先生敢于在学术方面进行驳论、质疑，尽管有些领域他的同事们认为是越界。他召集会议讨论盖亚假说和盖亚假说中地球是具有自我调节整功能的论点。他为地球降温的抵制工程计划提供了提供了广阔的研究空间。施奈德先生的朋友卡尔•萨根(后将其称为约翰尼•卡森)是负责研究核裁军带来的气候效应，施奈德先生的政治观点与卡森的基本相同，但由于施奈德先生公开声称他所研究的模型比起卡森的研究更不容易造成“核战争”，这破坏了两人间的友谊。

At the IPCC, Mr Schneider's deepest commitment was to candour about uncertainties and the role played by subjective expert judgment. He loved models for the patterns and ideas they revealed much more than he trusted them as detailed guides to action. He was more likely to criticise a piece of science for underestimating its own level of uncertainty than for coming to a conclusion he disagreed with. 

在联合国政府间气候变化专门委员会中，施奈德先生的最大的特点就是直言那些不确定因素和专家的主观臆断所起的作用。他喜欢这种方式的模型，并且他认可这些模型，可以将它们作为自己详细的行为指南。比起那些他不赞成的观点，他认为低估了不确定性科学的观点更应该受到批评。点。

In his mid-50s he found his ideas about how to make weighty decisions in uncertainty tested in a more personal way. He was diagnosed with a rare lymphoma. With his wife as advocate and his doctor as expert, he tried to understand the processes involved and decide on actions accordingly. His choice of aggressive treatments helped him survive until a heart attack claimed him on an aircraft ferrying him from one climate meeting to the next.

在他50岁的时候，他发现可以利用不确定因素做出更具有个性化的重大抉择。但随后施奈德先生被诊断出患有罕见的淋巴癌。在妻子的支持和医生的建议下，他试着了解那些不确定性因素的过程并按其过程行事行事。他自己选择了大胆的治疗，结果活了下来，但在参加下一个会议的途中，他因心脏病飞机上逝世。