This text is the culmination of a three-year project to research and study the impacts of global climate change on ecosystems and individual wildlife species in North America. In 1997, the National Wildlife Federation provided fellowships to eight graduate students to conduct research on global climate change, this book presents the results. It features case studies which examine: ways in which local and regional climate variables affect butterfly populations and habitat ranges; how variations in ocean temparature have affected intertidal marine species; the potential effect of reduced snow cover on plants in the Rocky Mountains; the potential effects of climate change onthe distribution of vegetation in the United States; how climate change may increase the susceptability of ecosystems to invasions of non-species; and the potential for environmental change to alter interactions between a variety of organisms in whitebark pine communities of the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem.
Stephen H. Schneider is the Melvin and Joan Lane Professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies, Professor of Biology, and a Senior Fellow in the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. He served as a National Center For Atmospheric Research (NCAR) scientist from 1972-1996, where he co-founded the Climate Project in 1973. He focuses on climate change science, integrated assessment of ecological and economic impacts of human-induced climate change, and identifying viable climate policies and technological solutions. He has consulted for federal agencies and White House staff in seven consecutive administrations. He has been involved with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in every assessment since 1988. More recently he was Coordinating Lead Author, Working Group II, Chapter 19, "Assessing Key Vulnerabilities and the Risk from Climate Change" and a core writer for the Fourth Assessment Synthesis Report. He along with four generations of IPCC authors received a collective Nobel Peace Prize for their joint efforts in 2007.Schneider has already begun to help structure the Fifth IPCC assessment (AR5), and was a delegate to the AR5 Scoping Meeting in Venice in July 2009.
Elected to the US National Academy of Sciences in 2002, Schneider received the American Association for the Advancement of Science/ Westinghouse Award for Public Understanding of Science and Technology and a MacArthur Fellowship for integrating and interpreting the results of global climate research. Founder (1975) and still editor of the interdisciplinary journal Climatic Change, he has authored or co-authored over 500 books, scientific papers, proceedings, legislative testimonies, edited books and chapters, reviews and editorials and has been featured in numerous televisions and film productions (please see attached vita). Dr. Schneider counsels policy makers, corporate executives, and non-profit stakeholders about using risk management strategies in climate-policy decision-making, given the uncertainties in future projections of global climate change and related impacts. He is actively engaged in improving public understanding of science and the environment through extensive media communication and public outreach. He has created a very comprehensive website on climate issues for the attentive public: climatechange.net. Many of his talks and appearances can be found on Youtube.
He is a cancer survivor since 2001, and helped design a new protocol for "maintenance therapy" for his rare mantle cell lymphoma. The story is described in his book "The Patient From Hell" and in his cancer website, patientfromhell.org.
