Welcome to Climate One at the Commonwealth Club. I'm Greg Dalton, the founder of Climate One.

Climate One is a leadership dialogue on energy, the economy, and the environment that discusses the transition to a prosperous clean energy future.

Our guest today is climatologist Stephen Schneider.

Professor Schneider holds several appointments at Stanford University in environmental studies, biological sciences,

and civil and environmental engineering.

He began studying the impact of human activity on the Earth's climate nearly 40 years ago,

decades before most people even heard of global warming.

In 1971, he received his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering and plasma physics from Columbia

University. He then studied the role of greenhouse gases as a postdoctoral fellow at NASA's

Goddard Institute for Space Studies. He's testified before Congress numerous times, first in

1979, as a member of the

core writing team for the assessment reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate

Change, and is the author of articles and books too numerous to mention. His most recent book is

Science as a Contact Sport inside the Battle to Save the Earth's Climate,

which is being published and released here today.

Please welcome Stephen Schneider.

Thanks very much, Greg, for inviting me and all of you for coming out on such a beautiful day.

And indeed, today is the pub date for science as a contact sport, and that's the first display I have seen.

So I'm very pleased with that.

And what I want to talk about today, I guess the title you gave me, wasn't it, was,

do science matter in the sweep of these things? And it reminds me when I was at Kyoto, the

Kyoto Protocol, the debate in 1997, and there was a session called, Does Science Matter?

...