Professor of Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies Stephen Schneider has been a scientific do-gooder his whole life.

Schneider is a member of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which, along with Al Gore, won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. For over thirty years, he has been speaking about the dangers of anthropogenic — or man-made — global warming to politicians, students and scientists. Yet many prominent members of the scientific and political communities have come to accept this theory only recently.

“I haven’t said anything new in thirty years,” he says. “Back then, it was theory. The difference now is that nature is cooperating with theory.”

Born in 1945 in New York City, Schneider grew up on Long Island. As a child, he read National Geographic magazine and loved to measure the intensity of hurricanes. His fondest childhood memories are of his growing fascination with nature — the time when he came across a fallen tree and was amazed by the ecosystem at its roots, or the time he built a telescope and saw the rings of Saturn through it.

In high school, he thought that he was going to be a physicist. He entered Columbia University in 1962 where he majored in mechanical engineering. He pursued a Masters and a Ph.D. at Columbia in plasma physics until 1971.

In 1968, at the height of protests over the Vietnam War, Schneider was elected by engineering school students to be their representative in negotiations for an academic senate.

“So I got, shall we say, my political training on the streets of New York,” Schneider said with a roguish grin.

The first Earth Day, April 22, 1970 changed the course of Schneider’s life — though perhaps he was already looking for a change.

“I was having trouble relating to things that lasted only a few microseconds,” said Schneider of his Ph.D. work. “I was ready for something new.”

That something came in the form of eco-socialist Barry Commoner’s talk at Columbia about the future of the planet. Inspired by the speech, Schneider took a class in planetary atmospheres with Professor S.I. Rasool, then the deputy director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Rasool offered Schneider a summer internship and then a post-doctorate fellowship at NASA, which he took.

“I felt the world was screwed up and that I should be doing something in my life that makes a difference, not just makes money,” Schneider said.

Here at Stanford, Schneider tries to teach in a thought-provoking way.

“If I can get these kids to find their own value system for themselves,” he said. “And I do that by deconstructing all the common values and then shutting up and letting them thrash it out in the seminars.”

He finds the relationships he forms with students to be very meaningful.

“The biggest rewards come ten years later when students still keep in touch and tell me what they’re doing,” he said.

Among other courses, Schneider teaches “Reducing Stanford’s Carbon Footprint” for undergraduates and an environmental forum seminar for graduate students.

Because of the politically-charged nature of his research, Schneider has been the focus of criticism. Skeptics of anthropogenic warming are quick to point out that he changed from predicting cooling to forecasting warming. Yet he believes that this was the only responsible thing to do.

“Imagine a doctor whose patient arrives with shaking and fever, assumes he has pneumonia [and] takes a sputum sample which comes back. He knows the patient doesn’t have pneumonia, but he stays on the original diagnosis to be politically consistent,” he said.

Yet Schneider is no stranger to adulation either — especially since, along with around 4,000 other scientists, he received the Nobel Peace Prize.

“I was proud to be a part of an enterprise that has such a culture of community,” he said.

Right now, Schneider sees his mission largely as raising awareness and advising on domestic policy. Yet he believes that when the Warner-Lieberman bill, which would direct the EPA to lower emissions of greenhouse gases and is now before Congress, passes, his role will change.

“That bill or one like it will definitely be passed in one year, after President Bush is gone,” he said. “Then we’ll have to negotiate with other countries to reduce their own emissions.”

In 2001, Schneider discovered that he had fairly far advanced mantle-cell lymphoma. After chemotherapy and some unorthodox treatment, he is now in molecular remission — there are no detectable cancer cells in his body.

Describing his personal struggle with cancer, he wrote “The Patient from Hell,” a book in which he talks about taking the driver’s seat and designing his own, pioneering treatment plan. Today, he still advises other cancer patients on how to get the most out of their treatment by collaborating with their doctors.

Schneider married Professor Terry Root, who is a senior fellow at the Center for Environmental Science and Policy, in 1995. Root is also on the IPCC, and her office at Stanford is next door to Schneider’s.

Schneider has two kids from a previous marriage. His son Adam will enter UCSD next year as a graduate student with interests in osteology and anthropology. His daughter Rebecca is finishing a Master’s degree at the University of Oregon in history, after studying at Stanford as an undergraduate.

In the future, Schneider would like to write more books, develop new courses and create a TV series on how to critically analyze the media coverage of scientific issues.

The kid who built his own telescope is now trying to help others see the intricacies of nature and the effect that people have on it — very fitting for a lifelong scientific do-gooder.