Obituary: Stephen H. Schneider dies at 65; Stanford expert on climate change - latimes.com

He testified frequently before Congress, most recently in May when he appeared before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming to decry harassment of climate-change researchers by skeptics.
...He also was one of the first scientists to devise an approach for detecting the signs of climate change and distinguishing them from natural changes. [how?]
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In later years he focused on risk analysis, devising schemes to determine the probability of various outcomes of global warming [how?  what are the probabilities?], from the disintegration of ice sheets to the shutdown of Atlantic Ocean currents.

[CO2 will give us asthma, allergies and infectious diseases?]: Study: people grasp climate change better as health issue - Green House - USATODAY.com

Framing climate change as a public health problem helps people, even skeptics, better understand the issue's significance, reports George Mason University researchers.

Stephen H. Schneider, Climatologist, Is Dead at 65 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com

The resulting consensus — which Dr. Schneider helped form with models that combine interrelated processes like ocean dynamics and cloud changes — is that temperatures are rising and that potentially disastrous climate changes could result.

Skeptics have questioned both the science and the need for costly expenditures to stop the predicted warming, like cutting coal consumption. But Dr. Schneider fought so tenaciously for a forceful approach to stop the warming that The New Republic last year called him “a scientific pugilist.”

He rejected hyperbole, readily conceding that uncertainty was unavoidable in something so complicated and long-term. The conference he had attended in Sweden before his death was partly to discuss how climate-change skeptics use that uncertainty to advance their cause.
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His case was buttressed by the “accumulated preponderance of evidence” scientists had amassed, he said. In an interview with the magazine American Scientist this year, he said his opponents relied on “the political chicanery of ideologists and special interests.”

His worry, he told the magazine, was that lobbying and advertising by “greedy” corporations would obscure this increasingly clear science. He asked, “Can democracy survive complexity?”
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Global warming skeptics liked to point to an article Dr. Schneider wrote that appeared in the journal Science in 1971 to suggest that he vacillated. In it, he predicted that the future climate danger could be global cooling, not global warming. He later explained that the cooling forces were regional, while the warming ones were global.

Premature chill in the Arctic? | Watts Up With That?

Much of the melt season so far has been below the green “normal climate” line. While it is just another data point (i.e. weather) , it is a curious and interesting development worth watching.