Talk:Stephen E. Schwartz

This is just a stub, please make it better

Schwartz is an interesting scientist. His research leads many people to think global warming will not be catastrophic, yet he is still worried about it. He played an influential role in the acid rain issue and I think many people will rely on his research on global warming. Please make this a better article. RonCram (talk) 00:31, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

Schwartz not known for this?

I was startled by the Edit summary by User Talk: Atmoz, "WP:UNDUE, not known for this," justifying his removal of half the article, namely the half dealing with the work Schwartz is best known for, which seems to be what everyone is talking about when googling for him. "Undue" doesn't seem a terribly compelling reason. This deletion comes across as an attempt to discredit an extremely distinguished scientist for the purpose of promoting an alternative viewpoint at the expense of the opposition---he is after all a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Fellow of the International Union for Pure and Applied Chemistry, and his research is very widely cited and therefore influential. That doesn't exactly make him a nutter. If there's no better reason then I propose reverting that deletion. --Vaughan Pratt (talk) 18:37, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Schwartz is not best known for his climate sensitivity estimate. Claiming so is wrong. -Atmoz (talk) 19:15, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Name anything he is better known to the general public for than that. I doubt if 5% of the people who've heard of him since that article had heard of him before, it propelled him into the limelight like nothing else ever had! What evidence can you cite to disprove that? Also why are you taking a position on his claim? Are you more qualified than he to make these judgments? --Vaughan Pratt (talk) 21:49, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

He is better known for his work on aerosols and atmospheric chemistry. This is an encyclopedia article on a scientist. It should be what he is known for in science, not what "propelled him into the [public] limelight". -Atmoz (talk) 21:55, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia serves the well-educated adult. This includes scientists sufficiently close to Schwartz's area as to know of him, but they would be greatly outnumbered by the well-educated adults who first heard of him through the article in question.

George Monbiot makes a valid point at [1], namely that those who deliberately distort climate science are not being suppressed to anywhere near the extent they claim. It would therefore be ironic if someone as distinguished as Schwartz who is not trying to distort anything, but earnestly trying along with the rest of the community to estimate the hard numbers better, were to have his contributions shouted down at Wikipedia in the very manner that Monbiot denies is happening for the right-wing press. The Realclimate crowd may have correctly assessed him as wrong, and perhaps other reputable sources too (I haven't followed that particular debate terribly closely myself), but I would have thought a responsible contributor to the debate such as you would draw a sharp line between the right-wing press and anyone with the level of professional recognition of Schwartz. Not to do so is to create a crack in the public's perception of the scientific process that the right-wing press might push a stick into in order to widen it to their advantage. --Vaughan Pratt (talk) 08:11, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Today's NY Times article concerning climate-related email stolen from a University of East Anglia server adds some clarity to my concern about what could be perceived as suppression by Wikipedia of Schwartz's well-known article. (I particularly liked Spencer Weart's comment that the hacked material would serve as “great material for historians.") However since the deleter is a regular contributor of high quality technical material on the subject I don't believe it's appropriate to revert this deletion until there's a reasonable degree of consensus to do so. One-on-one edit wars are the bane of Wikipedia. --Vaughan Pratt (talk) 17:34, 23 November 2009 (UTC)