Dr David Charles Lowe - The Alarmist: Fifty Years Measuring Climate Change

Victoria University of Wellington Press

PO Box 600, Wellington

New Zealand

vup.wgtn.ac.nz

Copyright Dave Lowe 2021

First published in 2021

This book is copyright. Apart from
any fair dealing for the purpose of private study,
research, criticism or review, as permitted under the
Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any
process without the permission of the publishers.
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

A catalogue record is available from the
National Library of New Zealand.

ISBN 9781776564187 (print)

ISBN 9781776564613 (EPUB)

ISBN 9781776564620 (Kindle)

Ebook conversion 2021 by meBooks

alarmist(pre 2020):

Someone who exaggerates a danger and so causes needless worry or panic.

alarmist (post 2020):

Someone who justifiably raises the alarm about a global danger to Earths biosphere.

For Irena, Greg, Suzanne and Johanna

CONTENTS

A southerly storm at Baring Head, New Zealand, can be a terrifying experience. The wind screams in from the Southern Ocean and races over the cliff edge with a force that numbs mind and body. The noise shrieks by at 40 metres per second like a Count Dracula soundtrack, a bloodcurdling whine accompanied by an eerie howling that varies in pitch by octaves. Anything not well bolted or screwed down blows away, never to be seen again; anemometers designed to measure wind speed routinely self-destruct in the gales. Huge waves pound the beach my colleague Peter swears he saw one 12 metres high crash onto the rocks below us. I remember a storm that lasted more than seven days. Since the late 1800s many ships have wrecked in the vicinity and its easy to see why. Its not a place for the faint-hearted, especially at night, when the lighthouse keepers worry about the ghosts of seafarers long since drowned.

Baring Head is the sampling station where I spent countless days and nights alone, making the first ever continuous baseline atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2 ) measurements in the southern hemisphere. The work was arduous and demanding and came at huge personal cost. Exhaustion and loneliness were my constant companions. It was 1972, and those and subsequent measurements at the site confirmed that humanitys impact on the atmosphere was a global phenomenon a dreadful discovery I have lived with for fifty years.

Half a century ago, serendipity set me a twenty-two-year-old physics graduate on a path to becoming one of a small group who provided proof that human activities were damaging the atmosphere by dramatically altering its chemical and physical properties. Our measurements showed that atmospheric CO2 was increasing around New Zealand as well as in the northern hemisphere. My work since then has taken me around the world, measuring minute quantities of trace gases critical to the health of the atmosphere and glimpsing climates long past through imprints left in polar ice cores. Along the way Ive faced plenty of setbacks countless failed experiments and dead ends, battles with decrepit equipment, the frustration of dealing with administrators disinterested in the science, and politicians incapable of comprehending the unimaginable consequences of the ever-increasing CO2 in the atmosphere.

As I write, all around me in this tiny Petone home office are symbols of my lifelong journey with the atmosphere. Books, photographs, posters and scientific papers. In a simple wooden frame, a certificate: the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. It is a testament to what Ive achieved and at the same time a reminder of the things that my lifetimes work in atmospheric research has not changed. The burning of fossil fuels has continued at a terrifying pace. Atmospheric CO2 has become the principal cause of human-induced climate change and a major driver of what is now known as a climate emergency.

The Alarmist chronicles my fifty-year journey with the atmosphere as one of elation and despair. But the atmosphere itself has a history dating back to the dawn of time, one which will continue when we are long gone. How has it changed with time and what have I seen during my own life?

Since the end of the last Ice Age about 10,000 years ago, humans have enjoyed a remarkably pleasant planet endowed with a relatively stable climate and an abundance of resources. During that period the human population has exploded from an estimated five million to around eight billion in 2021, and extraordinary advances in science, engineering and medicine have benefited most though not all of humanity. Human development over the last 300 years has been particularly remarkable: we live easier, healthier and longer lives than those endured by our ancestors. In the last twenty years the fraction of the global population living in extreme poverty has halved, almost all children living today are vaccinated, and most people have access to schooling and electricity. Is it a wonderful success story? Well, yes and no.

In 2021 there is virtually no patch on our planet that does not show some trace of human activity.

Geological eras are usually measured in hundreds of millions of years, but within the space of a single century humans are driving the planet into a completely new era, one for which a new name has been conceived: the Anthropocene. For the first time in history, a single species is modifying the web of life itself, driving the natural equilibria of the Earth System into uncharted territory.

In 1960s Taranaki, when the earths human population was only about three billion less than half what it is today in 2021 Id already seen the effects of local pollution on the surrounding atmosphere. Smoke from rubbish and other fires could blot out the sun and landscape with a pungent haze in the air. But after a day of rain or strong winds the smoke was gone and the land would sparkle under bright sunshine. The atmosphere seemed to have cleansed itself or had it?

When fossil fuels are burned, extra CO2 is released into the atmosphere, adding to natural levels of CO2 produced by natural processes like photosynthesis, where plants convert sunlight, water and CO2 into sugars and energy. But CO2 also drives a significant part of Earths natural greenhouse effect: an atmospheric process where greenhouse gases like CO2 and water vapour keep our planet about 30C warmer than it would be without the gases. This CO2 is an integral part of the active Earth System; its not used up, as the carbon is simply transferred from one form to another during the natural workings of the web of life and other geophysical processes. The total amount of carbon is conserved.

However, from the beginning of the first Industrial Revolution in 1750, humans began to add increasing amounts of extra CO2 to the active Earth System by burning coal, oil and gas. I call it extra because, until humans extracted it, that carbon had been locked away from the earths active reservoirs in strata below the planets surface.

The industrial benefits of fossil fuel combustion were obvious and far-reaching but no one is sure when the harmful impacts of adding extra CO2 to the atmosphere were first discussed. Most climate change scientists refer to Svante Arrhenius, who published a paper in 1896 entitled On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground. Arrhenius, a Swedish chemist, is a distant relative of Greta Thunberg the schoolgirl who in 2018 started the school strikes for climate movement and galvanised young people worldwide.