‘I’ve lived this horror for 50 years’
The Kiwi who helped prove man-made climate change came to science from his high school dropout surf board. Joel MacManus talks to Dave Lowe.
There’s a certificate on the wall of Dave Lowe’s small cottage in Petone, near Wellington. It’s tucked away in the back office, an A3 piece of paper in an ordinary wooden frame.
It could easily be missed by a passing guest. But if they cared to take a second glance, three words would immediately jump out: Nobel Peace Prize.
It’s the 2007 prize, awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Lowe was a lead author on its largest-ever report.
It was by far the greatest honour of his career. He resigned almost immediately afterward, walking away on top of the scientific world.
The prize is a testament to all that Lowe has achieved in his career, but at the same time, to him, it’s a haunting reminder of all the things he didn’t, or couldn’t, change.
Sitting at his kitchen table, reflecting on the prize, he goes a little glassy-eyed. His voice drops an octave. ‘‘I’ve lived this horror for 50 years,’’ he says. ‘‘There’s so little time left and we’ve just been so bloody stupid.’’
Dave Lowe was one of the first people to find measurable proof that human activities were changing the atmosphere and warming the planet. For the past 50 years, he has watched on, helpless and frustrated, as the situation around him has got worse, and worse, and worse.
A volcano above the clouds
The world’s largest volcano dominates the skyline of Hawaii’s Big Island. The huge, sloping sides and gigantic crater of Mauna Loa cast an imposing shadow and send a constant warning across the Pacific paradise.
The ancient Hawaiians believed Mauna Loa was created by the volcano goddess Pele, who formed it at such an immense height so she could escape the wrath of her sister Na¯ maka, the sea goddess.
According to one legend, Pele is accompanied by a phantom white dog. When an eruption was soon to occur, she would send her dog down the mountain to warn the people of the impending disaster.
In 1958, an American scientist named Charles David Keeling climbed Mauna Loa, and changed the world’s understanding of our climate forever.
Keeling had spent the better part of the 1950s perfecting a system of measuring exactly how much of which gases make up the Earth’s atmosphere. By adapting gas analysers used in coalmines, he was able to take the first reliable reading of the amount of carbon dioxide in the air.
The barren mountainside on the edge of the Mauna Loa crater, high above the cloud layer and away from any interference, proved the perfect location to capture the swirling air currents.
It was here, in two simple grey buildings set against a desolate, otherworldly landscape, that Keeling established the world’s first permanent station to measure CO2 levels.
The gas analyser splits a sample of air into one million parts, and counts how many of those are CO2.
The first measurement Keeling took read 313 parts per million. Then, as he continued to take regular readings, he saw something no-one had ever seen before. The planet was breathing.
In autumn, as the leaves died off the trees, the amount of CO2 in the air would rise.
Then in spring, as the plants grew again, the number would fall. In and out, like lungs exhaling.
Then, when a full year had gone by and the cycle was complete, he checked the number again. It never returned to 313.
He had just uncovered the first piece of evidence that the total amount of CO in 2 the air was increasing. That matters because CO2 has an insulating effect in the atmosphere. It traps heat, which is why it’s called a greenhouse gas. More CO2 means more heat.
Every year without fail, for the past 61 years, the number has continued to climb at an ever-increasing rate.
The chart which tracks the rising CO , 2 that drumbeat on the march to climate breakdown, is called the Keeling Curve.
Some would say the legends of Mauna Loa are true. Pele’s white dog has become Keeling’s gas analyzer, high in the mountains among the ancient volcanic rock, sending out a warning signal to tell the people of the coming disaster.
A worldwide search
While Keeling was tracking the first evidence of climate change on a Hawaiian volcano, Dave Lowe was a teenage high school dropout in Taranaki, with only one thing on this mind: surfing.
The sport was in its infancy in New
Zealand, primitive wooden longboards were the only equipment available. But Lowe was hooked.
‘‘There was just a small bunch of us, really weird characters, and I was just fascinated with it,’’ he says. ‘‘You go out there and man, do you get a feeling for the environment. I saw the atmosphere directly, going down into the ocean, mixing the sounds, the smells.’’
Sitting on his board, staring out at the mist and the ocean spray dancing against the pink hues of the setting sun, he decided he needed to understand more about the world around him. He went back to school and earned a physics honours degree from Victoria University of Wellington.
Lowe and Keeling’s paths would cross for the first time in 1970. By this time, Keeling was a giant in his field. But he wasn’t satisfied with his research station at Mauna Loa.
One measurement at one specific location wasn’t enough evidence. He wanted a global record, in both hemispheres, so he could confirm what he was seeing, and track it in future.
Lowe was a 23-year-old graduate at the former Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, recruited to join Keeling’s team as they set up the world’s second continuous record of atmospheric CO2. They found a spot about 30 minutes out of Wellington city, near Makara Beach, at the World War II-era gun emplacements of Fort Opau.
After six months training in California, Lowe returned to join the small American team of one scientist and two technicians. But soon he found himself with far more responsibility than he expected.
‘‘The scientist would constantly just bugger off back to San Diego for six months at a time. And the technicians, well . . . They were being paid to have the holiday of their lives, they were always off hunting and fishing, not to speak of the marijuana.
‘‘I was thrown in the deep end trying to run hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gear on a really important project which is being funded millions by the National Science Foundation.’’
But that work was for nothing. The readings at Makara were erratic, showing wild swings and no discernable pattern. They were useless. There was about a kilometre of paddocks between the sea and the analyzer, which was sucking up too much CO2 and throwing off the readings.
Keeling told Lowe he needed to develop a new portable gas analyzer and find a new location, undisturbed by vegetation or outside sources. After some searching, Lowe found the spot he was looking for at Baring Head, a peninsula an hour out of Wellington in the opposite direction, at the base of the Remutaka Forest Park.
It was perfect. At the right time, Baring Head gets air currents directly from Antarctica, an incredible undisturbed run through hundreds of kilometres of the Southern Ocean. ‘‘What we got was incredible. Right from the outset you could see that we had struck gold.’’
They learned first that Baring Head always measured a few ppm behind Mauna Loa. The majority of emissions are produced in the northern hemisphere; this showed that it took time for those gases to spread to the south.
They also found that Baring Head did not show the same huge seasonal swings as the Mauna Loa readings. The huge continents of vegetation in the northern hemisphere were affecting the Hawaiian readings, but the measurements in the South Pacific, surrounded by ocean, were far more stable.
But the most important thing was that the measurements at Baring Head proved Mauna Loa wasn’t an anomaly. In both the south and the north, the carbon in the atmosphere was slowly rising.
James Renwick is a professor of geology at Victoria University, who was also a contributor to the 2007 Nobel Prize and received last year’s Prime Minister’s Science Prize.
He says Lowe is ‘‘a bit of a legend in NZ atmospheric science’’, and his contributions to the global record of climate change were invaluable.
‘‘At the time I suspect it wasn’t appreciated just how important the Baring Head station was, but now the climate science community really values the long time series from Baring Head.
‘‘That’s very significant,’’ he says. ‘‘They are a part of a global network of observing sites that have taught us many things. Dave Lowe has been a real pioneer in atmospheric science in NZ, especially around measurement of greenhouse gases and in understanding the chemistry of the atmosphere and how that’s changing.’’
The grind
Finding himself in charge of a groundbreaking research with barely any experience, Lowe put everything on his own shoulders. He and friend and colleague Peter Gunther were basically running the entire southern arm of the operation alone, and they were fully aware of how important their work was.
That meant constant flights between Wellington and California, reading every background paper ever written on the subject, developing all the computer programs to drive the calculations.
The DSIR lab, where he was working, had one computer, an IBM 650 with paper tape inputs and magnetic tape. ‘‘We worked our butts off,’’ he says. ‘‘I knew that I just had to do this. I threw everything I had into it.’’
But that intensity had its consequences. Eventually, something had to give.
The single-minded drive Lowe had dedicated to his pursuit of science cost him his marriage. ‘‘I just kept on going as my marriage crashed. I was a real mess. A hell of a mess. I was working too hard, and completely blown apart emotionally.
‘‘The guy I was working for took a look at me and said ‘Dave, you’re no good to me at all in your condition’.’’
Proof or persuasion
In 1975, Lowe took a sabbatical to recover from his professional and personal blowout. He attended the first scientific conference of greenhouse gas experts. He reckons he’s probably the only person at the meeting who is still alive.
The small group knew what was coming before anyone else. They had proven that humans were changing the chemical makeup of the air, and they knew the inevitable outcome of that.
The terms ‘‘global warming’’ and ‘‘climate change’’ hadn’t been invented yet, but that’s what they were seeing.
In the following years, Lowe moved to Germany to study further, and met his now-wife Irena. They’ve been married for 40 years.
He specialised in isotopic techniques, which he describes as like DNA tracing for gas particles.
Not all the CO2 in the atmosphere is from the burning of fossil fuels. For most of human history, the CO2 level has naturally fluctuated between 200 and 300ppm, which we know thanks to air samples trapped in glacier ice cores.
Those natural fluctuations are often cited by climate change deniers to suggest that warming is not man-made.
Naturally occurring carbon is made up of different isotopes. The most common types are called Carbon-12 and Carbon-13.
Carbon-12 is by far the most common type found in nature. Carbon-13 makes up about 1 per cent of the total. But the exact amount can differ. There is slightly less Carbon-13 in fossil fuels like coal and oil compared to in atmospheric carbon.
Lowe and other international researchers found that, while total CO2 in the air was increasing, the percentage of Carbon-13 isotopes compared with Carbon-12 was decreasing.
That proved that the extra CO2 in the atmosphere was coming from the burning of fossil fuels by humans, not anything else. ‘‘That’s the smoking gun. You can get every sceptic blue in the face but that’s just open and shut evidence that this extra CO2 came from humans,’’ he says. ‘‘Unequivocal, no doubt.’’
But the battle to convince the public of his findings was only just beginning. Part of the problem was that the predicted temperature rise didn’t show up for several years.
While CO2 was rising, temperatures were jumping up and down, with no consistency. But eventually, the signal separated from the noise and the heat started to climb. Once it did, it basically never stopped.
In hindsight, the conservative approach of the scientific community probably held progress pack for a number of years, he says. ‘‘As a scientists, we thought, ‘No, you don’t jump up and down and scream, we’re not activists.’ Losing our credibility was the big issue.
‘‘It was a totally different time. If only I knew then what I know now . . . Now it’s different, many of us are out there doing stuff. We have to, this is an emergency.’’
Full-blown arguments with climate change deniers have been a common occurrence in Lowe’s life. His voice bristles with frustration when the topic comes up.
‘‘It’s better now, but it was hard yards. I’d be yelled at by people. It used to be constant shouting matches with sceptics.
‘‘[Scientists] deal in data and facts and graphs and numbers, it’s really hard to get through with that. In my lifetime I’ve given hundreds of climate change talks and you’re always up against it with this distrust.’’
Nothing grinds his gears more than scientists in the 1980s and 1990s who deliberately spread mistruths about climate change while on the payrolls of oil companies, like Fred Singer and others profiled in the 2010 book Merchants of
Doubt. ‘‘I just think . . . the bastard, how dare he not look at the facts. That makes me angry, people who deliberately go out and falsify what’s going on.’’
After resigning, Lowe started his own small family business, consulting and doing climate change education.
After his children left home, he and Irena moved into their small cottage, which they meticulously designed to have the smallest possible carbon footprint.
He’s still actively involved in climate science, making submissions on bills and helping with various research work. He’s working on a book about his life work.
Every day as he sits down to write, that Nobel Prize certificate hangs behind him. ‘‘I just wish . . . all of us wish, that we could have changed minds,’’ he says. ‘‘But how do you fight an oil company?’’
The first CO reading at Baring Head was 326 parts per million. The most recent reading was 409 parts per million.