The Alarmist Fifty Years Measuring Climate Change

About this book

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 Earth's biosphere.

His research was urgent fifty years ago. Now, it's critical.

In the early 1970s, budding Kiwi scientist Dave Lowe was posted at an atmospheric monitoring station on the wind-blasted southern coast of New Zealand's North Island. On a shoestring salary, he measured carbon in the atmosphere, collecting vital data towards what became one of the most important discoveries in modern science.

What followed was a lifetime's career marked by hope and despair. As realisation dawned of what his measurements meant for the future of the planet, Dave travelled the world to understand more about atmospheric gases, along the way programming some of the earliest computers, designing cutting-edge equipment and conducting experiments both dangerous and mind-numbingly dull. From the sandy beaches of California to the stark winters of West Germany, the mesas of the Rocky Mountains and an Atlantic voyage across the equator, Dave has faced down climate deniers, foot-dragging bureaucracy and widespread complacency to open people's eyes to the effects of increasing fossil fuel emissions on our atmosphere.

In equal parts adventure and warning, and with the wisdom and frustration of half a century behind him, The Alarmist is the exhilarating autobiography of a pioneering Kiwi scientist who has dedicated his life to sounding the alarm on climate change.

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Biography

Dave Lowe is an atmospheric chemist and a lead author of the 2007 Nobel Prize-winning IPCC Fourth Assessment Report on climate change. In the early 1970s, he set up a monitoring station at Baring Head to provide the world’s first evidence of rising atmospheric CO₂ in the southern hemisphere mid-latitudes. He has worked in laboratories in the US, Germany and New Zealand, where he developed equipment and methods to determine the sources of methane in the atmosphere. In New Zealand with NIWA, Dave developed an analytical laboratory and helped establish TROPAC, a world-leading atmospheric chemistry group based in Wellington. He has taught atmospheric chemistry at Victoria University of Wellington, where he is an adjunct professor, and between 2012–18 he acted as the government’s German–New Zealand science coordinator. Today, Dave runs an independent business focused on science education and sustainability. He is one of the last surviving attendees of the world’s first atmospheric CO₂ conference in 1975.