Kim Hill speaks with journalist Tom Doig and scientist Dave Lowe about the climate crisis. (A highlight of the 2021 WORD Christchurch Festival)
Listen to the conversation
Photo: AFP
During the course of a wide-ranging conversation, Tom Doig and Dave Lowe read from their recent books about their own experience of climate change in action.
Tom Doig reads from Hazelwood:
They told us it was going to be bad, and it was bad.
We got up early in the morning, soaked all the tea towels and some spare sheets and strung them up over Johnny’s vege garden. Then we sat in the kitchen and waited for the sun to rise. It got hot, then hotter, then impossibly hot. We watched as Johnny’s tomato and kale and snowpeas drooped, shrivelled and died. It was over C40˚. It was ten in the morning.
It was 2009. It was one more Saturday in Melbourne.
As Johnny’s garden cooked, I stayed inside and tried to watch DVDs, but it was too hot to concentrate. If I opened the front door, the air was a searing full-body punch. A friend texted me. I walked down the road to the shops, and my thongs melted off my feet.
By 3:04pm on 7th February 2009, it had reached C46.4˚. That was ten degrees hotter than the human body. That was unliveable.
I went to a barbecue that night. It was too hot to cook, so on the ride over I bought a couple of big bags of salt and vinegar chips. When I got there, everyone else had done the same. We sat around drinking beer, eating a fine range of salted snacks, and asking each other if everyone had heard from our friend Jenneke. She was in rural Victoria, and no-one could get through to her. Jenneke was a volunteer firefighter along with her Dad Vica.
The town of Marysville in Victoria was destroyed in the February 2009 bushfires. Photo: AFP
That night she escaped death, just, when Vica drove their fire engine off the road, up over a kerb, through a chain-link fence into the middle of a cricket oval moments before the Maryville fire engulfed the town. As they hid in the fire truck with blankets over their heads, adrenaline buzzing in her ears, Jenneke watched houses and gas tanks exploding on all sides. She watched a car driving round slowly, trying to find a safe place. She doesn’t know what happened to that car.
“I had the strong feeling of being very, very isolated,” she said. “We could listen to the truck’s radio, but couldn’t radio out ourselves as all the radio towers had burnt down. The radio described all the fires round the state, but said nothing about Marysville. It was this strange feeling that the whole town was burning up, and no-one outside even knew.”
Another friend lost her parents that night. They lived in a house in the bush. The house was gone. Their bodies were never found. It took days for the severity of the situation to become apparent. Overstretched emergency services eventually calculated that 173 people were killed in Victoria’s Black Saturday fires in scenes that could only be, and were, described as apocalyptic.
But as one of Australia’s worst disasters ripped across the state, I was sitting around with my mates, drinking beer and eating salt and vinegar chips, hoping that other friends were ok. We lived with it, because, what else could we do?
Baring Head Photo: NIWA
Dave Lowe reads from The Alarmist: Fifty Years Measuring Climate Change:
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 blood-curdling whine accompanied by an eerie howling. It 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 twelve 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 it’s easy to see why. It’s 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 measurements in the Southern Hemisphere.
The work was arduous and demanding and came at a huge personal cost. Exhaustion and loneliness were my constant companions. It was 1972, and those and subsequent measurements at the site confirmed that humanity’s impact on the atmosphere was a global phenomenon – a dreadful discovery I’ve lived with for 50 years.
Half a century ago, serendipity sent me as a 22-year-old physics graduate, on a path to becoming one of a small group that provided proof that human activities were damaging the atmosphere by dramatically altering its physical and chemical properties. Our measurements showed that atmospheric CO2 was increasing around New Zealand as well as in the Northern Hemisphere.
The book The Alarmist chronicles my 50-year journey with the atmosphere. As you can imagine it’s one of elation and despair. But the atmosphere 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?
About the speakers
Kim Hill, Tom Doig, Dave Lowe Photo: WORD Christchurch
Tom Doig
Tom Doig is an author, academic and journalist. His book about the 2014 Australian mine fire disaster, Hazelwood, was nominated for the 2020 Walkley Book Award and was shortlisted for a Ned Kelly Award in 2021. His latest book is Living with the Climate Crisis: Voices from Aotearoa.
www.tomdoig.com
Twitter: @tomdoig
Instagram: @doigdoig
Facebook: /tomdoig
Dave Lowe
Atmospheric scientist Dave Lowe began a pivotal record of atmospheric CO2 at Baring Head in 1970. His times of elation and despair are told in story form in his memoir The Alarmist: Fifty Years Measuring Climate Change.
www.lowenz.com