Book review: “The Alarmist”
Patrick Medlicott - 2nd February 2026
This is a review of “The alarmist: fifty years measuring climate change”, by Dave Lowe, Victoria University press 2021.
I want to start off by saying that I don’t know how I missed this work until recently - maybe it’s my age?
I would definitely recommend this book to our readers. Dave Lowe was born in the same year as me (1946). Whether this should be considered a vintage year I will leave to your readers to decide. He was born in Taranaki, where I now live. I would say that he is a polymath, and one of the great New Zealanders. He studied physics at Victoria, and then climate chemistry for his PhD in Europe.
Dave developed the first method of measuring atmospheric CO2 in New Zealand, around 50 years ago, at the time when an American gentleman called Keeling was doing something similar at Manou Loa in Hawaii. He made his own equipment, and spent years demonstrating the rise in atmospheric CO2 in the southern hemisphere - at huge personal effort. This has been ongoing at Baring Head, near Wellington, after being initially started at Makara, on the other side of the harbour. He is now retired, but still involved in climate change lecturing and research together with his family. He was part of a group awarded a Nobel Prize in the early 2000’s. He has published multiple papers on climate change and CO2, and is foremost known for his study of the effect of methane on the climate, which is of course significantly relevant to New Zealand and its dairy farming industry.
His life story is inspiring, and shows what people can achieve with dedication to science coupled with dedication to humanity. He has struggled to bring the attention of the world to the effect of climate change from anthropogenic (man-made) causes, and he is still trying to do this. Unfortunately, as he notes in his book, although many people understand what is going on, there is still considerable resistance to, and obfuscation and outright denial of, the facts. I assume our coalition government would describe him and those that understand the science as ”Worthies”, as they have done while they continue to pursue business as usual with policies which will mainly affect our descendants very adversely.