Sadly we lost Tom Quirk a week ago, and his funeral is in Melbourne today at 11am.
Tom Quirk
Some readers may remember his great contributions at this blog. He trained as a Nuclear Physicist, attended Harvard Business School and was a Fellow at Oxford. Not exactly the stereotypical knucklehead climate denier, he worked at Fermilab and CERN, and was once Deputy of VENCorp — managing the gas and electricity market in Victoria, which made him very well qualified to point out how subsidized wind power would drive out reliable baseload generators that keep the system running (and cheap).
Tom Quirk was one of the first to show one of the biggest flaws with the Australian wind turbine fleet, was that rather than randomly not working, they will all stop working together across several states of Australia. Tom did some very original work showing that phytoplankton are a much bigger source and sink of CO2 than most people realize. He also showed that temperatures in Melbourne were largely flat for 150 years from 1855 to 1995 before the BOM changed the site. He queried Bureau of Meteorology adjustments with criticism that is still relevant today. And demonstrated that most of the methane surges don’t correlate with cows and camels but with the rise and fall with El Nino’s and leaky Russian gas pipes.
When others might have retired to play golf, Tom was indefatigable, volunteering to warn us of the expensive mistakes the nation was making. His work with Paul Miskelly was years ahead of anyone else. If only the nation had listened more carefully to Tom and Paul, we could have saved a few hundred billion dollars or more. We don’t appreciate our star science talent…
There is a tribute page here.
We sceptical scientists will miss Tom. He was the quintessentially great Australian. A true gentleman, and a rare mind.
If there were more Tom Quirks the world would be a much better place