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
I read some of Tom Quirk’s work on Climate change.
He is a great loss.
I may be able to watch his memorial service on my computer thanks to the link provided by Jo.
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Tom wrote a definitive disproof of AGW in 2009:
Quirk, T. (2009). The Australian temperature anomaly, 1910 – 2000. Energy
& Environment, 20 (1-2), 97{100.
David Stockwell picked up on Tom’s concept and expanded the disproof:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/45861396_Structural_break_models_of_climatic_regime-shifts_claims_and_forecasts
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We need more Tom Quirks.
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An honest, genuine, traditional scientist who went against “consensus science” (sic) and the “Official Narrative” and sadly missed. We need more scientists like him, not what many scientists have become today to secure taxpayer funding.
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His observation that the wind is either “all blowing” or “all not blowing” on a continental scale is particularly important as the anti-energy lobby always claims that “the wind is always blowing somewhere” is just another Leftist lie. The “argument” is that if you just have another few tens of thousands of windmill plantations (and solar panel plantations) randomly located we will live in a Utopia with unlimited “free” energy along with free range Unicorns roaming about. It’s just doesn’t work like that. Australia will remain in energy poverty and an energy-poor nation as long as these lies and plans are allowed to exist.
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If we are not allowed to use the energy available to us then the risk is that someone else will by taking it from us.
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That’s the entire plan.
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What a pity we don’t have more scientists like Tom Quirk today.
So many so called scientists today just follow and then join the herd and become yappers.
Most of them couldn’t care less about the available data and evidence and would rather tell lies than spend 5 minutes online to check the facts.
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No, most work for the government where they are not allowed say anything. Or woke corporations. Scientists are poorly paid, have families and mortages. Many in defence and weapons development, as always. And a lot see it as just stupidity and do not want to get involved, thinking it will come to nothing. Which it would have done, except it is now owned by China and from rare earths to windmills to solar panels and Green credits, it’s a trillion dollar industry. Which makes no sense at all except massive profits for China.
Just try Professor Peter Ridd who spoke out from a university which has become famous for Climate fraud. He lost everything, despite the fact that Australians donated a million dollars to his cause. But the University had unlimited government cash. And the Great Barrier Reef is fine. Despite Barack Obama’s visit to give it the last rites.
And who even dares ask what Malcolm Turnbull has done with his gift to his wife of $444Million in cash to ‘save’ the Great Barrier Reef? Not worth anyone’s job to ask. The press leave it alone. The biggest robbery in Australian history.
So there are good scientists, but they will not, cannot speak out. Those who do are pilloried.
And often the medical doctors are the most gullible. Which is in my opinion a consequence of a very busy and often hard life where you are fundametnally and continually trained to believe, remember and repeat everything you are told. Which is the opposite of science.
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Consider properly qualified meteorologists. A great proportion of them do not believe a word of it and most never did. Especially the insanity of saying the weather and the climate are two different things so meteorologists are unqualified to comment.
Thus you have absurdities like graduate in English at LaTrobe Professor Tim Flannery as Australia’s Climate Commissioner, not a meteorologist or even a scientist. He did no hard science at university. None of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, biochemistry, meteorology,engineering… None. Essays and books and shoot from the hip uninformed opinions. And now we even have Aboriginal Science in the weather at the BOM. These are stone age people who could not count to ten in any of 300 languages and had the vocabulary of an infant and no way to pass on knowledge. You should see the cave paintings in Chauvet, France from 35,000 years ago.
Real scientists did not vote YES in the Referendum, but the head of the Science group said that Australian scientists vote YES. When she was a former Age journalist who had championed the cause and now presumed to speak on behalf of all Australian scientists and teachers.
Climate Science is nonsense from beginning to end. It’s Henny Penny stuff, the sky is falling, send money, steal money.
Rarely does any scientist have the financial independence to stand up to this. Only a few.
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You must give Flannery his due as a vertebrate palaeontologist. His foray into climate mania is another matter.
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Old bones have their place. But it’s not rocket surgery.
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I believe any real scientist would had thrown Climate science in the bin immediately. It is based on the idea that CO2 is insoluble. Then it is very hard to explain breathing, the essential characteristic of all living things.
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Very hard to explain beer, too.
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What exactly is “rocket surgery”?
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An old trilogy. Brain surgeon. Rocket scientist. Nuclear physicist. Like Tom.
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Wow. He sounds amazing. I did not know him at all. I don’t want to diminish what anybody else does here or elsewhere with regards to opposing the nonsense of anthropogenic global warming, but after reading about all that he did, we don’t need anything from anybody else. Or shouldn’t. Condolences to his family.
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I met Tom Quirk at the I.P.A.
What a gentleman.
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That phytoplankton thing came up again a few years ago. It was when there were various scientific institutions wasting money on machines to extract CO2 from the atmosphere. I think even the dingbats at the CSIRO had received some junk money and had constructed a machine. I must admit I knew about phytoplankton, but had no idea of their significant contribution to atmospheric O2. Some would say the most significant contributor. If asked I would have answered “trees” like more than 99% of the population. It was prompted by, of all people, a politician. Gerard Renick was big on it and commented many times on X of the importance of phytoplankton, and how it was silly even contemplating such folly as a CO2 extraction machine. No doubt Tom Quirk would have been all over it as well. He did his bit, and I will try to do mine. One climate alarmist at a time.
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Hi Jo,
Thank you for this wonderful article, and also your generous tribute to Tom at the link you provide above. I thought to write one there also. Here is a lightly edited version.
The breadth and depth of Tom’s interests and involvements are clearly the stuff of legend.
I thought to touch on in some detail, of what I came to realise is but one of many of Dr Tom’s activities and interests, as I think it should not go unacknowledged, and, this description also demonstrates his wonderful, inherent, generosity.
I was introduced to Dr Tom by another great Australian, the late Peter Mitchell. At that time we both were dealing with the curse of wind farms being hosted on properties neighbouring our own.
Through the courtesy of another electrical engineer, the late, great, Leith Elder, I had managed to get access to oodles of actual operational data for this form of generation. What struck me immediately was the profound intermittency that I came to realise is an absolutely inherent characteristic of wind energy, and therefore making it useless in any form of real grid-connected generation. What was needed was a careful, thorough perusal of this data by someone with a keen analytical mind. Peter said that he knew just the bloke. And so I met this wonderful man, Dr Tom Quirk, someone I came to know as always able to see the funny side of any situation, always so full of fun, but who never shied away from the serious work at hand. And soon came his first published paper on the topic. And, he insisted in putting our son Andrew’s name on the paper, because Andrew had devised an elegant way to extract this operational data for him. That was back in 2010.
Tom had a wonderful saying: “No good deed shall go unpunished!”. It was said always with a hearty laugh. In our many discussions I thought that what he meant was that if you do a good piece of analytical work then your “reward” is that you will be asked to do even more work on that topic!
I came to realise that there is a darker side to this remark, because certainly this work of ours did not go unpunished. Once published, Tom was subject to some of the most vile insults by wind’s proponents. He was cast as a “renewable energy denier”, “in the pay of fossil-fuel interests”, etc., when all he did was to demonstrate, by careful analysis of the data – the doing of the science, the application of sound engineering principles – that this concept is a failure. Tom’s response was to produce even more detailed, longer-term, studies, studies that showed even more clearly the folly of proceeding with this form of electricity “generation”.
As to his generosity, he refused to have his name on a later paper arising from this work. He insisted that it be in my name only, even though a critically-important part of the analysis was his work. He also ensured that the draft paper received a rigorous, independent, peer review. My only response to this generosity could be that he should receive as fulsome an acknowledgement as possible in the resulting paper.
As a result of Tom’s careful, elegant analyses, then, between us, we destroyed the mythology that grid-connected wind generation can ever be of any use, except in the collection of lucrative subsidies for its owners. This second paper was published in 2012. That’s 14 years ago. Our findings there as to the utter folly of wind generation, and more importantly, the likely dreadful impacts on grid stability, are even more valid today than when published all those years ago. (We remember the 2016 blackout in South Australia and the Spanish blackout last year. The latter was caused by the failure of both intermittent solar as well as intermittent wind.) In considering this aspect – the impact on grid stability, here is yet another, of what now seems to be one of many such examples, of where Dr Tom Quirk was way ahead of others in his thinking.
I have since wondered just how many might be the proposed business cases that Tom has destroyed simply by doing the necessary detailed analysis, and, in contrast, how many successful, beneficial enterprises might not have seen the light of day had he not given the same concentrated effort to their consideration?
Later, in 2016, Tom demonstrated that another wind-energy proposal, the “Tasmania – Battery to the Nation” concept, advanced with great fanfare by many, and the basis for the proposed now-controversial Marinus cable transmission link between Tasmania and Victoria, is also complete folly. I feel that it should be acknowledged that he put in many, many days of work, unsolicited by anyone in authority, work that shows, elegantly, and easy to understand in hindsight, (that is, after Tom did all the work for us), that when the wind is blowing in Tasmania, it is also blowing in Victoria, and conversely, when there is no wind in Victoria, there is, more often than believed, no wind blowing in Tasmania either. What Tom showed, by detailed, exhaustive, analysis of the actual, publicly-available operational data, over a long time period, of the now-considerable number of wind farms in both Victoria and Tasmania, is that, after all, as might be expected after a little careful reflection, the much-lauded basis of the scheme, the Roaring Forties, well they affect both the Victorian coastline, and Tasmania, about equally, and at the same time. So, the idea that somehow, when there is no wind available in Victoria, that we can, with complete certainty, draw on the supposedly always-blowing, magnificent, winds in Tasmania is, in the words of another great, Mark Mills, “an exercise in magical thinking”. That is, Tom showed that the idea of constructing a hugely expensive transmission link across Bass Strait between two wind resources that go up and down together in unison in the vain hope that the wind in one region might thereby compensate for the lack in the other, is, quite simply, ridiculous.
As Jo Nova said there in an earlier tribute, such as these studies amply demonstrates that Tom’s worth to Australia is in the trillions. His passing represents an enormous loss both to the nation and to the world. We can but take heart that his published papers will stand the test of time.
As others have already said, Tom was an intellectual giant, yet it was always so much fun to be in his company. I am absolutely privileged, honoured, and humbled, to have known him. He was a true gentleman, and a fearless scientist in the truest sense.
My heartfelt condolences to Tom’s family.
With great sadness,
Paul Miskelly
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Ocean “acidification” has run its course it seems.
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It’s ocean boiling now.
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I must admit I’ve not heard of him before, how did he manage to not be a believer and not get ‘cancelled’.
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In a sense Ronin, he did get cancelled. If he spouted the renewables propaganda, the ABC / BBC / Labor Party / Fairfax news would have beaten a path to his door.
Jo
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What a wonderful tribute left by Paul Miskelly. I never had the pleasure of meeting Tom Quirk, but I’ve read a lot of his work. He was highly educated and wonderfully analytical. I’m just a humble Gippsland farmer, with friends on the other side of Bass Strait and we have known for years that our weather is essentially the same. One day I happened to drive past the Toora windfarm in South Gippsland on what was a moderately windy day. The wind turbines up on the hillside perches were stock still, not functioning at all, because the wind strength was such that they had to feather the turbine blades to avoid excess blade tip speed that would have damaged the blades and probably the turbines themselves. That evening I spoke to my friend in Tasmania and sure enough he had experienced what he described as “moderate wind strength” as well. Our conclusion was that upon the evidence before us, Dr. Tom Quirk was correct in his analysis of the utility of a Victorian Tasmanian wind farm connection. In layman’s terms, it would be bloody useless. With wind turbines, no wind no power; too much wind no power. I’m sad that a mind like Tom Quirk’s has left us, while we are being led down the path to economic perdition by a mind like Chris Bowen’s.
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