Joe Farman died this weekend. Obituaries appeared on the BBC and Telegraph on Monday night.
As one of the scientists who helped find the "hole" in the ozone layer, Farman was part of what was arguably one of the most important scientific discoveries of the 20th century, even if it took a slightly different hue from earlier discoveries, a little less triumphant perhaps, being more a matter of humans incrementally learning what we had done to the Earth rather than simply digging deeper around themselves. More "er, um, I think, possibly, oh" than "eureka".
For the last few years the British Library has been undertaking an Oral History of British Science. The interview with Farman is lovely. There seems to be a fault on the sound file half way through, but the library has a link to the full transcript that makes for a very absorbing read. This interview is full of warmth, gossip and humour, with detail about the science told alongside a sense of some of the politics of science.
It takes you from his childhood memories improvising radio equipment with the Scouts and reading the popular science of the 1920s, to putting that 1985 ozone paper in the post to Nature on Christmas Eve. You get a sense of the technological and cultural changes in science over the century, as well as its immense increase in size and complexity. It's also a neatly context-filled insight into the development of an area of scientific measurement in the late 20th century; it reminds you how much of science is really a matter of working out new and more intricate ways to measure. And it's a great story of the gradual and sometimes tricky mingling of mathematics, meteorology and chemistry in the history of climate science.
You want page 251 for references to how much he enjoyed pulling James Lovelock's leg. Or page 237 where he tries not to be too scathing about how much science the Americans were doing at the McMurdo Antarctic Station, but notes they had brought a nuclear generator down there which ended up under the sea ice (they got it back a few years later apparently, in case you were wondering).
There's a touching bit in which he remembers getting angry when he discovered the wastefulness of CFCs used in the fast food industry (page 297), and I was interested to read that the idea of a "hole" in the ozone layer came from the pages of the Washington Post, probably after a Nasa press release, though no one owned up to being the first to use the word (page 294).
The juiciest bit, perhaps, is when he recalls telling his colleagues about the hole in the ozone layer and "there were several people there who we shall not name I should think who ought to have reacted but didn't … ". He goes on to say he later learned that the head of his division had tried to suppress that paper, writing to the Met Office to say it shouldn't be published "cause it'd be very embarrassing if my inferences were wrong" (page 281).
I highly recommend letting yourself be pulled into reading the whole thing. Not just as a tribute to a man who did some world-changing research, but also to get a sense of how complex, slow and just plain silly the progress of science can be.
Here's one of my favourite snippets as a taster, when he was asked to remember the early 1980s, when they were just beginning to receive low results for ozone levels in the spring (pages 277-8 of transcript):
"Their job was to keep an eye on things as they came in. And so actually I heard about this a little bit late and my first reaction, as anyone should be in essence, is if your observations of ozone start to change you should be – the first question you should ask is has something gone wrong with the instrument. And so you have to go through all the procedure of the calibrations and comparisons and so on and so forth, and convince yourself that it's not instrument or the people operating it but is actually something real.
By the time this was sorted out the sudden [inaud] observations we looked at just had got considerably lower, hmmm, and it was then fairly obvious that you had to believe it or not and if you believed it you had to publish it pretty quickly because it was fairly clearly important.
One of the odd things about the whole of the ozone story I suppose is it demonstrates, you know, how shall we put it [laughs], in a rather worrying way how compartmentalised science can get. Sherry Rowland and Mario Molina had given this warning that chlorine could be important, etc, etc. Hmmm … they clearly, by the time we talked to them, had no idea what incredibly low temperatures are reached in the Antarctic stratosphere. I mean when I started to do a very crude modelling of what might be expected, if you look in the recommended reaction rates for – air rates for some appropriate reactions you discover to your horror they had never been measured at the sort of temperatures you can get in the Antarctic winter [laughs].
And so it goes on. It shows very clearly, almost the same in the Met Office, that there was this huge gulf between people who wrote papers and the poor people who made observations, there was very little feedback, you know, by the people who regarded the data as important to the people who were making it. So you get this terrible situation where you get young men, even in the Met, old men, being paid to do something of which they've got really no idea why they're doing it and they don't really understand how important it is to take every effort to stop doing silly things, impossible to completely eliminate [laughs] and so on.
But, you know, it's much the same with the theoretical chemists. They really have no idea what the real Antarctic atmosphere was like and so I suppose it's not surprising that no one really sort of thought Antarctica was a place where you ought to be looking for this, but when you look back with hindsight it is perfectly obvious. And I suppose I'm as guilty as anyone, I knew perfectly well about stratospheric clouds – in the winter pole the stratospheric clouds. They even got good pictures of them and so on and so forth but since the chemists had sort of issued their blanket statement that there can't ever be enough particles in the atmosphere for chemical reactions on them to be important you [laughs] – until you're sort of pressed and are struggling to find something to latch onto – you know, it's difficult when people tell you don't think about this to suddenly say, 'Oh damn it, you have to, look.' [laughs]
Dr Alice Bell is research fellow in the Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex. A recovering historian of science, she has never really got over the delight of stumbling across archives of scientists gossiping about each other
