Illustration: John Shakespeare Photo: John Shakespeare
BOB FOSTER, 1931-2014
Bob Foster was one of Australia’s more significant, erudite - and controversial scientists. His most important contribution was as one of the group of talented young scientists and engineers who joined BHP in the late 1960s, when it started producing oil and natural gas from Bass Strait. They helped to turn what had been a rather stolid steel manufacturer, with coal and other mineral production geared to its manufacturing needs, into what became the natural resource behemoth BHP Billiton.
Australia’s oil exploration and production industry was still raw and pioneering when BHP took out successful exploration permits in Bass Strait in the early 1960s, on the advice of its American consultant, Lewis Weeks, and teamed up with Esso (now Exxon Corporation). Foster was one of the few Australians who knew much about the industry.
He had joined the Royal Dutch Shell group in 1956 and worked with its oil field operations as an exploration geologist in Brunei, Nigeria, Texas and the Middle East. He returned to Australia in 1966 to bring up his family just as BHP was recruiting for its new oil and gas division in Melbourne.
Later he became marketing manager for BHP Petroleum, as the oil and gas division had become.
Despite a successful working life with two of the world’s biggest corporations, Foster was an individualist, ever his own man and ready to be a constructive critic. His talent, perceptive eye and honesty of purpose allowed him to get away with more "rocking the boat" than many corporate dissidents.
Retirement in 1992 allowed him to pursue his interests in science for its own sake, in such esoteric fields as geophysics, relationships between earth, the sun and the other planets; and palaeoclimatology, the study of ancient climates.
His knowlege of these led him to question - as he did with most things - the basic concepts, as well as the methods, of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He became a climate change sceptic and an activist in that cause. He was a pioneer of the Lavoisier Society, a penniless sceptic minnow compared to the well-padded whale of the IPCC.
The sceptic view - which Foster could argue with formidable detail - is that the IPCC has greatly over-estimated the damaging role of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and that the relatively small volume mankind has added is more likely to help the planet, especially through increased plant growth.
He argued that such additional heating as has occurred and is likely to occur is mainly due to natural climate variability, including an average half a degree of warming a century since the "Little Ice Age" around 1700. He attributed the extra warming in the 1990s and early this century to several temporary factors, including unusually strong sun activity, caused by pressure on the sun from the outer planets, and an exceptional run of El Nino droughts of uncertain cause.
He especially emphasised the role of the sun in changing climate, a complex argument on which he differed with - and at one point was ahead of - the IPCC scientists. Part of the impact, he said, was on changes in wind and cloud patterns.
Foster also argued that the real problem is likely to be not so much heating as future global cooling caused by temporary changes in the impact on earth of the outer planets.
Robert Jacomb Foster was born in Darwin on September 19, 1931, son of Henry Jacomb Foster, a lawyer, and his wife, Francesca (nee Bevilacqua). Jacomb is an old family name of English origin running through generations.
At eight, Foster was sent to Adelaide for schooling. He studied geology but graduated in engineering from the University of Adelaide. At the university, Foster met another student, Jan Barker, and they were married in 1956.
Foster retired to Queenscliff, Victoria, but almost until his death he often visited Melbourne where he was active in talk groups and discussion and nothing pleased him better than an argument with a ‘‘warmist’’.
Bob Foster is survived by Jan, three children and five grandchildren.
Robert Murray and Tony Thomas