Opinion: What Sherwood Rowland taught us about science, and the Earth
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Good thing Sherry Rowland was working 40 years ago instead of now.
Otherwise, he might not have won the Nobel Prize, and we might all be a lot closer to dead -– as individuals, as a species and as a planet.
If UC Irvine chemist F. Sherwood Rowland, who passed away Saturday, had been starting his work now on how chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, damage the Earth’s protective ozone layer, it might be getting the same kind of manipulated skepticism and politically cynical slamming that global climate change now receives.
As it was, Rowland had to battle and scrap for his carefully researched warnings to be believed, but within 15 years of publishing his findings, the nations of the world -- the United States among them -- agreed to phase out CFCs. Believe it or not, manufacturers had stopped using them even before the Montreal Protocol was signed.
The Nobel committee, in honoring Rowland and co-discoverer Mario Molina, said their work may have ‘saved the world from catastrophe.’ These guys should have been wearing Spandex superhero suits, for what their work accomplished.
In 1990, with the inspiration of C. Boyden Gray, who worked in both the Reagan and the George H.W. Bush administrations, a cap-and-trade law was up and running to control acid rain. But when it comes to global climate change, the current GOP generation mocks this market-driven solution as ‘cap and tax.’
I interviewed Rowland a couple of times, most recently half a dozen years ago, when the neo-paleo-anti-science crowd was in full-court press as naysayers on human-generated global climate change. Legitimate scientists with nuanced questions about data and formulas being used were lumped in with random cranks as ‘proof’ that the body of scientific evidence is wrong and that science is no more than just another untrustworthy special-interest group.
Rowland told me he did get his share of attacks in the 1970s. You might say that. Radio Free Europe reported that a trade publication called Aerosol Age suggested he was a Soviet KGB agent, and DuPont took out full-page newspaper ads to question his chops.
Almost 20 years after his Nobel Prize, Rowland told me that ‘the planet is in for a rough century as we try to put together substitutes for the energy that we need in order to prevent very substantial climate change coming from rapidly rising temperatures.’
Yet like global climate change, many of the obstacles to fixing our problems also look to be man-made. As I wrote a few years ago, the public doesn’t like it when scientists engage in discussions that politicians recast as political, not scientific, and it doesn’t like it when scientists detach themselves from ‘real world’ concerns. Rowland remembered a sci-fi story from the 1950s, about a comet imperiling the Earth. Inside a lab, scientists were clamoring for a peek into a spectroscope; outside the lab window, people were getting fried by radiation right in their wingtips.
Rowland’s work on CFCs and ozone was a model, just like the world’s political response to it.
And in spite of the dire warnings that banning CFCs would tank the economy, guess what: American know-how and technology came up with an alternative, business embraced it and, whatever the dire warnings, our armpits don’t stink, we still have spray paint and we’ve maybe bought the ozone layer up there a few more centuries.
If we down here don’t mess our second second chance.
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--Patt Morrison
