Rowland, Pioneer on Ozone Layer Thinning, Dies at Age 84

By Michael D. Lemonick

When F. Sherwood Rowland and his protégé Mario Molina first made the shocking discovery back in 1974 that manmade chemicals could eat away at the Earth’s protective ozone layer, they were greeted mostly with suspicion and scorn by the chemical industry and even by their colleagues. By the time he passed away this weekend, however, at the age of 84, Rowland, had long since been vindicated: among many other honors, he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Molina and the Dutch scientist Paul Krutzen in 1995.

His greatest achievement, however, in his eyes and arguably in the world’s as well, was an international agreement called the Montreal Protocol. Rowland’s and Molina’s work on chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs — supposedly harmless chemicals used in spray cans, refrigerators and air conditioners — had been purely theoretical.

Professors F. Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina, 1975. Credit: Univeristy of California Irvine (UCI).

But in 1986, scientists discovered that the ozone layer had thinned dramatically above Antarctica, where leaking CFCs had been accumulating in the atmosphere. Since ozone screens out some of the Sun’s harmful ultraviolet radiation (it causes sunburn and skin cancers, among other evils), this finally got peoples’ attention. It took only 18 months for the world’s major CFC producers to agree to a phase out of the chemicals. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan later called it “perhaps the single most successful international agreement to date.”

An international agreement to limit harmful emissions into the atmosphere sounds like the perfect model for fighting global warming as well. There’s a catch, though: good substitutes already existed for CFCs. As a result, nobody even noticed that their air conditioners had been switched to using a different gas for coolant. CO2, the prime pollutant behind global warming, is the inevitable consequence of burning coal, oil and gas. That's how we get the vast majority of our energy, and a phase out of that magnitude would be far more expensive and disruptive — a major reason it’s not being done.

The ozone crisis might not have been averted either, though, without Rowland’s groundbreaking research, and without his tireless crusade to get people to pay attention to it.

“He was the perfect spokesperson for this issue,” his colleague Donald Blake, who, like Rowland, was a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Irvine, told the Associated Press. “He was austere, well-spoken and had a lot of confidence.”