Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [102]
Take the experience of Harvard atmospheric physicist Michael McElroy, for example. Industry representatives singled out his red hair and pale skin as proof that scientists had a ‘special interest’ in getting CFCs banned. The trade magazine Aerosol Age remarked that this man would naturally be an advocate of anything that might cut skin cancers. Even more shocking, perhaps, is this subversive jibe, written by a microbiologist in the pages of Nature:
[O]n the beach at Cape Canaveral in Florida, I saw a red-headed man, sunburned to look like a boiled lobster, applying Novocain cream to his glowing back. The only unusual circumstance was that the man was Mike McElroy, whose field is the physics and chemistry of planetary atmospheres and who has loudly warned us against the ultraviolet perils of destroying the ozone layer … Surely he, of all people, should have kept his shirt on.
In a 1988 interview, McElroy admitted that he made scientific contributions to the debate for a decade without supporting a CFC ban. He was, he said, more concerned about the ‘credibility problem’ that science was facing because of the ‘gaps in our understanding’ than he was about the dangers of depleted ozone. Atmospheric scientist Stephen Schneider took a similar line: he and his colleagues, he says, were ‘caught between the exaggerations of the advocates, the exploitations of political interests, the media’s penchant to turn everything into a boxing match, and your own colleagues saying we should be above this dirty business and stick to the bench’.
In contrast to this equivocation, Rowland and Molina stuck their necks out and stood up for the ban. Rowland’s colleagues shunned him for his activism. Almost no university chemistry departments would have him come and speak for nearly a decade – unthinkable for a chemist of his calibre. Twelve years passed without him being invited to speak to industry groups. Even James Lovelock thought Rowland too rash: he called for a ‘bit of British caution’ in the face of Rowland and Molina’s ‘missionary’ zeal for a ban on CFCs. Rowland says that taking a political stand over the science of ozone affected his reputation in the scientific community ‘on a permanent basis’. Now, he says, be belongs to a group that is ‘forever suspect’.
In the end, it was only the terrifying discovery of a hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica that galvanised the scientists. This was the point, McElroy later said, when he decided that it really was ‘time to be very serious about regulation’. The hole began to appear in September 1976, just as the National Academy of Sciences issued its equivocating report. But, although everyone was meant to be watching the ozone, no one noticed.
NASA’s satellite observation system missed the hole completely. The British observing station on the ground at Halley Bay in Antarctica didn’t, but the data it gathered weren’t being entered into any computers; instead, they were piling up in a Cambridge laboratory. For four springs (this is the southern hemisphere, remember), the seasonal disappearance of ozone passed all the scientists by. Then, in 1981, some Cambridge students finally got round to inputting the last few years’ worth of data.
They didn’t take long to notice the anomaly. The most trusted data from the American Amundsen-Scott ground station were indicating 2 to 3 per cent drops in ozone concentration, but according to the British instruments the springtime depletion was reaching 60 per cent. Joe Farman, who was heading the British team, contacted NASA to see whether their satellite had seen the same thing. He received no reply. One of his students got excited, and said they should publish. Farman said no – and tell no one. If they scaremongered, and they turned out to be wrong, all their