UCI Professor Sounds Alarm on Ozone Layer

In the den of his Corona del Mar home, F. Sherwood Rowland studied a panel of slides of Antarctica that were shot last year from a NASA satellite.

In the center of each, blocking part of the icy-white land mass below, was a ragged black hole.

“It’s a hole in the ozone,” Rowland, an atmospheric chemist, explained matter-of-factly. “It’s grown larger since last year. And it’s not going to go away.”

Rowland, 59, a UC Irvine professor of chemistry, takes more than an academic interest in the ozone layer.

Twelve years ago, Rowland, with Mario J. Molina, one of his post-doctoral researchers, discovered that chlorofluorocarbons released into the atmosphere from refrigerants and aerosol sprays were rapidly depleting the earth’s ozone layer, the protective band of gas that shields plants and animals from the ultraviolet rays of the sun.

For every 1% of ozone lost, Rowland estimated, 10,000 new cases of skin cancer are expected to occur in the United States annually.

Along with writing in scientific journals, Rowland made his case in television interviews and before legislative committees, eventually persuading Congress in 1978 to ban the use of chlorofluorocarbons in aerosol sprays.

But Rowland’s victory of a dozen years ago seems a limited one, the scientist said Saturday.

As he travels around the world, making calculations about atmospheric change and gathering air samples, he said, he believes that the chlorofluorocarbon problem has been growing steadily worse. “We have wasted 10 years for our response,” he said. “And the response of the industry (that manufactures chlorofluorocarbons) has been to defend the chemical rather than to defend the people of the world. . . .

“There are a lot of things happening to the atmosphere, and almost none of them are good.”

But if Rowland can sound pessimistic, he also still speaks excitedly about studying the chemistry of the atmosphere.

“The problems are always new and different,” whether they involve chlorofluorocarbons or acid rain, said Rowland, who recently served on a White House committee studying the effects of acid rain.

In addition to following the increase in chlorofluorocarbons, Rowland and his current team of UCI researchers are monitoring the buildup of other chemicals in remote areas of the world.

For instance, in December the team fanned out--Rowland to Oregon, one man to Alaska, another to New Zealand, a third to La Paz, Bolivia--to sample the buildup of methane gas.

‘Quite Ominous’

“We were at all latitudes, from the northern tip of Alaska to the tip of New Zealand. And there was very little difference. Every remote location has it and in increasing amounts,” Rowland said.

The increase “is also quite ominous,” he said. “It’s a marker for many compounds, and we just are not getting rid of them as fast as we used to.”

But Rowland’s reaction to a problem is not to be discouraged, but to study it.

Or as his son Jeffrey explained: “When Dad gets real excited about something, he doesn’t dance around the house. He just decides he is going to research it.”

For his research in both atmospheric chemistry and radio chemistry (the study of radioactive materials), Rowland has won a string of awards, including the Tyler Prize in Ecology and Energy and the American Chemical Society’s Award for Creative Advances in Environmental Science. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He estimated that he publishes about 15 research papers a year.

‘Greenhouse Effect’

For all his work, “I don’t think of myself as a particularly hard worker,” Rowland said. Although he has never taken a vacation longer than two weeks, Rowland said he enjoys a schedule that involves research at UCI and trips to Vienna, Hawaii, Italy and Switzerland every few months for scientific meetings.

In his years of studying the atmosphere, Rowland has had a lot of time to consider the implications of his data. One continuing concern, he said, is that ozone loss will create a “greenhouse effect” in which the earth gradually warms and wind patterns change.

Rowland said that manufacturers of chlorofluorocarbons have never been willing to admit that ozone loss would lead to the problems his studies predict; since 1979 they have fought additional regulations. He called that foolish.

“The fact that you can’t predict when an earthquake will come doesn’t mean there won’t be an earthquake.”

Rowland, at least, takes his research to heart. In December, 1973, as he and Molina were writing up their results, he and his wife scooped up every aerosol spray can in the house and threw them out. “When you believe it, you act on it,” Joanne Rowland said.

Now, with satellite photos showing ozone loss in Antarctica, there is new talk about the need to regulate chlorofluorocarbons, about the need to save the ozone layer, Rowland said.

“It looks like (the issue) is beginning to heat up all over again,” he said, sounding not at all displeased.