Prize Thinking by the Nobel Granters : Recognition underlines global warming danger
This year’s crop of Nobel science prizes provides two good reasons to cheer. First, on a parochial level, five of the nine winners did their work at California institutions. But, on a higher level, the chemistry prize was a resounding endorsement of the still politically contentious--though scientifically accepted--notion that modern industrial processes threaten calamitous global warming by damaging the Earth’s protective layer of ozone.
The prizes were especially sweet for UC Irvine, struggling to overcome the scandal over its fertility clinic. Chemistry prizes went to Irvine’s F. Sherwood Rowland and his former student, Mario Molina, a native of Mexico now at MIT, for pioneering work on chemical processes that destroy ozone. Also, a physics prize went to Frederick Reines of Irvine for discovering the subatomic particle called the neutrino. He shared the prize with Martin L. Perl of Stanford, discoverer of the neutrino’s cousin, the tau. Finally, a Caltech biologist, Edward B. Lewis, shared the physiology and medicine prize for explaining how genes control early organ development.
DARING: The prizes for the ozone work were particularly daring for the Nobel committee. When done in the 1970s, the work was at first derided by most scientists and certainly by the industry responsible for the emission of huge amounts of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) into the atmosphere. Rowland and Molina postulated then that as these chemicals rise in the air they are broken down by sunlight and then chlorine molecules react with ozone molecules and destroy them. They speculated that this could ultimately lead to global warming, skin cancer and even melt polar icecaps.
At the time, some industry critics called the theory a Soviet KGB plot. But in 1985 other scientists discovered an ozone “hole” over Antarctica. And, in an extraordinary act of international cooperation, industrialized nations agreed to protect the ozone layer in the 1987 Montreal Protocol and later to phase out CFC production by the end of this year. Last month a U.N. scientific panel agreed that global temperatures have risen over the last century from human activity.
DISSENT: Astonishingly, none of this has convinced some skeptics, most of them lacking scientific credentials. Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio commentator, regularly attacks global warming as a figment of liberals’ imagination. Relying on a tiny minority of scientific dissenters, a bill in Congress would delay or repeal the phase-out of CFC’s. It is sponsored by Rep. John T. Doolittle of California (R-Rocklin), an attorney by profession, and Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas), who used to run a company that sprayed Houston homes for cockroaches before going into politics. Their bill--opposed even by Dupont, the main maker of CFCs--is one of a number of bills meant to roll back vital environmental protections and scientific research on such matters.
Congress has this to ponder: Does it put more credence in the Nobel committee, or in such eminent scientific minds as Reps. Doolittle and DeLay and the windy Limbaugh?
