Jet-Set Nobel Winner Warns of Ozone Hole
The corner office in Physical Sciences I is adorned with Chinese and Japanese prints, opera festival posters, group pictures of smiling colleagues and, high up on a bookshelf, a curious collection of novelty aerosol cans.
One can came from the producers of a B movie called “Day of the Animals,” about creatures that inexplicably run amok because of the atmosphere’s ozone depletion. They invited F. Sherwood “Sherry” Rowland to the premiere, but he declined. He taped the movie when it was on TV but can’t bring himself to watch.
The UC Irvine chemistry professor counts that little gift among the stranger reactions to his Nobel Prize-winning research that determined that chlorinated chemicals used in aerosol sprays and automobile air conditioners were eating a hole in the Earth’s high-altitude ozone shield against the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays.
These keepsakes, which include a miniature bust of Alfred E. (“What me worry?”) Neuman, capture the wit and sarcasm of a man who made no apologies for his controversial research and makes none now as he eschews retirement and a cloistered laboratory for the high-flying life of the scientific star.
Two years after he, colleague Mario Molina (now at MIT) and Dutch chemist Paul Krutzen shared a Nobel Prize in chemistry, Rowland doesn’t spend much time in his standard-issue office or in the lab, for that matter. Winning the Nobel intensified a jet-set life he never expected but doesn’t seem to spurn.
Between frequent speaking engagements and his duties as foreign secretary for the National Academy of Sciences, an advisory body to the president, Rowland is a 180,000-mile-a-year flier, sometimes hitting four countries in a single month and receiving an overseas invitation about every 10 days.
He may speak from a lofty perch, but he worries that a society capable of both exaggerated concerns about science (“Day of the Animals”) and a cavalier attitude toward it (Alfred E. Neuman) doesn’t always seem to listen. Lately, despite the overwhelming acceptance of his work, he has faced a backlash from the scientific and political fringe.
But Rowland, 70, rises to his defense and does not shirk from carefully selected public appearances, using his Nobel influence to try to shape debate he sees as paramount.
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So there he was in July, bending President Clinton’s ear to tell him point-blank: “The climate is changing, and the evidence for that is very clear-cut. The temperature of the Earth is going up.”
Rowland handed him a statement to that effect, signed by 2,600 scientists, as a way to make clear the importance of the issue as Clinton’s administration decides how far the United States will go in setting limits for carbon dioxide emissions from automobile exhaust, coal-burning factories and other sources. Industry has opposed stringent limits because of fears that high gasoline prices and other measures would disrupt the economy.
The United States is expected to have a proposal ready for a United Nations meeting in December in Kyoto, Japan, aimed at setting worldwide limits.
Rowland won’t be in Japan. He’s certain that whatever treaty comes about “won’t go far enough.” He favors a progressive “carbon” tax on gas, oil, coal and other carbon-dioxide-emitting elements as a way to deter their use, but the idea is politically unpopular.
If Rowland is absent from Kyoto, the UCI campus may not be the first place to find him. He splits his time between campus and traveling for scientific gatherings and for National Science Academy obligations.
He’s choosy with his time, favoring scientific conferences (“You hear the hot stuff not by reading a lot of journals”) but rejecting requests from local grade schools (“If I do one I would have to do them all”).
Because he is off campus so often, he doesn’t teach undergraduates, and is not teaching graduate students this semester.
He is not a hands-on researcher, either, joking that his lab assistants won’t let him touch the equipment--moaning tanks and winking computers measuring air samples--for fear he might screw things up.
He leaves the details to some 20 faculty members, students and others involved in the Rowland-Blake Research Group, with UCI chemist Donald R. Blake handling the day-to-day work.
These days the 6-foot-5 former varsity baseball and basketball player sees himself more as a coach: “You don’t let [Tommy] Lasorda pitch, but you do take his advice.”
Lately, the research has looked at high smog levels in what was thought to be pristine air near Fiji and the effects of commercial airliner exhaust on the atmosphere. Results from the studies are expected to be published in the next couple of years.
The science drives him, he says, but should the experiments produce alarming results, Rowland might again step in front of the TV cameras to urge a change in policy. Some 23 years ago, he did just that, bucking scientific tradition in taking the extra step of pushing for a policy change--the banning of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).
“There are probably people who haven’t changed their view that scientists should stay in their place,” Rowland says. But “I don’t think that means giving up your citizenship rights. It never has made sense to me that when there is something which is of public interest and public discussion, that the scientists who actually understand the problem and know something about it should stay in their laboratories and let the lobbyists, who don’t know anything about it, argue about it. That seems to me to be the wrong way to run society.”
As outspoken as he may be, he doesn’t believe he crosses the line into politics. And for all his research into the environment, he neither accepts nor rejects the label “environmentalist.”
“If you draw a line from, let’s say, the extreme environmentalists--the tree huggers--and the extreme industrialists--who would be the midnight dumpers--I’m closer to a tree hugger than I am to a midnight dumper,” he says.
“I got into this not as an environmentalist but as a scientist interested in studying the chemistry of the atmosphere. In that particular sense I did not come out of what is usually labeled as the environmental community; I came out of the scientific community studying a scientific problem.”
A Nobel Winner Quick to Credit Colleagues
Shortly after winning the Nobel, Rowland was lunching on campus with colleague Blake when a freshman approached, chemistry textbook in hand. Would he sign it?
“He seemed embarrassed about it,” recalls Blake, who says Rowland obliged. “He’s not real comfortable being singled out like that.”
Indeed, his colleagues sketch a profile of a humble man as meticulous about giving credit as he is about handling data. After the Nobel, he seemed to make a point of meeting and greeting students and colleagues and to stay involved in the chemistry department, of which he was the founding dean in 1965. That is, when he was not traveling.
Those close to Rowland believe that, after years of withering criticism from the $2-billion CFC industry before the ban was enacted, the Nobel--and “smoking gun” discoveries in the 1980s and 1990s of ozone holes over the Antarctic and parts of the Northern Hemisphere--brought him vindication.
“I think he feels more relaxed and good to have his work ratified by this world-class organization,” says Ralph Cicerone, dean of UCI’s School of Physical Sciences and a fellow atmospheric chemist of high regard. “This is not just a group of old men and women in Sweden. They rely on people around the world to give independent reports and assessments and criticism.”
Yet Rowland does not gloat. He worries.
The backlash against his research and the global warming issue nags at him, even if it sits at the scientific fringe. The vast majority of scientists accept that CFCs deplete the ozone and that the temperature of the planet has risen at least one degree Fahrenheit in the last century.
S. Fred Singer, a Virginia physicist who has not done direct research on ozone depletion, has emerged as one of Rowland’s more ardent critics. Singer’s work has been cited by the likes of radio personality Rush Limbaugh and a few lawmakers to denounce the prevailing view on ozone depletion.
Singer’s group, the Science and Environmental Policy Project, suggests other particles besides CFC could be responsible for ozone depletion, and at any rate the dangers of the phenomenon are overblown.
“The world could do without CFCs in the long run,” says Singer, who intends to present a paper challenging Rowland’s conclusions at a December meeting of the American Geophysical Union. “But I object to the fact we are phasing them out so suddenly and precipitously without scientific justification.”
Politicians in Western states such as Arizona and Nevada have cited Singer and the few others who challenge Rowland’s findings in trying to roll back the ban on CFCs; the substitutes used in retrofitting pre-1994 car air conditioners are more costly. But their efforts have failed, and federal law overrides them.
“State legislatures do like to spin wheels,” Rowland says, regarding such politicians and theorists as worthy of membership in the Flat Earth Society.
Unconvinced El Nino Is Related to Ozone Hole
Rowland could have retired comfortably to his beachfront home with its view of Santa Catalina Island. Except, looking out at Catalina, he sometimes sees a murky brown haze, a reminder of the scientific problems bedeviling man.
He firmly believes global warming is real but doubts the world will respond for years to come. Like many a Southern Californian, he is watching reports of El Nino--the periodic warming of the Pacific. But he is not yet convinced that global warming is playing a role.
“It could be a cyclical variation, or it could be the climate system adjusting to the fact that the temperature has gone up,” he says.
Mainly, he watches the atmosphere. Down the hall from his office, a graduate student is preparing boxes carrying 24 air canisters that will be loaded on a NASA DC-8 to collect samples from the air corridors over the North Atlantic.
Rowland’s research group will fly with several other participants in a study of the air quality in the atmosphere trafficked by commercial airliners.
Rowland has also studied the composition of Mexico City smog, releasing a study two months before the Nobel awarded in 1995 asserting that leaking liquefied petroleum fuel tanks, rather than cars, were the primary cause of the smog. Though officials initially disputed that, Mexico is working on improving the tanks.
If he slows in the coming years, it will result from a poor turn in health, not a lack of interest. Besides, he says, the leisure life does not suit him.
“I doubt I will take up finger-painting or nonstop gardening for the foreseeable future,” he said.
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Profile: F. Sherwood Rowland
Age: 70
Hometown: Delaware, Ohio
Education: Bachelor of arts, chemistry, physics, mathematics, Ohio Wesleyan University, 1948; master of science, chemistry, University of Chicago, 1951; doctorate, chemistry, University of Chicago, 1952
Background: Founding dean of UC Irvine’s chemistry department. In the early 1970s, along with MIT’s Mario Molina, who was then a UCI graduate student, discovered that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), a standard ingredient in aerosol sprays (until 1978) and car air conditioners (until 1994), were reacting with the sun’s ultraviolet rays and attacking the protective ozone layer in the stratosphere. Ten years ago, the world’s nations agreed to phase out the production of the compound (banned in the U.S. since Dec. 31, 1995) by the turn of the century.
Positions: UCI Donald Bren Research Professor of Chemistry and foreign secretary for National Academy of Sciences
Accomplishments: Won 53 awards and honorary doctorates, including Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1995; Japan Prize in Environmental Science and Technology, 1989; Albert Einstein Award of the World Cultural Council, 1994
Personal: Married to Joan Lundberg for 45 years. They have two grown children.
Quote: “As a scientist, starting out, one would like to have interesting problems to try to solve. It’s an added attraction that the problem turns out to have utility [and] that is in the near term.”
Sources: UC Irvine, F. Sherwood Rowland
