ONCE , IT ACTUALLY worked. About 30 years ago, science pointed its solvent-stained finger at something that humans were doing wrong, something that would kill us if we kept it up. And the politicians listened and said: Whoa -- let's stop doing \o7that\f7.
It's 1973. A pair of UC Irvine scientists discover that the chemicals putting the spritz into deodorant and hairspray and the chill into air conditioning are chewing away the pancake-thin ozone layer that protects the planet from radiation. A year later they publish their findings. A year after that, Oregon bans the stuff, then the rest of the nation and Canada follow suit.
Bada boom, bada bing. Chlorofluorocarbons, RIP.
The slowest group to act turned out to be the Nobel Prize committee, which took 20 years to summon F. Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina (and another ozone scientist, Paul Crutzen) to Stockholm for the 1995 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Their work, the committee noted, may have "saved the world from catastrophe."
It's 2006. Rowland is still a research professor at UC Irvine, working out of a building that now bears his name. And science is regarded in some quarters not as a white-coat, white-hat savior but as just another whining special interest to be appeased or squelched. On a few blogs and blowhard broadcasts, science gets slagged as "opinion." We've strayed disastrously from the Pat Moynihan reality rule: "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts."
The young Rowland studied at the University of Chicago under the man who discovered carbon-14 dating, another scientific technique now getting hammered. For Rowland, a tall, lanky fellow who has an inch on Abe Lincoln, being the messenger of man-made apocalypse in the 1970s only meant an attack from a trade mag called Aerosol Age and, puzzlingly, getting picketed in Stockholm by Lyndon Larouchies. "I wouldn't say that ... there wasn't organized opposition, but it was more from industries than political parties," Rowland said.
Today, there's the example of NASA's James Hansen, another veteran atmospheric scientist, who was warned of "dire consequences" if he kept talking about the dire consequences of global warming. A 24-year-old college dropout with a PR job at NASA tried to keep reporters away from Hansen and changed the science content on the NASA website. The flunky finally quit -- not because he censored scientists but for the lame reason of lying on his resume. When politics trumps science like that, "you know something's out of hand," Rowland said.
