The Passing of F. Sherwood Rowland [Please excuse any delays in comment moderation. I'm on the run in Portugal supervising 13 students shooting a documentary on the forests that are the source of the cork sealing billions (not a typo) of wine bottles a year.] I was saddened to learn today of the passing on Sunday of F. Sherwood Rowland, a remarkable scientist, engaged citizen and professor best known for sharing the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work revealing the impact of synthetic chlorofluorocarbons on the atmosphere's protective ozone layer. Here's the seminal 1974 Nature paper on these consequential chemical reactions in Nature by Mario J. Molina and Rowland. Rowland, who was 84, died of complications from Parkinson's disease. The University of California, Irvine, has posted a news release and useful package of links that I hope you'll explore. This passage from the release is particularly relevant to discussions here of the role of scientists in pressing for policies to address risks revealed by their research: [He and Molina] decided they had to advocate for a ban on consumer products that were earning billions annually. Industry representatives fought back: At one point Aerosol Age, a trade journal, speculated that Rowland was a member of the Soviet Union's KGB, out to destroy capitalism. Even some fellow scientists grumbled that he was going overboard with a hypothesis. Here's a link to a book passage about Aerosol Age and Rowland. Rowland calmly stayed the course, working to convince everyone from Margaret Thatcher to Al Gore to reporters from hundreds of news outlets of what was at stake. Scientists doing similar research stuck by him, and consumers stopped using the sprays. The release also cites a comment Rowland made at a 1997 roundtable discussion of climate change at the White House: Is it enough for a scientist simply to publish a paper? Isn't it a responsibility of scientists, if you believe that you have found something that can affect the environment, isn't it your responsibility to actually do something about it, enough so that action actually takes place?... If not us, who? If not now, when? Here's a link to a summary of that meeting. The release also includes this reflection from Molina (you can review Molina's take on climate here): We really sort of stumbled onto a problem of global proportions. His impact and his legacy are extraordinary.... He was a superb scientist, and he worked with a very important problem affecting society. He was always persevered and kept his values, he always did it with honesty and with all the qualities a scientist should have. He's a wonderful example for good scientific behavior, unlike some today, and did not have any inclination to exaggerate or abuse the media. I was fortunate to have interviewed Rowland many times over the years, with our last exchange coming in 2008, when he participated in a World Science Festival panel on energy for which I served as moderator. He long recognized that reining in emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide would be much harder than acting to phase out ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons, for which substitutes had been developed and which had no substantial relationship to the economy. That knowledge gave him a pretty dire expectation of eventual concentrations of carbon dioxide. He will be missed. Here's a fascinating 1996 video interview of Rowland by the atmospheric scientist Richard Somerville of the University of California, San Diego: