UH hosts ’95
Nobel winner

His CFC discovery could
save the planet

By Helen Altonn
Star-Bulletin

Sherwood Rowland might have been a professional baseball player. Fortunately, he stuck with chemistry.

He won the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with acclaim for "saving the planet."

Rowland and colleague Mario Molina discovered that chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, in aerosol compounds and refrigerants were destroying the stratospheric ozone layer.

He will discuss "The Changing Chemistry of the Atmosphere in the 21st Century" in a free public lecture at 7 p.m. tomorrow in the University of Hawaii's Kennedy Theatre.

It's the first in a Nobel Lecturemr6 Sherwood

Rowland

Series sponsored by the Colleges of Arts and Sciences as "a gift ... to students of all ages in our island state."

Always active in athletics, Rowland played with basketball teams around Chicago during graduate school and also played semiprofessional baseball in Canada in the summer.

"The older I get, the better I was," he said in a telephone interview from the University of California/Irvine. "As Ph.D scientists go, I was a very good basketball and baseball player, but that's a limited group."

Rowland joined the university when it opened in 1965 and was its first chemistry department chairman.

Retiring from that post in 1970, he began investigating problems associated with atmospheric chemistry. His research group is continuing work in that area.

He was criticized as an alarmist when he said CFC chemicals weren't safe -- until the ozone hole was discovered over Antarctica in 1984.

Rowland is concerned about three phenomena related to the increase in trace-gas concentrations because of human activities: stratospheric ozone depletion, an increase in tropospheric (lower atmosphere) ozone and global warming. Actions are being taken to halt CFC damage to stratospheric ozone -- the good ozone because it protects Earth from ultraviolet radiation, he said.

However, problems are spreading and intensifying with increases of tropospheric ozone -- the "bad ozone" that creates smog -- and the situation probably won't improve, he said.

Tropospheric ozone is caused by automobiles and the burning of agricultural wastes and forests in the southern hemisphere, Rowland said. They give off nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons, which form ozone with sunlight.

"Los Angeles has done a reasonably good job in adopting controls so the amount of pollution put out by individual automobiles is greatly reduced, but the number of automobiles has almost canceled that out," he said.

With a motorized world, he said, "What was an urban problem confined to Los Angeles and a few other cities spreads to being a regional problem, then spreads to be a zonal problem, in the sense that winds carry it around." Something released in the air in Los Angeles today could be measured in Honolulu in possibly three weeks, he said.

Global warming, the third big environmental worry, is related to burning of fossil fuels -- coal, oil and gas -- and affects climate, Rowland noted.

Stratospheric ozone depletion resulted in the surprising discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole, he pointed out. The question now is whether global warming will trigger surprises in climate, he said.

One change could be for the El Niño phenomenon to become permanent instead of cyclical, he suggested. Another could be a shutdown in the warm Gulf Stream current from Florida toward England, he said.