Snorkel Quotes (1 quote)
If Lovelock hadn’t detected those CFCs [in the atmosphere above Antarctica] we’d all be living under the ocean in snorkels and fins to escape that poisonous sun.
As quoted in Jeff Goodell, How to Cool the Planet: Geoengineering and the Audacious Quest to Fix Earth’s Climate (2010), 95. Goodell noted that Nobel Prize-winning scientists Rowland and Molina hypothesized that sunlight split apart CFC molecules, releasing reactive chlorine atoms, that would burn a hole in the protective ozone layer of the atmosphere, increasing danger from more ultraviolet light penetrating to the earth. When the ozone hole was experimentally verified over Antarctica, the potential destruction to the planet on a grand scale was realized, CFCs were banned, and ozone depletion was halted. Rowland and Molina shared a 1995 Nobel Prize. Although earlier, Lovelock had recognized “no conceivable hazard” from CFCs in the earth’s atmosphere, he was nevertheless the first to detect them in the atmosphere over Antarctica. For this critical evidence, Lovelock was at least mentioned in the Nobel Prize press release.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
