RWE @39

I’m the guy who started the whole ozone depletion link to Freon business.

There are over 6,000,000,000 people on the planet, but I’m the only one who started the ball rolling. Perhaps you’ll indulge a truncated story, as the whole affair is too much for a blog post — it’d be a book.

You see I had a chemistry professor at UCI who wanted a Nobel Prize in the worst way — it was a running gag in the department. ( BTW there were only 79 Chemistry majors at the time. )

I majored in Chemistry because of some genetic quirk, it seems such an interest runs in the family genes. On a lark, I took the Chemistry Achievement test — didn’t need it to get into college — and got the top mark. Notably taking only 40 minutes for a nominally 4 hour test.

So you can understand why my Freshman Professor noted me. ( The top mark was a buzz topic for all of the grad students. Apparently three deviations above is note worthy.)

Hence my Professor allowed me to participate in his upper division course on Reaction Kinetics. ( I still have the textbook — Chemical Kinetics by Laidler 2nd ed. 1965. Since this class was filled primarily with his grad student clan to even be seated was pretty heady stuff. Unlike his well structured Freshmen lectures, this course was an almost entirely unstructured Socratic debate club that would have made Aristotle proud.

My dear Professor was an exponent of mining his acolytes for research ideas: everyone had to work up a paper proposing a line of inquiry for fresh and novel research. It was obvious that the best ideas would become fodder for his NSF grant harvesting mill.

And so I went straight to what I had long thought to be the unexplored frontier of fluorine chemistry. I was right, of course. Chemical Abstracts showed that the ONLY chemists performing any research were industry sponsored. Further the number of papers published was remarkably low: obviously most work was kept proprietary.

And so my paper pitched studying the reaction kinetics of fluorine compounds, generally. Since the only notable compounds in production were the Freons and in amounts very much greater than my dear Professor ever imagined, his interest was piqued.

He had already trolled the heavy metals for environmental impact. ( the EPA had just been founded and the NSF was kicking out grants right and left for such research — thank you Nixon ) So this line of inquiry was right up his alley, indeed he could say it was just an extension of his prior campaign. ( This, in fact, is exactly what he has done. )

Now I’m going to skip through a lot of painful personal details to get to the close: I made my sales pitch to him after having come to the conclusion that I’d have to drop out. The economics were not there, my parents effectively sabotaged my education — it’s a long and astounding tale.

My final close to him was:”If you research fluorine compounds you’ll get a Nobe… well, you’ll be world famous.” ( Didn’t want to queer the sale by pitching too high.)

The actual chemistry required to figure out the nature of chlorine promotion up to high altitudes came with speed and ease. It fell right into his lap, via Mario Molina, of whom Professor Rowland gave the project.

So now you have it blert to Rowland to Molina to result. Subsequently chemist Margaret Thatcher PM arm twisted, one by one, the assembled members of the Commonwealth into understanding Molina’s results. This was the beginning of the end for Freon. al-Gore came very much latter and now stands as the cock at sunrise proud of his ‘accomplishment.’

That this chain has morphed into AGW is a marvel for me to behold.

All of the above is true. But I will not be surprised to have a slew of comment from those with no direct knowledge of the events described.

It was just Professor Rowland and me in that classroom, all others had left. BTW, he requested that he might keep the term paper and I obliged. Instructors keeping my work had only happened a few times before, and I took it as an honor.

Nobel does not grant prizes on the basis of who started everything rolling. I admire my old Professor, even if he’s stretched the truth quite a bit about how he was ‘inspired’ into looking at the Freons as a ‘continuation’ of his original studies. So it’s not as if I’m interested in stinking up his award with blemish. He thinks so much like myself, I sometimes regarded him as a reverse clone: someone who’s wired the same as myself but is old enough to be my father.

So, yeah, I’m the butterfly that changed the flow of Freon and enviro-politics. In absolutely no way did I imagine it would take this course. And of course, I think AGW is pure bunkum.

In other words, I’m a typical Belmont Club poster.

As to your assertion: there was absolutely no linkage to patent expirations. The link if any, is to the birth of the EPA and NSF funding — and me.