Most of us spend our days impervious to the ozone layer, the hole in it and the gasses gnawing it thinner.
It’s a topic that’s easy to brush off given its invisibility, complexity and apocalyptic implications. Who’s thinking about stratospheric spoliation when there’s the economy, H1N1 and the Gosselins to worry about?
Dr. A.R. Ravishankara.
Ravi, as he’s known, is a researcher and director at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder. He’s a superstar in atmospheric chemistry. We pay him to have deep thoughts about the ozone.
Last week, he shook the science world with the unsettling news that we’ve been kidding ourselves about what’s damaging the planet’s protective layer. According to a study he published with colleagues in the journal Science, the emission of nitrous oxide is becoming the leading manmade threat to the layer that shields us from the sun’s deadly ultraviolet rays.
We’re not talking laughing gas from dental offices (nor the antique tank from which I spent far too much of 11th grade inhaling with the son of a dentist).
We’re talking 10 million tons of emissions a year, largely from manmade fertilizers, that are eating through the stratospheric layer.
Ravi’s team was the first to calculate the gas’ role in ozone depletion. They found it’s more of a threat than chlorofluorocarbons, CFCs, which were used in making refrigerants and phased out after the U.N.’s landmark Montreal Protocol in 1987. Ironically, the study suggests, nitrogen becomes more potent in destroying the ozone as CFC levels decrease. In other words, even though the layer’s on the mend thanks to the Montreal treaty, N2O emissions are reversing those gains.
The minute news leaked of Ravi’s report, hundreds of international journalists clamored to know what he plans to do about emissions.
“Me?” he answered. “Nothing.”
Nitrous oxide is among the greenhouse gases covered by the Kyoto Protocol on climate change but isn’t regulated by the Montreal Protocol, which has been adopted worldwide to help fix the ozone.
Now that it seems agriculture is destroying the layer even more than hair spray, air conditioners or industrial smokestacks, the question of how to cut emissions must contemplate over-fertilization, overpopulation, world economics and hunger.
Ravi is happy to gas on about the various chemical properties of nitrogen and oxygen. But global policy matters, he’s quick to note, are beyond his pay grade.
“I don’t get up in the morning and say, ‘God, I’m gonna save the Earth,’ though sometimes I do think about how sudden chemical reactions occur,” he says.
“We have six and a half billion people on this planet. You have to ask yourself what’s more important — fixing the ozone layer or feeding the people. I don’t pretend that because I’m a scientist I know what the answer should be,” adds the 59-year-old Boulderite whose dad was a farmer and whose brother worked to engineer fertilizers.
Ravi would much prefer that I write about his research than about him personally or, as legend has it, the $4 he had in his pocket when he emigrated from India as a grad student.
He knows there will be deniers of his results, “just like people used to think the Earth was flat.” Despite his confidence, it’s healthy to be skeptical about scientific findings.
What’s striking, despite his own depressing discovery, is Ravi’s optimism about the planet and faith in its inhabitants.
“Think about Montreal,” he says of the 22-year-old treaty that successfully reduced CFCs. “Humans actually did something about a layer in the ozone. They rose up and took action about something they can’t even see.
“That amazes me about the Earth’s resilience and our own ability to correct our mistakes, even if we realize we now have a new mistake to correct.”
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
