Today, Professor Frank Sherwood Rowland visited my university and gave a lecture on global warming and climate change. In the picture above, he's sitting in the middle on the stage and he's flanked by two university officials.
Professor Rowland was one of the key people who discovered the detrimental effect of CFC emissions on the ozone layer, which led to the Montreal Protocol which was aimed at reducing CFC pollution in the upper atmosphere. The Montreal Protocol was hugely successful, and Prof Rowland is quite happy with this.
He talked about the rising level of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere which is causing a gradual increase in global temperature over time. We got to see the data he collected over the years, and how he started off in this direction from the data collected by James Lovelock. For me, it brought back memories of playing SimEarth way back in the day, when games had very nice manuals with actual scientific facts inside them.
Time will tell if we will be successful at reducing the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Meanwhile, temperatures continue to slowly rise, despite what the oil companies tell you.
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