On a cold January afternoon, with slush and ice still cemented to the ground, Sherwood Rowland, Nobel laureate and honorary Duke alumnus, spoke about the dangers of global warming in a lecture titled "The Changing Atmosphere in 2004."
Rowland warned that the worldwide temperature has risen one degree Fahrenheit in the last century, with one-half of a degree in the last two decades alone. The temperature record worldwide has been broken every year.
"Only in recent times, within the last 30 years, have we had the precision of measurement where we can find compounds of interest [related to the green house effect]," Rowland said.
For instance, the presence of trichlorofluoromethane--a chloroflourocarbon, or CFC--has increased in the atmosphere from untraceable levels in 1960 to a major threat today, Rowland said.
The CFC gases are created by human production, such as cattle raising and rice cultivation. When the gases reach the stratosphere, the chloride reacts with the ozone to produce devastating effects: More infrared light is trapped in the earth's atmosphere, raising global temperatures.
Unlike other CFCs, trichlorofluoromethane is not filtered through light, rain and other chemical reactions, and remains in the atmosphere for decades. The gas molecules continue to destroy the atmosphere during this time.
"It has been proven that regulations can work to lower the presence of CFCs, but not all countries can do it, and the United States doesn't seem to want to be a part of any of it," Rowland said. "If any part of the climate changes, it is a change away from what we have in the present circumstances. We are unable to predict where things will get warmer. A change in climate might be advantageous to some, but on the whole it will not be good."
Hosted by the Phi Lambda Upsilon society, the lecture filled the Fritz London Lecture Hall, where it was originally scheduled to be held, and was moved to a much larger room.
"He was very gracious to accept to come here, and we were really excited in having him here," said Laurel Goj, a graduate student in chemistry and head of the Phi Lambda Upsilon society.
Rowland, the first and current chair of chemistry at the University of California-Irvine, has received numerous awards for his work on CFCs and atmospheric chemistry. He won the American Chemical Society award, the Roger Revelle Medal in 1994 and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995.
Junior Margaret Wat said she was excited to be meeting one of her heroes, on whom she wrote a chapter in "Portraits of Great American Scientists," a book project led by 1988 physics Nobel laureate Leon Lederman. "It's nice to actually meet someone in person who I wrote about. I think that his story is really science at its best," Wat said. "It was a good presentation."
However, some were left unsatisfied by the lecture, noting that they had hoped to hear original information rather than a recap of current knowledge.
"I was disappointed that the lecture was only a review [of global warming and CFCs] and that no new information was presented," said Duke alumna Nancy McLaughlin. "He was here 10 years ago and presented the same information."
James Bonk, director of undergraduate studies in the chemistry department, felt that even though the material may not have been fresh, it was still a good lecture. "He did a nice job of balancing the information between people that knew very little [of the subject] and people that knew a lot," Bonk said.
Rowland, when asked how worried people should be about global warming in their everyday lives, responded with a comforting answer. "Is anything drastic going to happen in 2005? Probably not," he said. "But global warming is very much a reality."
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