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.About sixty years passed between Midgley s initial discovery andthat global ban about the same time lapse that followed Midgley sleaded-gas discovery and its ban.During those sixty years, Rowland esti-mates, the unrestrained use of CFCs depleted the ozone layer by 10 per-cent worldwide.Another 5 percent loss is likely, he says, as the remainingCFCs reach the upper atmosphere.Eventually, if the world stops sendingthose molecular grenades aloft, the holes in the ozone layer may begin toclose.A recent study by New Zealand researchers found that the ozonehole over Antarctica shrank 20 percent between 2003 and 2004, from 11million to 9 million square miles.While encouraging, the researchers alsowarned not to read too much into the fluctuation, which could have been OOPS 36caused by natural climate variations.With luck and continued vigilance,the planet s self-inflicted wound may be healed a century from now.Butthings may get worse before they get better. In the first 25 years of the ultraviolet century [1970 2070], per-haps 1 to 2 million excess cases of skin cancer derived from stratosphericozone loss, wrote McNeill in Something New Under the Sun: An Environ-mental History of the 20th Century. That translated into about 10,000 to20,000 early deaths, mainly among fair-skinned people in sunny landssuch as Australia.No one knows the full effect of excess UV radiationon immune response, so the real impacts of CFCs erosion of the ozonelayer on human health (let alone the rest of the biosphere) remain entirelyunclear.But stratospheric ozone depletion another combination of badluck and Midgley s ingenuity will surely kill many thousands more be-fore the close of the ultraviolet century. Midgley s own death came at age fifty-five, after a long, difficultstruggle with polio.His inventiveness was apparent even during that ordealwhen he devised a complex pulley-and-harness lifting mechanism to helphimself get into and out of bed without assistance.Sadly, Midgley s wifefound her husband s lifeless body tangled in that device on November 2,1944. The newspapers reported Midgley s demise as a freakish accident,but the friends and family who had witnessed his recent suffering knew bet-ter, wrote Cagin and Dray in Between Earth and Sky. Columbus cemeteryrecords list Suicide by strangulation as the official cause of death. At Midgley s funeral service, the minister noted that we all enterand leave this world with nothing.Kettering later told a colleague thathe d wanted to interrupt the minister to say, In Midge s case, it wouldhave been so appropriate to have added, But we can leave a lot behind forthe good of the world. Indeed, the Detroit section of the AmericanChemical Society has, since 1965, bestowed the Thomas Midgley Awardto honor outstanding research contributions in the field of chemistry re-lated to the automotive industry. But Midgley s most enduring legacymay be a better understanding that the planet s ecosystem is far more BEWARE SOLUTIONS THAT CREATE NEW PROBLEMS 37fragile than we ever imagined, and an acute awareness that solving today sproblems can sometimes have unintended, and profound, consequencesfor tomorrow.TOM MIDGLEY S OTHER LANDMARKINVENTIONWithout Thomas Midgley, one could argue, global environmentalawareness might not exist.By creating toxic leaded gasoline and ozone-eating chlorofluorocar-bons in the 1920s man-made substances that threatened the existence ofevery living creature on Earth Midgley inadvertently created public-health crises so formidable that people began to understand just how drasti-cally human behavior can affect what once seemed like a limitlessecosystem.RSTESAIR DOselPE FCIHoEenRed OzodaeLstenriotnedervsginIndlemebnoiprotngentiin-lexllperewp1yllacsfinotitienulteso2 scidgduetch bsighr-at-rseoneetshe rt2poarfoopercneye codtigrvaeLey tasrojongIfs enell.-feow,e chlseilthbneitads wremaoegrrfynievxor 6mMioed f, rnanstgit seeg b.Lnilbsksi.rmdluaaretie den ghthyr.Wutsd bnprofi, aettutibsur sef OOPS 38When the widespread damage done by Midgley s chlorofluorocar-bons became undeniable in the 1970s, thanks to the work of University ofCalifornia, Irvine, chemist F.Sherwood Rowland and others, the ideathat a little hair spray and a little deodorant in the morning could affectour children s children changed everything, said Don Blake, a Rowlandresearch partner at UCI. When it comes to the atmosphere, there are nolonger any [geographical] or political boundaries
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