How a Planetary (Woman) Hero Helped Save Us All

Aug. 22, 2006 — -- Susan Solomon had an idea -- a really good one.

Because she was right, uncountable millions of young people around the world at risk for deadly skin cancer probably won't get it.

Uncountable bizarre mutations also won't appear among plants and animals in the world's wilderness and gardens.

Twenty years ago this week, Solomon, an atmospheric scientist, stepped onto the Antarctic snow, leading a team of scientists bent on checking out her idea about how to prove that human activity -- the manufacture and use of chlorine-based gases (CFCs or chlorofluorocarbons) -- was creating the frightening enormous holes that had appeared above the north and south poles in the ozone layer of Earth's upper atmosphere.

It seemed an outlandish idea at the time -- that mankind had become so dominant in the life of Earth that we could actually alter the atmosphere of the entire globe.

What child wants to think it has the power to hurt a nurturing parent?

It was real, though, and a close call.

Over the last couple of years, in the course of talking to climate scientists about the completely different problem of global warming, I have often enough seen them shake their heads in wonder and remark how lucky we all were that the ozone depletion and its causes were discovered in the nick of time.

They say the devastation to life on Earth -- if ozone depletion had gone unchecked -- would be hard to imagine.

Life had not evolved to live with a constant bath of the intense ultraviolet rays from the sun that the ozone layer blocked.

Overdose on UV and you're far more likely to get skin cancers.

Too much UV leaves wild plants and animals far more likely to suffer genetic mutation.

There is, however, a painful irony in what followed.

While the discoveries of Solomon and her team led to a true solution -- the world's nations banded together in the "Montreal Protocol" of 1989 to stop sending CFCs into the atmosphere -- that cure is now slowed by man-made global warming and even making that warming worse.