Flooding after Cyclone Gabrielle. Photo / Paul Taylor
Flooding after Cyclone Gabrielle. Photo / Paul Taylor
Opinion by Jarrod Gilbert
Thomas Midgley Jr was a bespectacled inventor who solved two significant problems and in doing so imperilled the world.
As this year’s extreme weather events bring climate change discussions to the fore, the remarkable tale of Midgley offers us warning and hope.
Midgley was an engineer by trade, and heset his considerable brain to solving problems in the early 1900s.
The first was the “knocking” that occurred within internal combustion engines. Seeking to increase the efficiency of such engines and reduce wear and tear, he invented a lead additive to petrol that brilliantly did the trick. Midgley and investors made a fortune, but lead levels in the atmosphere — directly caused by exhaust emissions — went through the roof. The acute lead poisoning that Midgley had witnessed among his workers in the factories making his product began to impact the health of people around the world, as well as the environment.
Midgley wasn’t done there, though, as he had turned his attention to another tricky problem — the dangerous gases being used in refrigerators. He invented a new gas that worked just as well in keeping refrigerators cold but was less immediately toxic. That gas was chlorofluorocarbon, best known as CFCs.
Not only did CFCs work well in fridges, they were also an excellent propellant for aerosols. But when used this way, and in much larger quantities, they also proved incredibly efficient at eating away ozone.
A layer of ozone encircles the earth, but it’s impossibly thin. If all of the ozone was evened out it would be a layer just two or three millimetres thick. That thin layer protects us from ultraviolet radiation.
American chemist Thomas Midgley Jr. Photo / Getty Images
By the 1970s, it was clear the damage being done to the ozone layer was real and immediate. And with that, and his contributions to lead in the air, Midgley was described by one environmental historian as having “had a more adverse impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth’s history”. Quite the legacy.
The science that discovered the dangers of the levels of lead in the atmosphere was not immediately celebrated. It was scorned. The company producing the petrol additive created a campaign of disinformation to attack it. Midgley himself publicly demonstrated that the product was safe by covering his hands in it and holding it under his nose in front of journalists, but money and not safety was his motivation. Apart from the publicity stunt, he had long given up being exposed to the product after suffering terrible health effects.
The key scientist agitating against lead after discovering its growing prevalence in the atmosphere was himself attacked, and funding for his experiments was removed.
By the mid-1980s, though, the weight of science was sufficient that lead was phased out of petrol, and levels of lead in the air were reduced dramatically.
While an all-too-belated response, there was a similarly good outcome around CFCs, and this perhaps gives us some hope around the current climate change crisis.
The science around the problems of depleting ozone in the atmosphere was discovered in the early 1970s. And for many years, talk of the ozone hole (which was never really a hole, but depletion in particular areas) was a leading issue, spanning scientists, politicians and watercoolers. It is discussed far less now, not because the issue was inflated then, but because the world did something about it with tremendous results.
Despite the CFC industry decrying any moves to ban the gasses as premature and the science as unclear, in 1987 the Montreal Protocol was signed, which banned CFCs and other ozone-depleting chemicals. It was a remarkable world agreement that listened to the science and acted. The ban came into effect in 1989 and the impact has been remarkable.
Ozone levels stabilised during the 1990s, and the hole has overall been contracting since the 2000s. Despite some illegal uses of the gases in certain counties, levels are expected to fully recover to pre-1980s levels — although it will take many years.
Midgley died in a very Midgely way, with a great idea gone terribly wrong. After contracting polio, he constructed a machine of pullies and ropes to assist movement in his disabled limbs. One night he became entangled in the elaborate contraption and was strangled to death.
Midgley’s story showed us the perils of human impacts on the environment and that economic interests will always attempt to usurp scientific understandings, but also that change is possible.
As the floods and tornados begin to wash and blow away the few remaining doubters of the realities of climate change, the questions turn away from whether we need to do something, to what are we going to do. Vested interests here and around the world are attempting to slow the required changes, but they will not be the people who are entangled in the ropes and pullies they are constructing: it will be future generations.
· Dr Jarrod Gilbert is the Director of Independent Research Solutions and a sociologist at the University of Canterbury.
