WE ARE all lucky to be alive. If industry had used bromine instead of its
close relative chlorine in aerosols and refrigerants, we would have had
something far worse than an ozone hole. The entire upper atmosphere would have
lost its ozone by the mid-1970s, Nobel prizewinner Paul Crutzen told the
conference.
We may not be so lucky next time. Crutzen warns that the early signs of other
environmental catastrophes could be going unnoticed.
Crutzen of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, won a
Nobel prize in 1995 for his pioneering research into how chlorine burnt a…
