I ask: “what if: a bromofluorocarbon world?” “A what?” you might reply. It’s perhaps one of the most underrated of all alternate history what-ifs: it’s well known that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), while inert and non-toxic on the surface, destroy ozone when they waft up to the upper atmosphere, to the tune of having already created a substantial seasonal “hole” in the ozone layer over the poles (especially the south pole) by the time their effects were even detected. If their usage went on growing the way they were, the ozone “hole” would have expanded to be global by the year 2040.
By the year 2065, the ozone layer would have been on the brink of total collapse; ultraviolet indices would approach 30 on a clear summer’s day in the mid-latitudes, strong enough for someone in the average American city to be sunburned in just five minutes. For reference, 10 on the UV index is considered “extreme” today. So says a study NASA cites in this fascinating piece, “The World We Avoided by Protecting the Ozone Layer”.
This future was never particularly likely; oh, the ozone depletion by CFCs could easily have been worse, but manufacture of these chemicals generally ceased immediately once the effects became known to scientists (ozone depletion is serious business, because without the ozone layer the biosphere would swiftly collapse, from the plankton on up the food chain…).
CFCs are insidious because they break down the ozone slowly enough it took decades for scientists to notice, with the effects only being truly obvious over the Antarctic; this also minimizes the amount of damage they could realistically have done to our planet before their effects were detected. The flip side is that it also takes a long time for the ozone layer to return to normal; interestingly, the recovery of the ozone layer is proceeding faster than models have predicted, but it’s still thought it will be the 2040s at the earliest before the ozone layer fully recovers, six decades after the Montreal Protocol formally banned these emissions worldwide.
But there is a what-if here: for there is a similar family of chemicals whose effects are less insidious, more rapid, and perhaps far more dangerous: the bromofluorocarbons, or “BFCs”. CFCs are commonly known as the “freon” family, and are carbon-based compounds consisting of fluorine and chlorine. BFCs were marketed as “halon” and are similar in structure to the CFCs, only instead of chlorine they contain bromine. CFCs were widely used as refrigerants, aerosol propellants, gaseous fire suppressants, and solvents, and it turns out BFCs can be used for the same purposes.
Where it gets fancy is that BFCs are superior to CFCs in the realms of being non-toxic, non-flammable, stable, inert, and non-reactive…but the inventor and popularizer of CFCs, Thomas Midgley (the same engineer who invented leaded gasoline; yes, really), opted to recommend CFCs over BFCs because BFCs had a slightly higher boiling point (making them slightly less convenient as refrigerants). My impression is it was a close-run decision…and perhaps a decisive one, since BFCs are far more potent at destroying ozone than CFCs. Ozone depletion might not even be noticed by scientists before the effects become obvious to even casual observers.
What would that even look like? Take a timeline like the alternate history I write my science fiction stories in. The Great War was stopped in its tracks on Christmas 1914, world peace prevails, and the economy is booming with mass riches along with rapidly advancing technology. Air conditioning and refrigeration are adopted on a massive scale decades earlier than in real life, perhaps already by the 1920s. Certainly by the 1930s these technologies would be widespread, with a corresponding demand for convenient inert refrigerants…and BFCs fit the bill. So let’s say Midgley (or someone like Midgley, but for fun let’s go with Midgley himself still in this world) invents BFCs and “halon” becomes the substance of choice.
What would be the effects? With truly massive uptake of halon-based refrigeration and air conditioning, as well as their use as aerosol propellants and the like, emissions would go on a hockey-stick-shaped curve upward…and the depleting effects on ozone would be immediate and decisive. The possibility exists that within a decade or two you could see not only an “ozone hole” over the Antarctic but also very noticeable ozone depletion over the mid-latitudes as well, i.e. the places where most people live. Already by the 1930s photographers would start to notice far more haze starting to appear more rapidly (a known effect of ultraviolet radiation, to the point there’s an entire industry of UV-blocking filters to guard against it), and everyone would start to notice pigments and paints fading out to white much more rapidly than normal. Yes, “shifting baseline” syndrome would subtly normalize the effects, but this occurs over the course of just a few years, easily noticeable even without any direct scientific measurements of the ozone layer. The killer, of course, is that ultraviolet indices would start to climb…and sunburn would start to occur much more easily than was normally the case. Once clear summer days start to sunburn fair-skinned people in a matter of minutes people will start to notice something is wrong; as in, casual observers and laymen, not just scientists in the Antarctic.
Of course in this world the space age begins already by the 1930s, following a space craze that takes off as early as the 1920s, so mercifully scientific observation of the ozone layer should be common enough by the 1930s; by 1940 at the latest the rapid disappearance of the ozone layer would have long since been scientifically described, with no doubt a crash program being undertaken to discover the cause.
Perhaps even Thomas Midgley himself would be involved in the effort, turning his biography from a cautionary tale to something more like a heroic tragedy; this might be helped considerably if in this timeline he never invented leaded gasoline (he actually got lead poisoning from the effort to develop it in real life and had to spend some time recovering; of course nobody put two and two together and figured out that this stuff was probably not good to be wafting up in urban skies, but I digress) and never contracted polio. As it was he made it until 1944 at the age of 55, so in a world where he doesn’t succumb to polio he likely would have lived for considerably longer. Long enough to have witnessed the definitive proof that his creation, the BFCs, were destroying the ozone layer, and hence civilization as we knew it.
As soon as the link is demonstrated in the laboratory it’s likely manufacturers would terminate production as quickly as was practicable, much as was the case in the 1970s and 80s in real life, replacing them with refrigerants of a more advanced and environmentally friendly sort, such as liquid carbon dioxide or even liquid nitrogen; in this world energy is more abundant, so working with truly cryogenic fluids at the household level would be more technically and financially tractable than in real life even as early as the 1940s. N2 and CO2 are truly inert as far as the atmosphere is concerned, so that solves the whole problem right there, with CFCs being an academic niche curiosity to them much like a hypothetical BFC world is to us.
The ozone layer would recover swiftly due to the lower residence time of BFCs in the atmosphere; unlike in real life, where we’ll have to wait a century or so for the atmosphere to recover, noticeable improvements will take place within a decade after their production and use is banned, and full recovery would take just a few decades; with a ban in the 1940s full recovery by 1970 or so is very likely. But in the meantime, what would the world look like?
Well…the ozone layer may well be substantially, possibly even mostly gone by the 1940s, so there is a period of what one might call “the ozone crisis”, where direct exposure to sunlight will cause sunburn within minutes. Ultraviolet indices unheard of in our world would just be a fact of life.
It might sound niche, but an ozone crisis in the 1930s and 40s actually would explain a lot about how I’ve built out my world anyway. Consider what the responses would be: obviously sunscreen would be an essential item to be outside during the day, but one imagines exposed skin would be minimized, and hats would grow to be as wide-brimmed and UV-proof as possible. Ergo, we see an explosion in hats that would evoke the fashions of the Edwardian era, starting to proliferate in the 1930s and continuing into the 1940s and 50s, cementing these big frilly hats as an item which can come and go in modern fashion. Sunglasses and Arab-style desert robes might also be tempting to adopt as a practical and fashionable choice.
Another effect might be to simply move most human activity toward hours of the day when the sun is not shining. This would particularly be the case for children: sure, one could diligently apply sunblock, but how much easier would it be to just put the infants of the space age on a schedule where they’re outside and playing during the night instead of during the day? Then there’s no need to worry about whether they’ve put their sunscreen on or not. Naturally the consequences of this on school schedules and the like is very disruptive, which makes the school-centered way of life a much easier target to be overthrown by the New-Age hippie counterculture that takes over starting in the 1960s. Why did it all fall by the wayside so easily? Because it was already weakened in its authority by the ozone crisis, that’s why!
Workplaces too would find it more congenial to move office hours away from the times of day the sun is shining and toward the nighttime hours, most likely the hours around twilight, either before sunrise or after sunset (or some combination of the two). Like schools the effect is disruptive, and for all we know “twilight hours” could persist as a norm even long after it ceased to be necessary among the (rapidly shrinking) set of office workers into the 20th and 21st centuries.
This state of affairs would neatly explain why well into the 21st century in my stories we see children and youths roaming out and about deep into the night, even well past midnight, with nobody apparently thinking it unusual or undesirable. There’s nothing to overthrow the notion of “show up first thing in the morning to work to prove your worth!” better than getting severe radiation burns and skin cancer as a result of your “diligence”.
It’s worth noting also that a knock-on effect of children being out playing deep into the night would stimulate a lot more interest in lighting up urban spaces at night for visibility and safety, which is good as far as it goes but it also greatly accelerates the problem of light pollution…which would be felt all the more acutely since this is a world in the grip of a space craze, where the idea of children gazing at the stars in the night sky is of paramount importance (reinforced by the fact children are mostly active at night in this world). So especially after the New Age takeover in the 1960s but probably beginning even well before then you’ll see a backlash where cities start to transition to requiring dim downward-facing red illumination only where needed, instead of bright omnidirectional bluish-white lights everywhere that wash out the sky. The net effect? Cities start to become dark places indeed; by the 21st century the Milky Way is visible even in the middle of downtown Los Angeles, and rural areas across the country experience truly pristine dark skies akin to today’s more remote national parks. Adds some richer texture to my worldbuilding I describe in “Take Back the Night?”, doesn’t it?
Another knock-on effect is that the ozone crisis would be the first inkling that mankind can truly break the atmosphere in an apocalyptic way…and would perhaps provide a template for a technological solution. Geoengineering, in a word (hint: Thomas Midgley, as an engineer, is exactly the type who would be gung-ho for this sort of thing, and might personally be involved to atone for his grievous mistake).
In real life it has been suggested by scientists that the ozone layer’s recovery could be sped up by artificial means, specifically the mass release of methane or hydrogen in the appropriate altitudes of the atmosphere. The methane or hydrogen molecules would tend to bind to the CFCs (or BFCs in this world; the mechanism works for both families of chemicals), decomposing them and rendering them harmless to the ozone layer. The scale of gases required would be truly monumental, and so especially since it was deemed good enough to leave the ozone layer alone to recover gradually this solution was not pursued.
But in a world like this? Where pigments are fading out, cameras are hazing up, people are sunburning, and whole civilizations now fear the day? With far more excess capital being available to deploy? It’s believable that any and all measures that could conceivably speed up the ozone layer’s recovery would be embraced. Let’s hope they don’t embrace the mass release of methane, since it’s an extremely potent greenhouse gas, but in as much as the hydrogen in the methane is the active ingredient, it seems likely that hydrogen would be the molecule of choice anyway. So what would that even look like?
What it would look like is airborne vehicles, most likely balloons or specially-designed zeppelins, being lofted up with as much hydrogen as they can carry, and they effectively spray the atmosphere with as much of the substance as they can. In the beginning this would be by means of ordinary chemical propulsion, but nuclear reactors offer the possibility of supporting far larger-scale vehicles…and since vast vehicles is what would be required, nuclear zeppelins optimized to station at high altitudes (15 to 35 kilometers!) may well be one of the first applications of nuclear technology ever undertaken. Quite a change from our world.
And this is a world where tending to these vehicles might be among the more common of all jobs in the entire economy, given the scale of the effort required. Interestingly this would be taking place in the 1940s and 50s, concurrent with the space race to orbit, then the Moon, then Mars, which really lends a complementary dimension to the whole period.
This ozone crisis, by the way, also neatly explains why the middle of the 20th century is so closely associated with the sun-kissed bronze goddess look even a century later in my stories: it’s so distinctly mid 20th century not merely because of tanning coming into fashion (thank you, Coco Chanel) and then falling by the wayside much earlier than in real life (most likely with the New Age turn in the 1960s), but because of physiological reasons: the sun outside is about as strong a source of ultraviolet radiation as a tanning bed; if you want outside without protection, then with ozone being as depleted as it is in the 1940s, you’d only need a few minutes a day to become noticeably browner. Many might even prefer the then-fashionable bronze sun-kissed look over fighting every minute of sun exposure when going outside to maintain fair skin. The net effect is a population that looks almost uniformly and deeply tanned in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, if you looked back on photos from that period and judged them by the (in this timeline) 21st century standard of “fair and lovely”.
The effects on the biosphere are presumably not very pleasant, but in as much as ozone is only depleted at all for a few decades before reverting to normal the long-term effects might be relatively modest.
And as for geoengineering? The moral mankind takes away from the story might be to not allow the atmosphere to be tampered with. Especially if the mass hydrogen release program has a measurable and noticeable effect on washing out the BFCs faster than nature would, and if it’s deemed a success, then it would no doubt be cited as precedent when the greenhouse effects of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide (and other gases) become known. After all, if actively drawing down the BFCs as fast as possible saved the world, then why not draw down the excess greenhouse gases as fast as possible too? And so as we get deeper into the 21st century vast plants start to process the air, drawing down the carbon dioxide and the other greenhouse gases, by mid-century reaching a rapid clip. And…well…let’s just say that causes more disruptive and less salutary effects than the BFC drawdown did in my universe.
But it does help to establish the basis for why a civilization like the one I depict in my sci-fi universe would embrace such an audacious and large-scale geoengineering plan in the first place: because it worked once before, and besides, it’s mankind’s duty to set right what he did wrong in the atmosphere, lest the end result be global armageddon, just as it was during those days we bravely sent rocketships into the sky, even as we feared and dreaded the sunrise on terra firma…
And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!
— J.R.R. Tolkien, “The Fellowship of the Ring”
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