One of the very rewarding aspects of my work has been the interaction with a superb group of colleagues and friends in the atmospheric sciences community.
Many Latino kids should become scientists because we need scientists all over the world from all different backgrounds. We have many tough problems, and we need everybody's help to solve the problems.
When I was in elementary school, I was very interested in science already. I must have been ten or eleven years old. I started experiments with chemistry sets at my home in Mexico. I was able to borrow a bathroom and convert it to a laboratory. My parents supported it. They were pleased. My friends just tolerated it.
Climate change and ozone depletion are two global issues that are different but have many connections. In the ozone depletion case, we managed to work with decision makers effectively so that an international agreement called the Montreal Protocol was achieved that essentially solved the ozone depletion problem.
Laboratory experiments, field observations and atmospheric modeling calculations have now established that chemical reactions occurring on PSC particles play a central role in polar ozone depletion.
One action society needs to take is to use energy much more efficiently. Instead of incandescent light bulbs, you could switch to LEDs that consume a lot less electricity, for example.
The scientists I looked up to at the beginning were not Latino. They were famous scientists of many years ago, like Madame Curie. Later, I realized that there were also, but a very few, Latino scientists. There were good ones, but very few, because there wasn't as much a tradition to be a scientist in our culture. But this is changing.
The first education to be a good chemist is to do well in high school science courses. Then, you go to college to really become a chemist. You want to take science and math. Those are the main things.
The basic science is very well established; it is well understood that global warming is due to greenhouse gases. What is uncertain is projections about specifics in the next few decades, by how much will the climate change.
Much remains to be learned about stratospheric chemistry - and, in more general terms, about the physics and chemistry of the global atmosphere.
In 1960, I enrolled in the chemical engineering program at UNAM, as this was then the closest way to become a physical chemist, taking math-oriented courses not available to chemistry majors.
Keeping with our family tradition of sending their children abroad for a couple of years, and aware of my interest in chemistry, I was sent to a boarding school in Switzerland when I was 11 years old, on the assumption that German was an important language for a prospective chemist to learn.
Beginning in 1986, a series of field experiments were designed to test the various hypotheses which had been put forth to explain the Antarctic ozone hole.
I attended elementary school and high school in Mexico City. I was already fascinated by science before entering high school; I still remember my excitement when I first glanced at paramecia and amoebae through a rather primitive toy microscope.
In contrast to the troposphere, the stratosphere is extremely dry and practically cloudless - the concentration of water vapor is measured in parts per million and is, in fact, comparable to that of ozone.
