Lu Qingbin first became a “minority” in 1999.
That year, he was 34 years old and performing postdoctoral research at Rutgers University in New Jersey, known as the “Public Ivy.” He published a paper each in top physics journal Physical Review Letters (PRL) and chemical physics journal Journal of Chemical Physics (JCP). However, these two papers brought him far more skepticism than acclaim—if that’s what you could call it.
Initially, research colleagues in the US, France, and Germany were unable to reproduce his results. After he left New Jersey in early 2000, his supervisor hired two Russian postdocs to repeat the work, and they obtained the same experimental results, which were published in JCP in 2004. But this still failed to quell the controversy: Why was it that only your lab could manage to do it?
The pressure from his peers cast a pall over his lab. The most disheartening incident occurred in 2006, when his supervisor worked with a renowned team from Johns Hopkins University to publish another paper in JCP that refuted Lu Qingbin’s findings.
What no one realized at the time was that Rutgers University had a piece of equipment that was one of a kind in the world, and as a result, observed a phenomenon that others couldn’t see.
Qingbin Lu
A Lesson with Mixed Feelings
Even so, when revisiting this experience, Qingbin Lu still feels incredibly fortunate: "I was at the right place at the right time doing the right experiment."
This experiment changed the entire course of his academic career, giving rise to his current three main research interests. It also made him savor the experience of being a "minority" time and again in his later life.
His discovery was this: when there are polar molecules like water molecules or ammonia molecules, the dissociative electron transfer (DET) reaction of Freon is enhanced by 30,000 times.
In a solid phase surface environment, for every 1 million chloride ions produced, only about one can be detected, so this experiment placed very high demands on the sensitivity of the equipment.
During that era, there were only two instruments in the whole world that could achieve this level of sensitivity: one was in the laboratory of Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, Professor John Polanyi at the University of Toronto in Canada, but that instrument had already been dismantled in the late 1990s; the other was the one that Lu Qingbin used to conduct his experiment.
Because it involved Freon, the notorious ozone layer depleter, Lu Qingbin's paper attracted a lot of attention from his colleagues after it was published, which also gave rise to the series of academic disputes mentioned at the beginning of the article.
It wasn't until 2006 that South Korean scientists used a different experimental method to demonstrate that they had observed the same phenomenon, and in 2009, physicist Martin Wolf, who had studied under Nobel Laureate in Chemistry Gerhard Ertl, led a team to conduct a series of experiments that once again confirmed that this phenomenon was real, and that the DET reaction levels of Freon were indeed very high, before the debate gradually subsided.
By this time, 10 years had passed since Lu Qingbin had conducted that astonishing experiment.
This experience taught Lu Qingbin a lesson: even at an established prestigious university like Rutgers University, in the laboratory of a renowned scientist, using the most advanced equipment of the time, and publishing in the most influential journal in the field, it could still take 10 years or even longer to gain recognition from others.
In the years that followed, he would often reflect on the lessons learned from this experience.
Challenging the Mainstream, Time and Again
During those 10 years, Lu Qingbin did not stop. Based on the discovery of the DET reaction, he proposed the cosmic ray electron-induced reaction (CRE) mechanism to explain the depletion of the ozone layer.
Cosmic-ray-driven electron-induced reaction (CRE) mechanism causes ozone depletion.
The traditional theory posits that after freon is released into the atmosphere, it will decompose to produce chlorine atoms under ultraviolet radiation, which will in turn react with ozone molecules and cause them to decompose into regular oxygen molecules. Three chemists won the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this theory.
However, Lu Qingbin's CRE theory believes that the key factor in decomposing freon is not ultraviolet radiation, but cosmic rays. Since cosmic rays are affected by the Earth's magnetic field and solar activity, and have an 11-year cycle, he predicts that the size of the ozone hole above the South Pole will also exhibit an 11-year cyclical change.
In August 2001, Lu Qingbin published an article in the journal PRL that he considered very significant: "Influence of Cosmic Rays on the Dissociation of Chlorofluorocarbons and Ozone Depletion in the Atmosphere." The editor of the journal selected it as the only highlight article for that issue. The American Physical Society published a focus article titled "Ozone Depletion Fueled by Cosmic Rays", which was later reprinted in the famous popular science magazine Scientific American.
However, the praise of reviewers and editors was not enough to give Lu Qingbin's academic career a green light. On the contrary, because he had put forward an academic viewpoint that challenged the mainstream, he wandered ever further down the path of the 'minority'.
In early 2004, Lu Qingbin joined the University of Waterloo in Canada, and three years later, he was exceptionally granted tenure. His research on freon and the ozone hole was too unorthodox to enable him to obtain research funds, and so he applied for project support through his work on femtosecond biology and femtosecond medicine. From atmospheric physics to medicine, although the disciplines may sound very different, the basic principles still revolved around the molecular dissociation electron transfer reaction that he was good at.
From 2004 to 2008, Lu Qingbin published a series of articles about the DET reaction and the CRE theory. In 2009, Physics Reports invited him to write an article summarizing the field.
In the process of writing this article, an even more 'heretical' scientific hypothesis emerged from his 'intuition': what if the culprit causing global warming was not carbon dioxide, but freon?
At that time, there was much more scientific debate in the field of climate change than there is today. Scientists were far from reaching a consensus about whether global temperatures were actually rising, whether the warming was caused by natural phenomena or human activity, and if so, what substances were causing the climate change.
Carbon dioxide was always the 'suspect' that received the most attention. The most mainstream climate model recognized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was the Global Circulation Model (GCMs) based on the carbon dioxide theory. However, there has been constant controversy in academia about whether or not the GCMs model is already outdated.
One of the main problems with the GCMs model is that its equations contain a large number of adjustable parameters and some uncertain terms.
In physical research, parameters are like a double-edged sword. Introducing the right parameters can help scientists answer some questions that have been difficult to solve in the past. However, using a large number of parameters, especially adjustable parameters, means that people can manipulate these parameters to make their own theories and models 'fit' the observations as much as possible.
The genius scientist Von Neumann once joked about parameters. If he could use four parameters, he could create a model of an elephant. If he used five parameters, he could make the elephant's trunk wiggle.
In 1953, in a century-defining meeting between the two physics masters Enrico Fermi and Freeman Dyson, Fermi quoted this passage to criticize Dyson's theoretical work. These conversations later became classics in terms of the methodology of physics research.
In Lu Qingbin's view, too many parameters gave scientists room to 'cheat'.
He did some analysis of the data from 1850 to 1970 and concluded that before freon was released in large quantities, the correlation coefficient between the average global surface temperature and the carbon dioxide concentration was almost zero. However, from 1970 to 2012, the correlation coefficient between the average global surface temperature and the total amount of halocarbon greenhouse gases, represented by freon, was as high as 96%–97%. This was an almost perfect linear correlation.
In 2015, Lu Qingbin published a monograph, A New Theory and Prediction on Ozone Depletion and Climate Change, which formally proposed a new theory that freon causes global warming. What he was proud of was that this was a model that could carry out 'zero-parameter calculations'.
My '1905'
In October 2021, the much-anticipated Nobel Prize in Physics was announced.
Two climate scientists—Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann—shared half of the prize for their work on "the physical modeling of Earth's climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming." Their research on climate change was based on the GCMs model.
After hearing this news, Lu Qingbin couldn't sit still. "I had long expected that the Nobel Prize would be awarded for research related to global climate change. However, I had originally hoped that this Nobel Prize would help the public acknowledge my work. I didn't expect it to make even more people believe that carbon dioxide was the culprit."
Lu Qingbin has not published any papers in this field for six years since that monograph came out in 2015. Now he feels that he can't be so 'Buddhist' anymore.
He first carefully read the Popular Science Background document published by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences at the same time, especially the concluding paragraph: "Is the Earth warming? Yes. Is the warming caused by increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere? Yes. Is it possible that the changes are due only to natural causes? No. Are emissions from human activities the cause of increased temperatures? Yes." As Lu Qingbin saw it, whether intentionally or unintentionally, this document clearly avoided a key question: which gas caused global warming?
He then looked up a report published by the IPCC: 'Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis'. There was one image that particularly interested him. This distribution map of temperature increases in the atmosphere overlapped with another map that was deeply ingrained in Lu Qingbin's mind: the distribution map of Freon in the atmosphere that was published in the PRL paper in 2001.
Inspired by the collision of these two images, Lu Qingbin completed a new paper within two months, which was published in the American Institute of Physics' 'AIP Advances' in July 2022. As you may have seen in the news, the conclusion of this paper was 'discovery of a seasonal ozone hole that is seven times larger than the ozone hole over Antarctica'.
In August 2022, another paper was published in the journal 'Atmosphere', providing new evidence for the impact of Freon on global climate change.
Despite being under great pressure, Lu Qingbin continued to work non-stop.
In June 2023, he published a paper in the 'Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences' (PNAS) as the sole author, achieving the first non-parametric quantification of the amount of global ozone depletion. It further verified the discovery of the ozone hole in the tropics.
In the article, he derived a simple quantitative formula for calculating the concentration of chlorine atoms that causes ozone depletion in the atmosphere. An anonymous reviewer commented on the paper thus: 'This work is a tour de force.'
Following that, in July 2023, Lu Qingbin published another paper in the journal Atmosphere, performing a critical assessment of climate models and radiation force based on six sets of observational data. His second monograph has also been signed into contract.
As such, Lu Qingbin has achieved completely quantitative models with zero parameters in both of his most important areas of research – the relationship between freon and global climate change, and the relationship between freon and holes in the ozone layer.
It took him 24 full years to reach this goal, and the pace of his true breakthroughs was very intensive – several key papers were published within about one year.
"No matter what others think, for me, this is my 1905." He told Science and Technology Daily.
Lu Qingbin's academic idol is Einstein, and he has read through all versions of his biography. In 1905, at only 26 years old, Einstein published five papers on quantum theory, the theory of special relativity, and Brownian motion, among other topics, a year which was thus dubbed the "Miracle Year".
But although Lu Qingbin is "very confident" in his academic results, the loneliness of not being recognized still follows him like a shadow.
The spectrum of Earth's blackbody radiation and the measured/simulated atmospheric transmittance spectrum: The strong infrared absorption peaks of freon and ozone just fall within the 8-13 μm atmospheric window, which is almost transparent wavelength. Lu Qingbin believes that this shows that Freon is the most important greenhouse gas affecting climate change.
The Elephant in the Room
In the past few decades, Lu Qingbin's academic career seemed to have split into two parallel accounts: on the one hand, his universities of study and employment, and his platforms of article publication, were all mainstream, even "high-level"; on the other hand, his name and his theories were still trapped in a kind of "spiral of silence".
He has long been used to doubts and objections from his peers, and what bothered and embarrassed him more was the near consensus of "ignoring" him.
Based on his research findings, he made some predictions, including that the size of the ozone hole would exhibit an 11-year cyclical change, and that the recovery of the ozone layer would occur first over the Antarctic and then over the tropics—this was the exact opposite of the predictions of traditional photochemical theory.
Over time, both of these predictions were confirmed to some extent. Even scholars who had originally objected to him published articles with similar conclusions, but their references conveniently avoided Lu Qingbin's work. It is just like that famous English proverb, "The Elephant in the Room", it was so obvious, yet it was unspoken.
In a small area, Lu Qingbin's name almost became an "allusion". Just recently, an American scholar complained in a blog that others were objecting to his academic viewpoint, "just as they objected to Lu Qingbin's findings" and "the details cited by the critics actually support Lu Qingbin's findings".
In recent years, however, Lu Qingbin's CRE theory has gradually begun to appear in mainstream news reports analyzing the formation of the ozone hole and even in the introductions of relevant international awards, which made him feel some sign of the ice breaking.
At the end of 2023, he returned to China, and gave a series of academic reports at Westlake University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Fuzhou University, and Beijing Jiaotong University. Many people were attracted by the news of the ozone hole in the tropics, and left in surprise and thought over the academic controversy over global climate change.
When Lu Qingbin gave a Xihu Famous Teachers Forum report at Westlake University, the host was Professor Wang Hongfei. In his view, Lu Qingbin's research on the ozone layer had been verified by more and more evidence, and "should not be too much of a problem". His academic viewpoints on climate change, however, completely overturned his cognition.
"Professor Lu's theories obviously belong to the 'minority'. But the advantage of academia is that as long as you can justify yourself using scientific language and scientific methods, you can always publish your different views in articles, and there will always be someone willing to listen to your views." Speaking of this, Wang Hongfei laughed, "Of course, lifetime tenure also helped him a lot. At least he won't lose his job because his research direction is too 'non-mainstream'."
Yan Chang, an associate professor with tenure at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, is another scholar who heard Lu Qingbin's report.
"Of course we welcome academic minorities!" he said to the China Science Daily. "The function of academic reports is to share and communicate. We will not consider anything we hear as definitive, but we will not easily reject different views out of hand either."
He admitted that this report was different from most other academic reports he had heard in that the problems addressed were extremely complex. Most students and teachers present were very interested, but also maintained a scientific attitude of openness and skepticism towards the novel theory.
"Famous astronomer Carl Sagan once said: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Yan Chang said, "Professor Lu's scientific views have stood in a non-mainstream position for a long time. As to whether his academic views are correct, only time will tell—the true course of the ozone hole and climate change will be the most powerful evidence."
Despite having long been "the elephant in the room", Lu Qingbin has always believed himself to be lucky. He has been met with coldness and with goodwill. Some people avoid talking about "the elephant", while others give "the elephant" candy.
The first research grant he applied for was a Senior Research Fellowship from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. This project primarily supported research in human health. Interestingly, the report sent to Lu Qingbin by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research stated that "This candidate is obviously a very capable scientist, whose important research work is in the area of ozone layer physics", so even though he "did not do any work in the area of health", the committee gave him the highest score for a candidate in the non-medical degree category (non-MD, PhD).
In 2006, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada sent Lu Qingbin a research project expert review report stating that "I now understand why, about a year and a half ago, at an international conference held at Cairo University (in Egypt), I heard Professor Zewail, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his contributions to femtosecond chemistry, publicly praise his colleague Dr. Lu's ability and talent as a top-notch scientist. I finally now know who Dr. Lu is." Zewail was Lu Qingbin's advisor during his postdoctoral work at the California Institute of Technology, and his evaluation played a very critical role in Lu Qingbin's later career.
NSERC's Review Report on Qingbin Lu.
Photos courtesy of the interviewee
Whenever he feels lonely and unsupported, Qingbin Lu always thinks about those who trust him silently.
Lu's father was a grassroots cadre. Although he was not a great figure, he held on to some idealism throughout his life. He hoped that his son could make some contributions to the world.
On the afternoon of August 2, 2001, at 5 pm, the American Physical Society released the news about "cosmic rays burning the ozone layer". His father passed away that evening. Lu has no idea whether his father had a chance to see the news. But he felt that his father persisted for two years in a very poor physical condition, perhaps in order to wait for that moment.
Another person that he will never forget was his mentor, Huai-rong Gao when he was studying for his master's degree at Fuzhou University. Years after the mentor's death, Lu visited her former residence when he returned to China. Following the mentor's daughter, Lu entered the mentor's bedroom where she worked and saw a scene that he will never forget.
On the desk where Teacher Gao used to work, there was a transparent glass board and a small piece of paper was pressed under the clean glass. In graceful handwriting, it read: "Qingbin Lu."
She always believed that this student could make achievements and held on to this expectation until she left the world. Thinking of this, Lu burst into tears.
Perhaps it's never easy to be a "minority" in any field. But fortunately, there are some things that have supported "minorities" until now.
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