Lu Qingbin found himself on the academic fringes for the first time back in 1999.
At the age of 34, he was conducting postdoctoral research at Rutgers University in New Jersey, often dubbed the "public Ivy League." He had published one paper each in the prestigious physics journal Physical Review Letters (PRL) and the Journal of Chemical Physics (JCP). However, instead of accolades, these papers brought forth more questions than praise – if any praise at all existed.
Initially, colleagues in the United States, France, and Germany struggled to replicate his findings. Upon his departure from New Jersey in early 2000, his supervisor hired two Russian postdocs to reproduce the work, which was eventually validated and published in JCP in 2004. Yet, this did little to quell the skepticism: why was it only his lab that could achieve these results?
The pressure from peers loomed over the lab like a dark cloud. The most disheartening blow came in 2006 when his supervisor collaborated with a prominent team from Johns Hopkins University to publish a paper in JCP refuting Lu Qingbin's findings.
Little did anyone know at the time, Rutgers University possessed a one-of-a-kind apparatus, allowing them to observe phenomena beyond the reach of others.
Lu Qingbin: A Lesson from a Mixed Bag
Reflecting on his journey, Lu Qingbin feels incredibly fortunate: "I conducted the right experiment at the right time and place." This experiment changed the trajectory of his academic career, leading to the three major research directions he pursues today. It also exposed him to the taste of being a "minority" repeatedly throughout his life.
His discovery was profound: in the presence of polar molecules like water or ammonia, the dissociative electron transfer (DET) reaction of fluorine increased by a staggering 30,000 times. In a solid-phase surface environment, for every million chloride ions generated, only about one could be detected, highlighting the high sensitivity required by the equipment for this experiment.
Back then, only two instruments in the world could achieve such sensitivity: one at the laboratory of Nobel laureate John Polanyi at the University of Toronto, which was dismantled by the late 1990s, and the other, the one Lu Qingbin used for his experiments.
Due to its association with the notorious ozone-depleting substance - fluorine, Lu Qingbin's paper attracted considerable attention from peers, sparking the academic controversies mentioned earlier. It wasn't until 2006 when South Korean scientists, using a different experimental approach, confirmed the same phenomenon. In 2009, physicist Martin Wolf, who had trained under Nobel laureate Gerhard Ertl, led a team to conduct a series of experiments reaffirming the existence of this phenomenon and the high level of DET reaction of fluorine, gradually putting the controversy to rest.
A decade had passed since Lu Qingbin embarked on that astonishing experiment.
This experience taught Lu Qingbin a valuable lesson: even if you're at a prestigious institution like Rutgers University, in the laboratory of a renowned scientist, and have achieved results using the most advanced instruments of the time, it may still take 10 years or even longer to earn recognition from others in the field.
In the years that followed, he frequently revisited the insights gained from this lesson.
Challenging the mainstream, time and time again
During those 10 years, Lu Qingbin didn't pause. Building on the discovery of DET reaction, he proposed a mechanism explaining ozone layer depletion called Cosmic Ray-Induced Electron (CRE) induced reactions.
The cosmic ray-induced electron-induced reaction (CRE) mechanism is responsible for the destruction of the ozone layer.
Traditionally, it was believed that after releasing fluorocarbons into the atmosphere, they would decompose under the influence of ultraviolet light, producing chlorine atoms, which would then react with ozone molecules, leading to the breakdown of ozone into ordinary oxygen molecules—three chemists won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995 based on this theory.
However, Lu Qingbin's CRE theory suggests that the key factor in fluorocarbon decomposition is not ultraviolet light but cosmic rays. Due to the influence of the Earth's magnetic field and solar activity, cosmic rays have an 11-year cycle. Therefore, he predicted that the size of the ozone hole over Antarctica would also show periodic changes every 11 years.
In August 2001, Lu Qingbin published a significant paper in the PRL journal titled "The Impact of Cosmic Rays on Fluorocarbon Dissociation and Ozone Depletion." This paper was recognized by the journal's editors as the sole highlight of the issue. The American Physical Society published a focus article titled "Ozone Layer Destroyed by Cosmic Rays," which was later republished by the renowned science magazine Scientific American.
However, the favor of reviewers and editors was not enough to pave the way for Lu Qingbin's academic career. On the contrary, by challenging mainstream academic views, he found himself further marginalized.
In early 2004, Lu Qingbin joined the University of Waterloo in Canada and, three years later, obtained tenure ahead of schedule. His research on fluorocarbons and ozone holes was too unconventional to secure research funding for him, so he mainly relied on projects in femtosecond biology and femtosecond medicine. Although the transition from atmospheric physics to medicine may seem broad, the basic principles still revolve around his expertise in molecular dissociation electron transfer reactions.
From 2004 to 2008, Lu Qingbin published a series of papers on DET reactions and CRE theory. In 2009, the journal Physics Reports invited him to write a comprehensive review article in the field.
During the writing process of this article, a more "unconventional" scientific hypothesis emerged from his "intuition": could fluorocarbons, rather than carbon dioxide, be the culprit behind global warming?
At that time, there were far more scientific debates in the field of climate change than there are now. Scientists had varying opinions on whether the Earth was warming, whether the warming was due to natural phenomena or human activities, and what substances were causing climate change.
Carbon dioxide has always been the most scrutinized "suspect." The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) endorsed the most mainstream climate models, which were based on the theory of carbon dioxide. However, there has always been controversy in the academic community: are GCMs models outdated?
One of the main problems with GCMs models is that they contain many adjustable parameters and some undetermined factors in their equations.
In physics research, parameters are like a double-edged sword. Introducing parameters appropriately can help scientists answer some previously difficult questions; however, the excessive use of parameters, especially adjustable ones, means that theories and models can be "tailored" to fit observations as much as possible.
The brilliant scientist von Neumann once joked about parameters: with four parameters, he could fit an elephant, and with five parameters, he could even make the elephant's trunk wiggle.
In 1953, at the historic meeting of two physics masters, Enrico Fermi and Freeman Dyson, Fermi also criticized Dyson's theoretical work using this dialogue—their conversations later became classics in the methodology of physics research.
In Lu Qingbin's view, too many parameters leave scientists with room to "shirk responsibility."
He analyzed data from 1850 to 1970 and concluded that before the massive emissions of fluorocarbons, the correlation coefficient between the global average surface temperature and the concentration of carbon dioxide was almost zero. However, from 1970 to 2012, the correlation coefficient between the global average surface temperature and the total amount of halogenated greenhouse gases represented by fluorocarbons reached 96%–97%, almost perfect linear correlation.
In 2015, Lu Qingbin published a monograph titled "New Theories and Predictions of Ozone Holes and Climate Change," formally proposing a new theory that fluorocarbons lead to global warming. What made him proud was that this was a model that could be calculated "with zero parameters."
"My 1905"
In October 2021, the highly anticipated Nobel Prize in Physics was announced.
Two climatologists—Shuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann—shared half of the prize money for their work on "physically modeling Earth's climate, quantifying variability, and reliably predicting global warming," which was based on GCMs models.
Upon learning this news, Lu Qingbin couldn't sit still: "I had long expected the Nobel Prize to be awarded to research related to global climate change. But I had hoped that this Nobel Prize would confirm my work to the public, but instead, it made more people believe that carbon dioxide is the main culprit."
Since the publication of that monograph in 2015, Lu Qingbin has not published any papers in this field for six years. Now, he feels he can't continue to be so "indifferent."
He first carefully read the "Background to the Popular Science" document released by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, especially the concluding paragraph: "Is the Earth warming? Yes. Is the increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere the reason? Yes. Is it impossible for the cause of warming to be entirely natural factors? Impossible. Is human emissions the cause of temperature rise? Yes." According to Lu Qingbin, whether intentional or not, the document clearly avoids a key question: which gas is causing global warming? He then consulted the IPCC's report titled "Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis." One particular image caught his keen interest. It depicted the distribution of temperature increase in the atmosphere, coinciding with another image deeply etched in Lu Qingbin's mind: the distribution of fluorine in the atmosphere published in a PRL paper in 2001.
Drawing inspiration from the collision of these two images, Lu Qingbin completed a new paper within two months, which was published in July 2022 in the American Institute of Physics journal "AIP Advances." You might have come across the conclusions of this paper in the news — "Discovery of tropical regions hosting a year-round ozone hole, seven times larger than the one over Antarctica."
In August 2022, another paper was published in the journal "Atmosphere," providing new evidence of fluorine's impact on global climate change.
Under immense pressure, Lu Qingbin continued to work tirelessly. In June 2023, he published a paper as the sole author in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), achieving the first-ever parameter-free quantification of global ozone depletion and further validating the discovery of ozone holes over tropical regions.
In this article, he derived a concise quantitative formula to calculate the concentration of chlorine atoms in the atmosphere causing ozone depletion. An anonymous reviewer praised the paper, stating, "This work is a tour de force."
In July 2023, following up, Lu Qingbin published another paper in "Atmosphere," conducting a critical evaluation of climate models and radiative forcing by integrating data from six major observations. His second monograph has also been contracted.
With this, Lu Qingbin has achieved full quantification of zero-parameter models in his two most valued research areas: the relationship between fluorine compounds and global climate change, and the relationship between fluorine compounds and ozone depletion.
Before reaching this milestone, he embarked on a journey of 24 years, with breakthrough strides occurring at an intense pace—several significant papers were published within about a year.
"Regardless of how others perceive it, for me, this is my 1905," he told the "Chinese Science Bulletin."
Lu Qingbin's academic idol is Einstein, and he is well-versed in various biographies of him. In 1905, at the age of just 26, Einstein successively published five papers on quantum theory, special relativity, Brownian motion, and other topics, which is why that year is also known as the "miracle year."
However, despite Lu Qingbin's "very confident" in his academic achievements, the loneliness of not being recognized still haunts him like a shadow.
The Earth's blackbody radiation intensity spectrum and the measured/simulated atmospheric transmission spectrum: Fluorocarbons and ozone's strong infrared absorption peaks fall exactly within the nearly transparent wavelength 8-13 micrometer atmospheric window. Lu Qingbin believes this indicates that fluorocarbons are the most important greenhouse gases affecting climate change.
The Elephant in the Room
Over the past few decades, Lu Qingbin's academic career seems to have split into two narratives: on one hand, the institutions where he studied and worked, as well as the platforms where he published papers, are mainstream enough, even "elite"; while on the other hand, his name and his theories remain trapped in a kind of "silent spiral."
Criticism and opposition from peers are no longer rare, but what embarrasses and troubles him more is a kind of almost tacit "ignoring."
He has made some predictions based on research conclusions, including that the size of the ozone hole would show a periodic change of 11 years, and the recovery of the ozone layer would first appear over Antarctica, followed by tropical regions—this is exactly the opposite of the predictions of traditional photochemical theory.
As time has passed, these two predictions have been confirmed to some extent. Even scholars who initially opposed him have published papers with similar conclusions, but the citation sections of these papers "cleverly" avoid Lu Qingbin's work. Like the famous English proverb—"the elephant in the room"—so obvious yet so unspoken.
In a small circle, Lu Qingbin's name has almost become an "allusion." Just recently, an American scholar complained in a blog about others opposing their academic views, "just like they oppose Lu Qingbin's findings" and "the details cited by critics actually support Lu Qingbin's findings"...
However, in recent years, Lu Qingbin's CRE theory has gradually appeared in mainstream news reports analyzing the formation of the ozone hole and even in introductions to international awards, which gives him a hint of breaking the ice.
At the end of 2023, he returned to China and gave a series of academic lectures at Westlake University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Fuzhou University, and Beijing Jiaotong University. Many people were attracted by the news of the tropical ozone hole and left with surprise and contemplation about the academic controversies surrounding global climate change.
At the Westlake University's Westlake Distinguished Teachers Forum, the host was Professor Wang Hongfei. In his view, Lu Qingbin's research on the ozone layer has been increasingly validated by more evidence, "there should be no major problems." However, his academic views on climate change are truly overturning his understanding.
"Professor Lu's theories obviously belong to the 'minority.' But the benefit of academia is that as long as you can justify your views with scientific language and methods, you can still publish papers with different perspectives, and there will always be someone willing to listen to your views." Here, Wang Hongfei smiled, "Of course, tenure has also helped him a lot. He won't lose his job just because his research direction is too 'non-mainstream'."
Yan Chang, an associate professor on the long-term teaching track at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, is another scholar who attended Lu Qingbin's lecture.
"We certainly welcome academic minorities!" he told China Science News. "The function of academic lectures is to share and communicate. We won't take anything we hear as gospel, but we also won't easily shut out different viewpoints."
He admitted that, unlike most academic lectures he had heard before, the issues involved in this lecture could be said to be extremely complex. Most of the teachers and students at the scene were very interested, but they also maintained a scientific attitude of openness and skepticism towards novel theories.
"The famous astronomer Carl Sagan once said: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Yan Chang said, "Professor Lu's scientific viewpoint has been standing in a non-mainstream position for a long time. Whether his academic views are correct, time will eventually provide the answer—the real direction of the ozone hole and climate change is the most powerful evidence."
Despite being in the "elephant in the room" scenario for a long time, Lu Qingbin has always considered himself lucky. He has experienced cold treatment and felt kindness, with some avoiding the "elephant" while others bringing candy to it.
The first research grant he applied for was from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research as a senior researcher. This project mainly supported research in human health. Interestingly, the report issued to Lu Qingbin by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research stated: "This candidate is clearly a highly capable scientist doing important research in ozone layer physics," so even though he "has not done any work in health," the committee gave him the top score in the non-MD, PhD category.
In 2006, the expert review report for Lu Qingbin's research project issued by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada stated: "I now understand why about a year and a half ago at an international conference held at Cairo University, I heard Professor Zewail, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his contributions to femtochemistry, publicly praising his colleague Dr. Lu as a top scientist's ability and talent. I finally know who Dr. Lu is." Zewail was Lu Qingbin's mentor at the California Institute of Technology during his postdoctoral studies, and his evaluation played a crucial role in Lu Qingbin's subsequent career.
NSERC Evaluation Report for Qingbin Lu. All images provided by the interviewee.
Whenever feeling lonely and unsupported, Qingbin Lu always remembers those who silently believed in him.
Qingbin Lu's father was a grassroots cadre, not a prominent figure, but he harbored ideals throughout his life. He hoped his son could make a contribution to the world.
On August 2, 2001, at 5:00 p.m., the American Physical Society released news about "Cosmic Rays Destroying the Ozone Layer." That same evening, his father passed away. Qingbin Lu never knew if his father saw that news. But he vaguely felt that his father, enduring for two years in a terrible state of health, might have been waiting for that moment.
Another person he can't forget is his mentor, Gao Huairong, during his master's studies at Fuzhou University. One year after her death, Qingbin Lu visited her former residence during a trip back home. Following her daughter, he entered the bedroom where his mentor had lived. There, he witnessed an unforgettable scene.
On the desk where Professor Gao had worked, there was a piece of transparent glass, and under the clean glass lay a small piece of paper, on which were delicately written the three characters "Qingbin Lu."
She had always believed that this student could accomplish something, carrying that expectation until leaving this world.
Thinking of this, Qingbin Lu burst into tears.
Perhaps being a "minority" in any field is never easy. But fortunately, there are always things supporting the "minorities" to get to where they are today.
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