ECONOMIST: Paul Crutzen died on January 28th
經濟學人：保羅·克魯岑於1月28日去世
The atmospheric chemist and meteorologist was 87
大氣化學家和氣象學家87歲
It was unpremeditated, Paul Crutzen told people afterwards, something sudden and unbidden. At the same time, it had been building up for decades. It may well resonate for centuries.
保羅·克魯岑事後告訴人們，這是無意的，是突然的、不請自來的。與此同時，它已經建立了幾十年。它很可能會引起幾個世紀的共鳴。
The year was 2000, and he was in Cuernavaca at a scientific meeting devoted to understanding the way that the Earth operates as a system. In one session the word 「Holocene」 was used again and again. An unfamiliar word to many outside science, an unexceptionable one to those within: a simple and value-free way of referring to the little sliver of geological time that began in the last throes of the most recent ice age, 11,700 years ago. But he found himself increasingly irritated by hearing the term used to encompass both the world of today and the world of the first farmers, a world of a few million people and of a few billion, a world of fires in hearths and a world of oilfields. He could not accept the view that humans just happened to occupy their period in the same way that dinosaurs happened to occupy the Jurassic and trilobites the Ordovician. And so he interrupted. 「Stop saying the Holocene! We’re not in the Holocene any more.」 Hubbub; surprise: 「So where are we then, Paul?」, his colleagues asked. 「When are we?」 He cast around, hesitated, then decided: 「The Anthropocene」.
那是2000年，他在庫埃納瓦卡參加一個科學會議，專門研究地球作為一個系統的運行方式。在一次會議上，「全新世」一詞被反覆使用。對於許多外部科學來說，這是一個不熟悉的詞，對於內部科學來說，這是一個不可理解的詞:一個簡單而無價值的方式，指的是11700年前最近一次冰河時期的最後陣痛中開始的一小塊地質時間。但他發現自己越來越被這個術語所激怒，這個術語既包括今天的世界，也包括第一批農民的世界，一個有幾百萬人和幾十億人的世界，一個有火爐的世界和一個有油田的世界。他不能接受這樣一種觀點，即人類只是碰巧佔據了他們的時期，就像恐龍碰巧佔據了侏羅紀和三葉蟲佔據了奧陶紀一樣。所以他打斷了我。「別說全新世了！我們已經不在全新世了。」喧譁；驚訝:「保羅，我們現在在哪裡？」，他的同事問道。「我們什麼時候？」他環顧四周，猶豫了一下，然後決定:「人類世」。
The idea that humans act as a force of nature, and that the extent of that action meant the Earth had crossed a threshold into a new mode of being, was not new. But his outburst gave it wings. Partly it was a matter of timing: the full import of climate change and the lack of much success at curbing it, despite decades of effort, were beginning to sink into scientists』 minds. Partly it was that 「the messenger was the message」. No one had done more to understand the ways that humans were changing, and could change, the nature of their planet than Paul Crutzen had.
人類作為一種自然力量行動的想法，以及這種行動的程度意味著地球已經跨越了一個門檻進入了一種新的存在模式，這並不是新的想法。但他的爆發給了它翅膀。部分原因是時間問題:儘管科學家們付出了數十年的努力，但氣候變化的全面影響以及在遏制氣候變化方面缺乏成功開始進入他們的腦海。部分原因是「信使就是信息」。沒有人比保羅·克魯岑更了解人類正在改變並且可能改變地球自然的方式。
His parents were poor. His primary-school years were spent in an Amsterdam occupied by German forces; some classmates died in the hongerwinter of 1944-45. His high-school exam results were depressed by an ill-timed bout of fever, meaning he could not get a scholarship to university. Not wanting to burden his parents with fees, he went to technical school to train as a civil engineer. In the late 1950s, having married a Finnish woman he met on holiday in Switzerland, he gave up the engineering of bridges in Amsterdam for that of houses in Sweden, closer to her family.
他的父母很窮。他的小學時光是在被德國軍隊佔領的阿姆斯特丹度過的；一些同學在1944-1945年的洪二灣遇難。他的高中考試成績因不合時宜的發燒而沮喪，這意味著他無法獲得大學獎學金。不想讓父母負擔費用，他去技校培訓土木工程師。20世紀50年代末，他和一位在瑞士度假時認識的芬蘭女子結婚後，他放棄了阿姆斯特丹的橋梁工程，轉而在離她家更近的瑞典建造房屋。
It was there that in 1958 that he saw a computer-programming job at Stockholm University’s Department of Meteorology advertised in the paper. He had no experience in programming; but then, nor did many people at the time. He got the job, took courses on the side and, in the 1960s, started out on a research career. Many of his colleagues were looking at the impact of humans on the environment, but he wanted to do pure science. So he turned to the chemistry of the stratosphere.
正是在那裡，1958年，他在報紙上看到了斯德哥爾摩大學氣象系的一份計算機編程工作。他沒有編程經驗；但是當時也沒有多少人。他得到了這份工作，參加了兼職課程，並在20世紀60年代開始了自己的研究生涯。他的許多同事都在研究人類對環境的影響，但他想做純科學。所以他轉向平流層化學。
The problem which caught his attention was that the chemical reactions thought to destroy the ozone in the stratosphere were much slower than the sunlight-driven reactions known to create it. There thus had to be another 「sink」. He found it in nitrogen oxides; even in the tiny amount nature provides at the top of the atmosphere, they could catalyse ozone destruction efficiently enough to do the job. It was an elegant, brilliant idea. It was also, for a man who had started out not wanting to look at human impacts, a startlingly inopportune one.
引起他注意的問題是，被認為破壞平流層臭氧的化學反應比已知產生臭氧的陽光碟機動反應要慢得多。因此，必須有另一個「水槽」。他在氮氧化物中發現了它；即使是大自然在大氣層頂部提供的極少量的臭氧，它們也能有效地催化臭氧的破壞，足以完成這項工作。這是一個優雅、絕妙的主意。對於一個一開始不想關注人類影響的人來說，這也是一個令人吃驚的不合時宜的問題。
At the time he was doing this work there was a heated debate in America over the advisability of building supersonic airliners to ply the stratosphere—the engines of which, he and others realised, could produce nitrogen oxides in ozone-layer-crashing profusion. Soon afterwards the ozone-destroying effect of nitrogen oxides produced in fireballs the size of cities was raised as a long-term consequence of nuclear war. A year later Sherry Rowland and Mario Molina showed that chlorine from cfcs, industrial chemicals used in refrigerants and aerosols, might act in the same way as nitrogen oxides, eating up ozone with terrible abandon. That finding launched a decade-long struggle to outlaw the production of cfcs—a goal written into international law in the Montreal protocol of 1987. He, Molina and Rowland shared a Nobel prize for their work in 1995.
當他在做這項工作的時候，美國正在就建造超音速客機在平流層飛行的可行性進行激烈的辯論——他和其他人意識到，超音速客機的發動機會產生大量的氮氧化物，破壞臭氧層。不久之後，城市大小的火球中產生的氮氧化物破壞臭氧的效果被提升為核戰爭的長期後果。一年後，雪莉·羅蘭和馬裡奧·莫利納證明氯來自含氯氟烴在美國，製冷劑和氣溶膠中使用的工業化學品可能會像氮氧化物一樣，以可怕的速度吞噬臭氧。這一發現引發了一場長達十年的反對非法生產含氯氟烴這是1987年蒙特婁議定書寫入國際法的目標。何、莫利納和羅蘭因他們的工作在1995年分享了諾貝爾獎。
His role in these debates provided him with an education in politics to match his earlier ones in engineering and atmospheric science. Again, he proved an adept student. When, in the mid-1970s, his friend Stephen Schneider suggested that climate scientists should brief politicians and the public systematically about the findings which were beginning to worry them, he agreed, but said it would be slow work. He and Schneider did not get their wish until the late 1980s, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was set up: an innovation built on the success of the Montreal protocol.
他在這些辯論中的角色為他提供了政治教育，以匹配他早期在工程和大氣科學方面的教育。他再次證明了自己是個內行的學生。20世紀70年代中期，當他的朋友史蒂芬·施耐德建議氣候科學家應該系統地向政治家和公眾介紹讓他們開始擔心的發現時，他同意了，但表示這將是一項緩慢的工作。他和施耐德直到20世紀80年代末才如願以償，當時政府間氣候變化專門委員會成立:這是建立在《蒙特婁議定書》成功基礎上的創新。
For decades he studied and catalogued the ways that humans were making changes on the level that had caused his outburst in Cuernavaca. His research covered swathes of atmospheric chemistry, notably that which occurs in the huge smoky, smoggy clouds created by forest fires and unchecked industry. In the course of that work he wrote the first influential paper on the blacked-out sky, failed harvests and mass starvation of the hongerwinter writ large that would follow nuclear war. He was deeply committed to averting such human and ecological catastrophe. When in 1995, while running the Max Planck Institute in Mainz, he heard of his Nobel prize, he celebrated with Sekt rather than champagne: not because of his modest, Dutch, cycling-to-work frugality, but because of France’s blinkered position on nuclear testing.
幾十年來，他研究並記錄了人類在導致他在庫埃納瓦卡爆發的層面上進行改變的方式。他的研究涵蓋了大氣化學的方方面面，特別是那些發生在由森林火災和無節制的工業造成的巨大煙霧中的化學物質。在這項工作的過程中，他寫了第一篇有影響的論文，論述了黑暗的天空、歉收和大規模饑荒hongerwinter核戰爭之後的大事件。他堅定地致力於避免這種人類和生態災難。1995年，當他在美因茨管理馬克斯·普朗克研究所時，聽說了他的諾貝爾獎，他用塞克特而不是香檳:不是因為他謙遜的荷蘭式騎車上班的節儉，而是因為法國在核試驗上的狹隘立場。
If, as seems quite likely, the International Commission on Stratigraphy eventually extends formal recognition to the idea of the Anthropocene, the fallout from such testing, now settled into sea-floor sediments, may well be chosen as the geological formation that marks its base. And it also seems likely that, for as long as that epoch lasts, those who study it will be following the lead of Paul Crutzen.
如果國際地層學委員會最終正式承認人類世的概念，那麼這種測試的沉降物，現在已經沉積在海底沉積物中，很可能被選為標誌其基礎的地質構造。而且似乎還可能的是，只要那個時代持續下去，那些研究它的人就會跟隨保羅·克魯岑的腳步。
本文章英文原文來自經濟學人，本人僅提供給大家一個觀察國外文章的平臺，文章內容不代表公眾號立場
英文文章及圖片來源：
https://www.economist.com/obituary/2021/02/13/paul-crutzen-died-on-january-28th
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