Chemists warned about a hole in the sky a decade before it was found

In 1974, chemists Mario Molina and Sherwood Rowland calculated that CFC gases from aerosols and refrigerators could drift into the stratosphere and destroy ozone. Industry dismissed it as speculation until 1985, when British Antarctic Survey scientists measured a real, dramatic hole opening over Antarctica. Their warning led directly to the Montreal Protocol, one of the most successful environmental treaties ever signed.

— Mario Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland, Stratospheric sink for chlorofluoromethanes: chlorine atom-catalysed destruction of ozone — Nature, 1974