1980s: An age of discovery

The 1980s was an era of emerging electronic dance music, big hair hype and a bohemian lifestyle.

The hairspray business was booming. Nintendo's were a fad.

Personalities of people were influenced through the existing pop culture. Pop culture had been a big part of 80s as it started melting into the fashion, hippiness as well as attitude.

However, it was also the era in which the ozone layer was found depleting. I like to call it the silent killer in a way, the hole grew to almost be the size of continental United States but no one ever knew about it, until the reports were out!

I remember studying in class about oxygen, being our ultimate source of life, but just one more oxygen atom and we get ozone which is extremely toxic to us. However like we need oxygen to breathe, it is vital that we need ozone to protect us from UV radiations from the sun.

It came as a big surprise to many, as it was for the first time that a real visible threat of earth was seen when the hole was reported to be expanding. The panic and the urgency of the issue could be compared to that of a meteor hitting the earth.

Scientists were sure of one thing -if nothing was done, we would have been on the track to destroy the entire ozone layer by 2050. Without the ozone layer ecosystems would collapse, we would all have skin cancer and eventually will lead to our mass extinction.

But today thankfully the ozone layer is healing, because 1980s was also the era when we all came together to end this catastrophe. This is not going to be the story of how the ozone layer survived, rather how humans came together to end this.

The world would have to make a big change or else we would face catastrophe.

These are words of Dr. Susan Solomon an atmospheric chemist, who in 1987 led the investigation on what caused the hole in the ozone.

And this crisis put us into taking the fastest action on climate change we've ever seen.

This is all because we took 3 P's seriously

1. Personal

People took it personally as they understood that as long as the hole remained, it would cause them skin cancer due to the unfiltered UV radiations. Today we witness more disastrous natural calamities like floods, landslides and earthquakes more often. This is a clear indication that things are not going the right way. After a flood we see the lands are shaken, homes destroyed and people lose their loved ones.

When the solutions are simple and straightforward, we've slowly started to change and adapt ourselves to live in harmony and not against nature.

2. Perceivability

People saw the reports and images provided by NASA and hence believed the problem was real and was happening now. They were given full information through news, television serials and even movies! We can see this even today.

Many campaigns and several Netflix documentaries talk about this issue. Even world renowned actors such as Leonardo di Caprio, Zac Efron and countless others have voiced their concerns through through their movies and documentaries.

More we talked about it, the louder it got and more it is heard.

3. Practicality

The switch from ozone depleting products like CFCs to using more sustainable products was surprisingly smooth as people were willing to give up the products because they had taken the ozone depletion personally. But today the situation a little different. Hydrofluorocarbons- the greenhouse gas which traps heat, is complexly interlinked to related most of what we use today.

But we have countless new solutions and technologies to back us up and restrict most of our HFC release.

Experts say that we have till 2030 to evade the disaster.

Can we do it?

The answer is yes, we can. Because we've done it before.