Though many people initially dismissed Rowland and Molina's explanation of how CFCs deplete the earth's ozone layer, they were fully vindicated when they won the 1995 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. (They shared the award with Paul Crutzen, a Dutch researcher who discovered in 1970 that a variety of gases could be involved in ozone depletion). These were the first Nobel Prizes ever given for discoveries related to the environmental sciences.