Had humans found bromine cheaper or more convenient to use than chlorine, it is quite likely that by the time Crutzen and his colleagues made their discovery, we would all have been enduring unprecedented rates of cancer, blindness and a thousand other ailments, that our food supply would have collapsed, and that our civilisation itself was under intolerable stress. And we would have had no idea of the cause until it was too late. (CiB link)
Reality
Yello! The whole "reality" thing is getting quite complicated. I've just been wondering how, in a libertarian utopia, you go about getting access to information. Everything's privatised, so all information is presumably the property of the producer. If information is a commodity, science doesn't really seem to have a huge role: you get what you pay for.
I've been arguing with a couple of people on the left who a) seem pro-AGW but b) anti-science. I've yet to find out what criteria they're using to decide what they believe. Not that any of this is straightforward, mind...