Question: What is the most destructive inention so far eg.the bomb?Plastic?etc.

Maria McNamara answered on 9 Nov 2019:

Yes I agree that plastic is the cause of much environmental change, not only via the release of CO2 during its production and burning, but increasingly we’re becoming aware of the dangers of microplastics. These are often formed in soils and especially water bodies lakes, rivers and oceans) when bigger pieces of plastic break up into fragments. Some products, however, contain manufactured microplastics, including lots of beauty products. We now know that these microplastics are hugely damaging to marine life.

There have been some other pretty nasty inventions. CFCs – chloroflurocarbons – were a major issue 20 years ago. They were found in fridges and in pressurized spray cans and although they are pretty innocuous in the lower atmosphere they undergo alteration in the upper atmosphere and caused a hole in the ozone layer that was first discovered in 1985. The use of CFCs is now banned but they have a long residence time in the atmosphere – over 100 years, so we will still see a hole in the ozone layer for a long time to come.