Ozone: The Hole Truth
2007.09.14
# Perhaps decades from now, participants in the Kyoto Protocol, the global-warming treaty modeled after the Montreal Protocol, will meet and congratulate themselves because none of their scary assertions came true. But how many resources will have been spent to save a world that never really needed saving in the first place?
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Rush Limbaugh / Al Gore debate (1992): ozone hole and global warming
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Telling little green lies?
1995.11.23
The hole in the ozone layer has more to do with politics than deodorants, a French scientist Haroun Tazieff tells Ian Phillips.
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One of the founding fathers of the French ecological movement and a former minister for the prevention of major natural and technological risks, Tazieff is well qualified to talk about environmental issues. He has been adviser to most of France's environment ministers over the past decade.
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It seemed strange to Tazieff that an ozone hole situated above the Antarctic was blamed on CFC gases, when most deodorants were sprayed in the northern hemisphere.
He was surprised to discover an article in the 1950 Annals of Geophysics reporting the existence of ozone holes above Norway in 1926 - years before CFC's were even dreamt of - and was astounded to find that the hole above the Antarctic was not the recent phenomenon ecologists claimed it to be. It was actually discovered as far back as 1957, he says, by the English scientist, Gordon Dobson, but it was only in the mid-eighties that satellite photos began to highlight it in a rather spectacular way.
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On September 5, 1987, there was a relatively large reduction of 0.1 per cent in the levels of ozone over a surface of three million square kilometres near the Palmer peninsula in the Antarctic. Tazieff is convinced there is no way that the CFCs could have broken down so much ozone in such a short space of time.
Even if CFCs do have an effect, he asserts that it must be an insignificant one. After all, it is alleged that it is the chlorine in the CFCs which breaks down the ozone molecules. However, only 7,500 tons of chlorine are released from the breakdown of CFCs every year, against 600 million tons from the evaporation of seawater and 36 million from volcanoes.
What is more, the effect of chlorine is to break down the ozone into oxygen plus by-products, and it simply requires the presence of ultraviolet rays to transform the oxygen back into ozone.
Fiona Weir, atmosphere campaigner for Friends of the Earth, does not dispute the role played by natural phenomena, but insists there is also a massive man-made effect. She dismisses Tazieff's arguments as being out of date, and sees the ozone problem as more than a polar phenomenon, claiming that even over mid-latitudes, levels of ozone are being depleted by 3 per cent per decade. "That is absolutely untrue," responds Tazieff. These figures have not been proved, and there are more people that refute them than accept them.
https://uwaterloo.ca/wat-on-earth/news/telling-little-green-lies
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Ozone: The Hole Truth
2007.09.14
The international treaty to protect the ozone layer turns 20 this year. But is there really much reason to celebrate?
Environmentalists have made numerous apocalyptic predictions over the past several decades, virtually none of which has come to pass. Yet each time, the greens and their political allies proclaim victory, arguing that their preventive prescriptions averted disaster.
Such is the case with the 1987 Montreal Protocol On Substances That Deplete The Ozone Layer (Montreal Protocol). The lurid predictions of ozone depletion-induced skin cancer epidemics, ecosystem destruction and others haven't come true, for which Montreal Protocol proponents congratulate themselves. But in retrospect, the evidence shows that ozone depletion was an exaggerated threat in the first place. As the treaty parties return to Montreal for their 20th anniversary meeting it should be cause for reflection, not celebration, especially for those who hope to repeat this "success story" in the context of global warming.
The Montreal Protocol's provisions were tightened in 1990 and again in 1992, culminating with a CFC ban in most developed nations by 1996.
So what do we know now? As far as ozone depletion is concerned, the thinning of the ozone layer that occurred throughout the 1980s apparently stopped in the early 1990s, too soon to credit the Montreal Protocol. A 1998 World Meteorological Organization (WMO) report said that, "since 1991, the linear [downward] trend observed during the 1980s has not continued, but rather total column ozone has been almost constant …" However, the same report noted that the stratospheric concentrations of the offending compounds were still increasing through 1998. This lends credence to the skeptical view, widely derided at the time of the Montreal Protocol, that natural variations better explain the fluctuations in the global ozone layer.
More importantly, the feared increase in ground level UVB radiation has also failed to materialize.
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The parallels with global warming are striking. Again we face a real but greatly overhyped environmental problem. In both cases, virtually everything the public has been told that sounds terrifying isn't true -- and what is true isn't particularly terrifying. But doomsayers such as Gore simply soldier on. His claims of blind animals from ozone depletion have been replaced by equally dubious assertions in his book "An Inconvenient Truth," including predictions of a massive sea level rise that would wipe away south Florida and other coastal areas.
Perhaps decades from now, participants in the Kyoto Protocol, the global-warming treaty modeled after the Montreal Protocol, will meet and congratulate themselves because none of their scary assertions came true. But how many resources will have been spent to save a world that never really needed saving in the first place?
https://www.heritage.org/environment/commentary/ozone-the-hole-truth