The discovery of the depletion of the ozone layer in the late 1970s and the subsequent Montreal Protocol of 1987 are often cited by climate alarmists as the paradigm case to support their delusions. But, in reality, it’s mostly an object lesson in everything that’s wrong with climate alarmism.
For a start, ozone depletion is a clearly measurable phenomenon. Despite the preponderance of evidence supporting the conclusion that global temperatures have increased by probably less than one degree over the past century, the “settled science” of climate is in fact anything but. The Montreal Protocol is also an example of effective action, both in terms of costs and outcome, unlike the lunatic Paris Agreement which imposes staggering costs on many countries, while allowing the world’s largest carbon emitter to increase its emissions unimpeded – all while doing absolutely nothing to measurably affect global temperatures.
The ozone saga is also illustrative of the opportunistic hysteria of activists – some of them familiar names from the ranks of climate alarmism.
Mostly, though, the story of the ozone layer is a salutary lesson in just how little we really understand about the Earth and atmosphere – and just how robust “Gaia” might really be.
It’s been a third of a century since the Montreal Protocol was signed in 1987, garnering the world’s efforts to staunch the ozone layer being depleted by chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), chemicals used as refrigerants, aerosol in spray cans, solvents and a wide array of other uses. To the surprise of even those signing the agreement though, the thinning of the ozone layer had more or less ceased as early as 1991 — far too soon to credit a treaty whose ink had hardly dried — and even as concentrations of CFCs increased in the atmosphere until 1998.
Yet in the midst of all this Al Gore was writing in 1992 that “hunters now report finding blind rabbits and fishermen catch blind salmon,” infusing a legitimate scientific concern with the scaremongering catastrophism so prevalent among self-styled activists.
Although human-produced CFCs peaked and began to decline in 2000, the “ozone hole” was already shrinking. It’s predicted to return to pre-industrial levels within a few decades.
Yet, even with human ozone depleting chemicals phased out, the ozone layer is still doing its own thing.
A “record-level” ozone hole formed over the Arctic in February and March of 2020 — three times the size of Greenland — and then simply closed up and disappeared last April[…]
Certainly, no thinking person cares to harm the planetary buffer that protects all life on Earth, however after decades of studying the matter there is some diversity of opinion now concerning what may be a more complete view of the thickening and thinning of the planet’s ozone shield.
As with that dreadful sky dragon – carbon dioxide – it seems that natural processes dwarf anything that humans can inflict on the planet.
Volcanoes too, however, shoot gases high into the atmosphere. And one of the most active on Earth is Mr. Erebus in Antarctica. Observations in 1989 detected aerosol particles identified as volcanic ejecta of Erebus at a height of 8 kilometers over Antarctica. In 2015, in a paper published in the scholarly journal, Atmospheric Environment, “Antarctic Ozone Depletion Caused by Erebus Volcano Gas Emissions,” scientists determined that “Erebus is a natural and powerful source of stratospheric hydrogen chloride and sulfur dioxide, and hence, the cause of the Antarctic ozone depletion, together with man-made chlorofluorocarbons.”
So, as with other supposed environmental disasters having turned out to be something more than the reflexive tendency to paint humankind as the font of all supposed dysfunction on Earth, science may have been ill-served in this matter, yet again. There might indeed be a cyclical thickening and thinning of the polar ozone holes; it could be a natural phenomenon linked to plate tectonics and volcanism.
NewsMax
But humans are definitely the only possible cause of climate fluctuations. Only a “science denier” would be stupid enough to say otherwise.
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