Dr. Will Happer of Princeton wrote “The Montreal Protocol to ban freons was the warm-up exercise for the IPCC. Many current IPCC players gained fame then by stampeding the US Congress into supporting the Montreal Protocol. They learned to use dramatized, phony scientific claims like “ozone holes over Kennebunkport” (President Bush Sr’s seaside residence in New England). The ozone crusade also had business opportunities for firms like Dupont to market proprietary “ozone-friendly” refrigerants at much better prices than the conventional (and more easily used) freons that had long-since lost patent protection and were not a cheap commodity with little profit potential” (link).
Even James Lovelock agrees. James Lovelock formulated the Gaia hypothesis, which postulates that the biosphere is a self-regulating entity with the capacity to keep our planet healthy by controlling the chemical and physical environment. He later became concerned that global warming would upset the balance and leave only the arctic as habitable. He began to move off this position in 2007 suggesting that the Earth itself is in “no danger” because it would stabilize in a new state.
James Lovelock’s reaction to first reading about the CRU emails in late 2009 was one of a true scientist:
“I was utterly disgusted. My second thought was that it was inevitable. It was bound to happen. Science, not so very long ago, pre-1960s, was largely vocational. Back when I was young, I didn’t want to do anything else other than be a scientist. They’re not like that nowadays. They don’t give a damn. They go to these massive, mass-produced universities and churn them out. They say: “Science is a good career. You can get a job for life doing government work.” That’s no way to do science.
I have seen this happen before, of course. We should have been warned by the CFC/ozone affair because the corruption of science in that was so bad that something like 80% of the measurements being made during that time were either faked, or incompetently done.
Fudging the data in any way whatsoever is quite literally a sin against the holy ghost of science. I’m not religious, but I put it that way because I feel so strongly. It’s the one thing you do not ever do. You’ve got to have standards.”
On a March 2010 Guardian interview, Lovelock opined:
“The great climate science centres around the world are more than well aware how weak their science is. If you talk to them privately they’re scared stiff of the fact that they don’t really know what the clouds and the aerosols are doing…We do need skepticism about the predictions about what will happen to the climate in 50 years, or whatever. It’s almost naive, scientifically speaking, to think we can give relatively accurate predictions for future climate. There are so many unknowns that it’s wrong to do it.”
Will Happer further elaborated:
“The Montreal Protocol may not have been necessary to save the ozone, but it had limited economic damage. It has caused much more damage in the way it has corrupted science. It showed how quickly a scientist or activist can gain fame and fortune by purporting to save planet earth. We have the same situation with CO2 now, but CO2 is completely natural, unlike freons. Planet earth is quite happy to have lots more CO2 than current values, as the geological record clearly shows. If the jihad against CO2 succeeds, there will be enormous economic damage, and even worse consequences for human liberty at the hands of the successful jihadists.”
LIKE GLOBAL WARMING THE DATA DOESN’T SUPPORT THE THEORY
The ozone hole has not closed off after we banned CFCs. See this story in Nature:
Scientific Consensus on Man-Made Ozone Hole May Be Coming Apart
As the world marks 20 years since the introduction of the Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer, Nature has learned of experimental data that threaten to shatter established theories of ozone chemistry. If the data are right, scientists will have to rethink their understanding of how ozone holes are formed and how that relates to climate change.
Markus Rex, an atmosphere scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute of Polar and Marine Research in Potsdam, Germany, did a double-take when he saw new data for the break-down rate of a crucial molecule, dichlorine peroxide (Cl2O2). The rate of photolysis (light-activated splitting) of this molecule reported by chemists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, was extremely low in the wavelengths available in the stratosphere – almost an order of magnitude lower than the currently accepted rate.
“This must have far-reaching consequences,” Rex says. “If the measurements are correct we can basically no longer say we understand how ozone holes come into being.” What effect the results have on projections of the speed or extent of ozone depletion remains unclear.
STILL COMING
Yet like the cultists whose spacecraft didn’t arrive on the announced date, the government scientists find ways to postpone it and save their reputations (examples “Increasing greenhouse gases could delay, or even postpone indefinitely the recovery of stratospheric ozone in some regions of the Earth, a Johns Hopkins earth scientist suggests” here and “Scientists Find Antarctic Ozone Hole to Recover Later than Expected” here.
“The warmers are getting more and more like those traditional predictors of the end of the world who, when the event fails to happen on the due date, announce an error in their calculations and a new date.” Dr. John Brignell, Emeritus Engineering Professor at the University of Southampton, on Number Watch (May 1) PDF
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To change the subject a bit . . . but not really . . . how much did the US pay Canada for “acid rain”?
That Nature link is outdated.
http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090507/full/news.2009.456.html
Far too oft, the political and emotional values of individuals outweighs the data, and allows many people to alter the data to fit the theory, rather than altering the theory to fit the data.
The precautionary principle would seem to be far more applicable to the nature of alarmism than the problem it purports to solve, that of environmental disaster. There is no net downside to opening the data to interpretation by others, and many possible benefits. If nothing else, the precaution of open data, open methods, and open communication and review should be part of that scientific method.
If the data are proprietary, then likely it is best they not be used for public purposes. If the system is paid for out of the public exchequer, then it is likely that the public has a far heavier proprietary interest in the outcome of the data than the scientists in question, and that fact of public funding predicates openness in any arrangement.
As a whole, science is damaged otherwise. It should never be dogmatic, never about emotions or outcomes, but simply about what the truth is. Outcomes are the business of demagogues, zealots, and politicians, not scientists.
That science is the pursuit of the truth, wherever it may lay, in spite of any personal antipathy toward the nature of the truth revealed.
Perhaps though, it is my own idiocy talking.
I often refer to the ozone hole/CFC ban scam as the pilot episode for global warming – the series. Of course even is were could thoroughly discredit the specious science upon which the CFC ban was enacted, we could never go back to using cheap, safe and effective CFCs because now they’re “powerful GHGs”. Like AGW, none of the studies at the time of the great CFC imbroglio ever centered on natural causes and variability of Antarctic stratospheric ozone thinning. It was assumed that it had to me man-made.
Few of us stop to consider exactly what the CFC ban costs were to society. Refrigeration and A/C became much more expensive. Millions of otherwise perfectly functioning poeces of equipment had to be scrapped.
Hi Joe
I’ve been interested in this subject for several years after I posed a simple question to Cambridge University and The Max Planck Institute -both leaders in the field of ozone research. It was this;
“How do we know the Ozone hole hasn’t alweays been there?”
They both answered frankly that they didn’t know (and hadn’t given it much thought) but just assumed that it was new as it started to appear some years after they were able to start measuring it.
They were going to carry out some research to try and ‘hindcast’ from their 1950’s actual measurements but I’ve heard nothing further.
Has anyone here got any idea how we can find out if something existed prior to the ability to measure it?
Tonyb
“Global warming consensus coming apart after Montreal is slicked off by North American Ice Sheet return!”
This CFC thing was Bravo Sierra from the word go, I participated as a pilot in several CFC monitoring flights, back in the late 70’s. NOAA and Battelle could not find any real correlation . I’d like to know if the Gore family invested in the replacement Refrigerants.
The hole is Solar and Atmosphere driven,period..
When it comes to the ozone hole, I always wondered how freon destroyed the ozone over the Antarctic in the southern hemisphere when the majority of people and the majority of air conditioners were in the northern hemisphere.
Freon was replaced with Puron, R-410A. I have a friend who owns his own HVAC business so I ask about refrigerants from time to time. Puron is hard to work and it requires different tools and gauges. Puron also is big greenhouse gas, and so strict measures have to be taken to reclaim any puron. (It is not really “pure” then, is it?) When I started looking into freon and puron, that is when I started to question consensus science.
The freon debacle didn’t start the activist scientists. Before the freon scare, there was the acid rain scare. Before the acid rain scare, there was the DDT scare. What the freon scare did was to give the activists an understanding of how to quickly push bad science through so that their real agenda would come to pass. The freon scare showed how a scare can done. The next step was to add an agenda along with the scare.
The environmentalists got th’ science wrong?…. Who woulda thunk it!…;-)
Re Dupont and the new refridgerants, what about the boost in sales of ‘sun creams’ ?
When I was a child I was really worried about what would happen to our planet, extinction of all those beautyfull fluffy animal species, polution, cancer etc. It was the age of the Club of Rome. None of their doomsday predictions have came true, the biggest problem we are facing in my home area is not overpopulation but lack of births, not health threatening polution but dramatically increasing longevity. Then the ozone hole and acid rain came and we were confronted with pictures of Australians hiding themselves under wide hats. We were informed about crop damages skinnn cancer and the damned drycleaners- tri-chorine-ethylene- (I hope this is the correct English spelling) was a popular detergent at the time for drycleaning, both for domestic and professional use- no fire hazard – great chemical. But then that was banned. I have little doubt that the pretty much worldwide ban on CFC has done some good but I stil resent the hype surrounding it. Mostly predominantly I resent the systematic brainwash our children are subject to through media and education feeding them with politically correct misinformation in the eco ideology. That is why this article is really encouraging and heartwarming.
I concur. It is clear that the scientists are anything but. They are carnival barkers.
So is anyone going to get in touch w/ congressman Issa to get the freon regulations removed? Is it clear enough at this point that the ozone doomsday isn’t coming?
The cycles of the Ozone Hole show that it is a natural process, unrelated to human activity.
To understand the public misinformation on this and many other subjects, one need look no further than Wikipedia and William Connolley.
Follow the money to find the truth. Science is no exception. Greed is rampant. Always has been always will be.
Twenty years ago I was dubious of the science behind the ozone hole but I could accept it because it didn’t cost that much and most countries got on board. Today not only people but countries are jumping off the co2 bandwagon eg Japan and most of the important players don’t even want to get involved.I think its time for a full court press from the skeptic community to try to get most of this bad news for agw into the mainstream press. They have to feel enough heat so they’ll get out of the kitchen!
John M,
Nice try, but, that experiment is as bad as the one under question. Where are the actual measurements of impurities and spectra for them?? They simply reduced the CI2O2 and claim the smaller absorption shows there were impurities?? How do we know how THEIR impurities are affecting the experiment since they apprently made no effort to identify what was there and what it was doing??
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
One thing not mentioned was the ban also included the propellants used in inhalers for the many millions of people suffering from asthma (as I do) or COPD. The new formulations were no longer available in low cost generic form and the prices of the inhalers skyrocketed. Big pharma was all too glad to make the change and rake it in.
John M,
the real experiment is happening over the Antarctic every winter. It varies like everything else we know in the universe. Have you even bothered to look back at the earlier data?? None of it would be out of place in modern measurements. There is no there there and never was.
Remember Steig and others have shown that the Antarctic warmed quickly from about the 50’s to about the 70’s and has been pretty flat since then. The O hole seemed to increase in size about the same time. Are they connected? Which caused which?? Strat temps seem to be more important than particular chemical make-up, yet, why aren’t we screaming about strat cooling causing the hole?? Cause they can’t come up with an anthro connection that is plausible though they have tried!!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
I have little doubt that the pretty much worldwide ban on CFC has done some good…
Sorry, but I really don’t like this attitude. There is no way such a statement can be made in the absence of reliable data. The whole thing was a farce and nothing good can be said about it unless you’re willing to do some real science and show the benefit. Lacking that, zero tolerance for pseudoscience is the order of the day.
Don’t forget that in many jusistictions it is illegal to service your own AC system thanks to this. Money was made hand over fist when fundamental environmentalists, law makers, and big business got together.
*Go Green so we can take your green*
kuhnkat,
All I pointed out was that the Nature article linked to originally was outdated.
That’s no reason to have a cow.
I think carnival barkers would resent the comparison
The Precautionary Principle tells us that we should never bathe, because the single biggest cause of accidents and death in the home is the bath. Baths should be outlawed, or heavily taxed, with a cap on new bath construction. Those houses that do not install baths should be able to sell their rights to build a bath to those houses that want to install a second bath. This will create a market for baths and new opportunities for employment.
This will be a win-win for the environment. As we reduce the number of baths this will reduce the demand for water from our lakes and rivers, preserving our natural heritage. The saving in energy previously used to heat bath water will significantly reduce the amount of CO2 released into the environment, maintaining the planet at its optimum temperature.
Joe D’Aleo says:
January 8, 2011 at 9:26 am
One thing not mentioned was the ban also included the propellants used in inhalers for the many millions of people suffering from asthma (as I do) or COPD.
___________________________________________________________
Joe,
You might find the following article from Feb 2010 in the American Thinker interesting:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/the_cfc_ban_global_warmings_pi.html
John M:
from your own link:
“Lin’s group has proposed another set of values, but its results may not be the last word on the issue, he says.”
I’ve paid some attention to the ozone issue because it fits with the science that I have seen in connection with the fact that the stratosphere appears to cool when the sun is active (less ozone and a larger hole overall) and warm when the sun is less active (more ozone and a smaller ozone hole overall) which is contrary to established climatology.
I think the problem is that established climatology places too much weight on ozone effects below the stratopause where the usual assumptions do hold true. However it now seems to me that the opposite process applies above the stratopause and in global net terms it is the upper portion that is dominant thereby altering the entire vertical temperature profile so as to affect pressure distribution in the troposphere and thereby change regional climates and the entire global energy budget.
On considering all the evidence that we have I find that the ozone hole must grow and the stratosphere and mesosphere must cool together naturally when the sun is more active and the opposite when the sun is less active.
Blaming both the cooling stratosphere and increased size of the ozone hole at a time of more active sun on human intervention was a major error and has yet to be recognised as such.