UN Global Warming Propaganda Campaign: Return to Perceived Success Indicates Desperation

Opinion by Dr. Tim Ball |

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is running a campaign using television weather presenters and national broadcasters from around the world, to influence the UN’s Climate Summit 2014 scheduled for New York City on September 23. It is a counter attack designed to offset their losing the public, political, and scientific debate.

They’re releasing a series of films to, as WMO Secretary General Michel Jarroud said,

“paint a compelling picture of what life could be like on a warmer planet,”…“Climate change is already leading to more extreme weather such as intense heat and rain…We need to act now.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Reports are the basis for the films. It is bureaucratic incest, since Maurice Strong set up the IPCC through the WMO. The films are scenarios of the future that imply are based on good science. They can’t be correct because every prediction the IPCC ever made, from their inception in 1990, was wrong. If the prediction is wrong, the science is wrong.

On Wednesday September 10, 2014 the UN announced that the ozone layer was recovering. They said,

“Experts said it showed the success of a 1987 ban on man-made gases that damage the fragile high-altitude screen, an achievement that would help prevent millions of cases of skin cancer and other conditions.”

We are not told who the experts are, but the ban they reference is the Montreal Protocol. It is too convenient and likely part of the campaign to push for a global climate Protocol at the September 23^rd meeting. Headline to the story says, “Ozone layer shows first sign of recovery, UN says.” That is incorrect. In 2003, Andrew Revkin reported a similar claim in the New York Times. He wrote,

Scientists monitoring the highest levels of the atmosphere say they have detected a slowing in the rate of destruction of Earth’s protective veil of ozone, the first sign that the phasing out of chemicals that harm the ozone layer is having a restorative effect.

Now the UN is setting up for the September 23^rd meeting using the ozone layer issue as a template for action on CO2. It is understandable from their perspective, because they tout it as a victory. It wasn’t! The ozone story parallels and was effectively a trial run for CO2 and Kyoto. They want a similar protocol, but are challenged because Kyoto failed.

Some of the same people who created and pushed the ozone issue were also deeply involved in CO2 and the IPCC. Susan Solomon, is a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration employee, described by Wikipedia as follows;

Her work formed the basis of the U.N. Montreal Protocol, an international agreement to protect the ozone layer by regulating damaging chemicals. Solomon served the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. She was a contributing author for the Third Assessment Report. She was also Co-Chair of Working Group I for the Fourth Assessment Report.

The Ozone Issue

The Montreal Protocol is a template, but not for pushing the need for a Climate Protocol. It is a template for how ozone destruction by human produced Chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) was a test run for the deception that human CO2 is causing global warming. It’s a template, not because it worked, but because it was completely unnecessary, cost a lot of money and created a multitude of other problems. It is a template because humans were blamed for atmospheric ozone destruction without evidence, while natural processes were ignored.

They said CFCs would remain in the atmosphere for up to 100 years, as they did with CO2. As recently as September 2012, they said recovery of the ozone would take a very long time.

The ozone layer outside the Polar regions will take 40 years to recover to its pre-1980 levels, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said Friday.

But they also said,

The ozone layer over the Antarctic is expected to recover much later.

It only appears the Montreal Protocol worked because there was no problem in the first place. Variations in ozone were perfectly natural. Now, they need to use it as a success for political reasons, even if it exposes the error of their claims. It is not about science, so the facts are arranged as required.

The Ozone Deception

A major tenet of the environmental paradigm is that almost all change is due to human activity. Once a change is determined, it triggers a search for the human cause, usually ignoring natural change.

The British Antarctic survey team determined in the early 1980s that ozone levels were lower than measures taken in 1957. Press reports were sensationalist and created the idea this was abnormal. James Lovelock, the British scientist who proposed the Gaia hypothesis, warned against overreaction, but was ignored because the issue suited environmental hysteria.

Once designated unnatural, the search for a human cause began. Lab experiments by Sherwood and Molina in 1974 determined chlorine as the active ingredient in chlorofluorocarbon that destroys ozone. They did not recreate the temperature and pressure conditions in the ozone layer at some 20 km over Antarctica. They produced a static condition when the major natural mechanism causing ozone variation over Antarctica is an intense atmospheric circulation system associated with the Circumpolar Vortex. Because of the land/water juxtapositions, it is far more intense than in the Arctic. Their work was fundamental to the hypothesis that CFCs (commercial name Freon), which are four times denser than air, were carried to the lower stratosphere, where the chlorine portion, which is indistinguishable from natural source chlorine, destroyed ozone. As Richard Lindzen said about global warming and CO2, the consensus was reached before the research had begun.

The Evidence

There are no holes in the ozone. There were none when it became a political issue in the 1990s and none today. This is not just semantics, but an important fact in the relationship between scientific accuracy, the public perception and political reaction. Ozone levels vary considerably in different regions, at different altitudes and over time. The so-called “ozone hole” is a region in the ozone layer generally located over Antarctica, although it moves around with changes in the Circumpolar Vortex. Ozone level is lowest during the Southern Hemisphere winter, at which time ozone concentration is approximately 1/3 of the global average. It is an area of thinning due to natural causes.

Hypotheses are only as valid as the assumptions on which they are derived. A basic assumption of the ozone hypothesis is that sunlight is constant, including the ultraviolet portion of the spectrum. That assumption forces you to assume that any variation in ozone levels is not caused by solar variations. We know now that the original assumption of constant sunlight and therefore constant ultraviolet radiation is incorrect. As a NASA Report explains,

Though UV solar radiation makes up a much smaller portion of the TSI than infrared or visible radiation, UV solar radiation tends to change much more dramatically over the course of solar cycles.

When portions of ultraviolet light (UV) strike free atmospheric oxygen it splits the oxygen (O2) into single oxygen (O) molecules. These quickly combine in threes to create ozone (O3). The entire process is called photo-disassociation. This process occurs variously from 20 to 40 km above the surface in the Ozone Layer. The system is self-correcting because as more ultraviolet penetrates deeper into the atmosphere it confronts more free oxygen (O2). By 15 km above the surface, over 95% of the UV has been expended in the creation of ozone.

Like the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis (AGW), research continued in spite of media and political acceptance. It was determined that a major cause of changes in the size and extent of the Antarctic ozone hole are the intense wind patterns and circulations associated with the extensive Antarctic high-pressure zone and the surrounding wind pattern known as the Circumpolar Vortex. A second factor is Polar Stratospheric Cloud (PSC) that form when gases including water vapor sublimate directly to crystals because of the intensely low temperatures (-70°C and below) and pressures over the South Pole.

Bureaucracies were established for CFCs, laws passed, and punishments determined for anyone using CFCs. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other national agencies are replicating this by identifying CO2 as a pollutant and toxic substance.

Ramifications

The attack on CFCs undermines another technology that, like fossil fuels, dramatically improved the quality of life. Refrigeration tackled the serious problem of food spoilage. In developing nations estimates claim 60% of food produced doesn’t make it to the table. The figure is 30% for developed nations. Loss reduction is due partly to reduced field and transportation loss, but mostly to spoilage in storage.

As a result, when the Montreal Protocol was proposed, India and China’s position was identical to their position with Kyoto and other attempts to restrict their development and improvement of standard of living. They said you’ve reduced your losses through refrigeration, now we want to reduce ours. You produced this product now want to ban it, claiming it is an environmental hazard. We suggest you reduce your levels and let us increase ours, to achieve the same benefits. The answer was no! As a result India and China did not participate in the Montreal Protocol, just as they are not part of Kyoto and oppose any other form of restriction. When I pointed out to the Parliamentary committee that India and China were not participating, the Chairman’s assistant disappeared to return 20 minutes later to say they produced less than 5 percent of the CFCs, so they were not significant.

Nurtured by environmental hysteria and the determination to show all changes in the natural world are due to human activity, the claim CFCs were destroying ozone jumped directly from an unproven hypothesis to a scientific fact. All the other ingredients were at hand; the big greedy corporation; the dangerous product; refrigeration that improved quality of life at the expense of the environment; and the fear factor of increased skin cancer, especially among children.

The political juggernaut was underway as fearful people demanded political action. Most actions did not and could not deal with the problem. Companies turned production of sun blockers into a multibillion-dollar industry even though their product didn’t, until a few years ago, deal with those portions of ultraviolet radiation that are harmful to the skin. Claims of increases in skin cancer failed to take into account increase in life expectancy or such anomalies as the lowest levels of skin cancer occurred in Colorado, the state with the highest levels of ultraviolet radiation due to altitude. Humans require ultraviolet radiation to produce vitamin D in the body. Inadequate levels lead to various diseases, including bone problems such as rickets in children and scrofula, a form of tuberculosis.

There are still no “holes in the ozone”, but the area of thinning over Antarctica continues to vary due to natural conditions. As the climate change deception falters, the counterattack builds. The UN realizes the New York meeting is critical, maybe even a ‘tipping point’. Out of desperation, they fall back on the illusionary “success” of the Montreal Protocol, thus risking the exposure of that charade.