Guest Opinion: Dr. Tim Ball
My grandmother told me “Your sins will find you out.” I don’t know if it’s original, but it certainly seems true when you look at the sins of those who created the ozone hole and global warming deceptions. Exposure of the sins is not surprising because many of the same people produced the template used in both cases. It involved creating unnatural scenarios that would eventually be out of phase with natural events. The truth is slow, but it eventually catches up, because, as Aldous Huxley explained,
“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
There is not now and never was a “hole in the ozone.” The phrase was a public relations construct to mislead and exploit fear as the basis for a political agenda. The procedure used in the exploitation of environmental and climate for a political agenda is to take normal patterns and events and present them as, or imply, they are abnormal. It works because most people don’t know what is normal. Global warming became the largest exploitation of this practice, but it was based on the knowledge gained from reported ozone depletions over Antarctica. The ozone deception served as a forerunner, a practice run, for the global warming deception to follow.
Background
The objective is to link the normal change or event to human activity to form the basis for a political agenda culminating in control of people. The change must be global to bypass national governments and establish the need for a world government. A 1974 Club of Rome comment said, “The Earth has cancer and the cancer is man.” Their anti-humanity theme continued in the 1994 Club of Rome book, The First Global Revolution. It was written in 1994 but is more reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984.
“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill … All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.”
Why do we need “a new enemy”? First they create the false or exaggerated problem, and then, they offer the solution. It is wrapped in the guilt that ‘you caused it’, but they offer salvation. Give us control and money so we can save you and the planet. Like all religious leaders, they claim the power of absolution. Pass the collection plate.
There is and always was an area of thinner ozone over Antarctica that is totally due to natural causes (Figure 1).
Figure 1 shows the level in Dobson Units explained in Figure 2. As with CO2, it is important the public understand the volumes and distributions so involved. Applying the information in Figure 2 against the conditions in Figure 1, you can see that the global average of 300 Dobson Units means if you compressed the ozone down to the surface at 0°C and one atmospheric pressure you have a layer 3 mm thick. The level over Antarctica in Figure 1 is 150 DU or half the average – thinner, but not a hole.
The entire story of ozone depletion due to Chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) was just that, a story, a scientifically created deception. It was a forerunner and template for the much larger deception of global warming entirely due to human produced CO2. Now, the evidence, much of which was known at the start but deliberately ignored, is emerging.
Sins Being Exposed
A recent headline illustrates the problem created by the deception that CFCs were causing Antarctic ozone depletion. Sir Walter Scott’s observation about tangled webs applies.
At a total extent of 28.2 million square kilometres, this year’s ozone hole was surpassed by only Sept 24, 2003 (28.4 million sq km), Sept 24, 2006 (29.6 million sq km) and September 9, 2000 (29.9 million sq km).
Why did the ozone hole grow so large this year? It was a combination of just how persistent ozone-depleting chemicals are in the atmosphere, and just how cold the atmosphere got over Antarctica during the past month.
Gradually they are presenting arguments that approximate the truth without disclosing they were wrong. They hope nobody will notice. NASA GISS is at the center of the strategy. Consider the following bureaucratese waffle.
Twenty years after the Montreal Protocol, Antarctica’s ozone hole isn’t growing substantially larger each year, but it isn’t actually –recovering – clearly growing smaller each year – yet, either. Atmospheric scientists reported that conclusion on December 11, 2013 to an audience of Earth scientists at the 2013 American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. These scientists presented results of two new studies, indicating that variations in temperature and winds drive year-to-year changes the size of the ozone hole. Susan Strahan of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland presented this work, saying:
Ozone holes with smaller areas and a larger total amount of ozone are not necessarily evidence of recovery attributable to the expected chlorine decline.
… meteorology [not chemistry] was responsible for the increased ozone and resulting smaller hole, as ozone-depleting substances that year were still elevated.
The trouble is ten years earlier a 2003 report said,
The rate at which ozone is being destroyed in the upper stratosphere is slowing, and the levels of ozone-destroying chlorine in that layer of the atmosphere have peaked and are going down — the first clear evidence that a worldwide reduction in chlorofluorocarbon pollution is having the desired effect, according to a new study.
The Ozone Layer
Ozone is created in the upper atmosphere in a process called photodisassociation. When ultraviolet (UV) radiation, which is a small part of the total electromagnetic energy from the sun, strikes free oxygen molecules (O2) (Figure 3). The molecules are split into single oxygen molecules (O), which combine with other O2 to create ozone (O3). (Figure 4) Ultraviolet is critical because it is the major factor in the creation of O3. Ultra means ‘beyond’ so it is light that is beyond the violet (400 nanometers) on the visible protion of the spectrum. It is visble because it is detectable by the human eye.
Formation of ozone occurs between 15 and 55 km above the surface with maximum concentration between 15 and 30 km. Densities vary horizontally and vertically, so levels over any region change hourly with air movement in the upper atmosphere. The Ozone Layer is self-healing because as UV penetrates further into the atmosphere it encounters more free oxygen.
Solar rays strike the atmosphere at a gradually decreasing angle from 90° at the equator to 0° at the poles. In his September 20, 1995, Congressional testimony Professor Fred Singer explained,
“A projected 10 percent UV increase from a worst-case global ozone depletion is the equivalent of moving just 60 miles closer to the equator….New Yorkers moving to Florida experience a more than 200 percent increase in UV because of the change of latitude.”
External Societal Dynamics of Deception
An important point to raise at this juncture relates to my first threatened lawsuit. It followed a radio debate with a dermatologist who made dire threats and urged use of sunblockers. I pointed out that humans require ultraviolet radiation to limit scrofula, a form of tuberculosis, that is created by a bacteria that is killed off by the UV. It also creates vitamin D that is necessary to prevent rickets, a form of bone disease. I told the audience that keeping children out of the sun and reducing the amount of UV exposure was potentially dangerous. This demonization of UV ignores its benefits. The same situation is true of CO2 and its essential role in the life of plants and all life.
It was additionally problematic because until recently the blockers only worked for UVB. Here is a comment from 2014.
Sunscreens are important skin-care products used to prevent photoaging and skin cancer. Until recently it was believed that blocking UVB radiation and sunburn were the only measures needed to prevent sun damage. The SPF rating was developed to measure the ability of a sunscreen to block UVB radiation.
Now we know that UVA radiation also damages the skin. Although the FDA has proposed a rating system that lets you know how well a sunscreen blocks UVA, that proposal has not been approved yet.
The dermatologist disagreed with my comment that sunscreen producers were a major promoter of the dangers. Recent revenue from just three US companies was $355 million with a 2.6% annual growth. Increased lifespan explains the increase in skin cancer, not ozone thinning. Save money, put on a hat.
False Assumptions
Global warming and ozone thinning each began with a hypothesis and in both cases were supported by completely false assumptions designed to predetermine and isolate a human cause. With warming, it was the assumption that an increase in CO2 causes a temperature increase. The only place in the world where that is true is in the IPCC computer models. With ozone thinning, the assumption was that solar energy and, therefore, ultraviolet radiation is constant. Since ozone is created by the interaction between UV and oxygen, assuming UV is constant eliminates it as an explanation for variation in ozone levels. It eliminated the most obvious natural variation, which is precisely what they wanted. It also required identification of a man-made product, even if it also occurred naturally like CO2, to blame. In the case of ozone, the product was chlorine, which is part of the refrigerant chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) commercially known as Freon.
Keeling and others, in conjunction with the IPCC, identified human produced CO2 as the problem. Crutzer, Molina and Rowland produced the science necessary to point the finger at CFCs. They, like Gore and the IPCC, received a Nobel Prize for their work. Their award reads in part,
“…for their work in atmospheric chemistry, particularly concerning the formation and decomposition of ozone”.
The award is arranged to give their work political credibility, a practice that makes the Prizes a mockery.
Notice it does not specify destruction of ozone in the Ozone Layer. They didn’t and couldn’t simulate atmospheric conditions in the Ozone Layer. With the pseudoscientific evidence, the political agenda could proceed. With both CFCs and CO2, they abandoned the scientific method and determined to prove rather than disprove their hypotheses. The imperative was to ban CFCs not to test the theory. Like the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) hypothesis, the consensus was determined before the research began, and contradictory or conflicting research ignored.
They ignored variations in ultraviolet radiation, which we now know is the major cause of variation. They also ignored the effect of other gases, especially water vapor in the form of ice crystals. They ignored the properties and effects of other gases at the extreme temperatures of -70°C and colder (see Strahan’s comments above). These crystals created what were initially ignored, namely Polar Stratospheric Clouds (PSC). In 1998, the University of Cambridge said,
“the precise chemistry and details of PSCs are not fully understood…” “We do not yet fully understand the mechanism for PSC freezing, and this remains one of the largest uncertainties in stratospheric ozone modelling.”
This revelation is ten years after the “science was settled” with the signing of the Montreal Protocol.
Another parallel between the CO2 and CFC deception was production of a “wanted list” of similar planet destroying chemicals. It is another form of the consensus argument; if there are many, it must be true. With CFCs the list identified Ozone Destroying Chemicals (ODC). With CO2 the list identified Global Warming Potentials (GWP). The UNFCCC list identified dozens of GWPs but does not include water vapour, which they eliminated by their limiting definition of climate change for the IPCC.
By 1987, the manipulators persuaded over 190 countries to sign the Montreal Protocol. It called for elimination of ODCs by countries that signed, committing them to limiting all production. Interesting differences with the Kyoto Protocol resulted in similar political outcomes. The US and other industrialized nations ratified the Montreal Protocol. Later AGW promoters argued it was proof that the Kyoto Protocol would work. However, two countries, India and China said, you reduced your food losses by 30 percent through the refrigerant CFCs that you said was an environmentally safe neutral gas. Now, you are saying that we can’t reduce our food losses by using the same refrigerant. They proposed that the developed nations reduce their use and allow them to raise their level. The proposal was rejected. It was another example of what Paul Driessen wrote about so effectively in his book Eco-Imperialism, which Wikipedia defines as follows.
Eco-imperialism is a term coined by Paul Driessen to refer to the forceful imposition of Western environmentalist views on developing countries.
Another parallel involved the challenge of separating the human-produced chemical from the natural. Chlorine was the active ingredient in CFCs that they claimed destroyed ozone in the high atmosphere. They claimed the chlorine from CFCs was different than natural chlorine.
Susan Solomon became interested in stratospheric chemistry and did her thesis research with Paul Crutzen of Nobel fame. Later from lab work at NOAA Susan Solomon produced a theoretical paper about the role of chlorine dioxide and the destruction of ozone. There has never been, to my knowledge, in situ evidence. Solomon went on to work as a contributing author for the IPCC TAR (2001) and co-chair of working Group I of the FAR (2007). These were two of the most influential IPCC Reports on policies driving the recent Paris Conference.
The false science was exposed in “The Holes in Ozone Hoax” As they wrote
“Omitted from this story of mass destruction is the fact that the amounts of chlorine contained in all the world’s CFCs are insignificant compared to the amount of chlorine put into the atmosphere from natural sources”
The CO2 equivalent to the chlorine deception involved claiming that the CO2 produced from burning fossil fuels differed from “natural” CO2. Similarly, the volumes produced by humans are within the error of the estimate of at least two major non-human sources. It would be an insignificant amount, even if it were causing global warming. The only way the IPCC was able to claim human CO2 was the major factor involved eliminating almost all other possible sources of change. Promoters of the CFC fiasco did the same earlier and achieved their goal. No wonder they tried it again with CO2.
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Mark Twain observed that a lie can be half way around the world before truth can pull its boots on.
Please less comments, because we must save the Planet , your pleasure to explain everything drive the use of energy too high: your brains are hotter , your metabolism is higher , that means a lot of CO2 extra, the use of servers means higher electricity consumption, that means much CO2 to produce it and so on… Please do more restraint to save the Planet !
What is this Planet to talk about greenhouse effect as long our Planet Earth it is an open system.
I hope you didn’t took me seriously ! .
Next up is nitrogen.
http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/nitrogen-and-climate-change-dave-reay/?sf1=barcode&st1=9781137286956
I suspect that methane will be the next target, as a small amount of it is associated with the evil oil and gas companies.
Now that they feel they are all justified in taxing the air we exhale, now they will concentrate on justifying taxing our farts.
About time.
And oxygen is bl..dy dangerous too, look at fires.
I guess once we’re breathing vacuum they’ll be happy.
You’ll know it’s time to run when you see the headline “Wild fires to be controlled by reducing oxygen emissions …”
It’s a joke. Isn’t it? Someone please tell me it’s a joke? Please. He can’t be serious, can he? Can he? Can he?
Sorry, that was a reply to the nitrogen comment.
The nitrogen oxides were the key in the volkswagen diesel software.
I keep trying to make this point but the Ozone Hole is not as a result of Ozone getting destroyed.
It just gets forced out of the south polar vortex to the mid-latitudes. It gets “swept out”, not destroyed.
When the Ozone Hole is peaking in September/October, the Ozone concentrations in the middle south latitudes peak at the opposite time of the year. This is the end of the cold winter at the south pole. When the Sun returns, the Ozone moves back in.
Maybe this chart will provide some proof for some. The average of these two latitudes hardly changes at all throughout the year and it has not gone down over this period.
http://s1.postimg.org/p25kctw9b/Ozone_Shifts_Latitude_Nov15.png
Data from the Climate Explorer.
http://climexp.knmi.nl/select.cgi?id=someone@somewhere&field=o3col
From my reading on the subject, the bulk of Earth’s ozone is created in the equatorial stratosphere. It moves polewards both because of a lesser partial pressure of ozone at higher latitudes, and also because of equatorial heating and cooling at the poles. In any event, ozone has a relatively short half-life, and in the absence of sunlight, there is no new ozone created at the poles in the Winter to replenish what naturally decays. As I remarked in a previous post, anomalously high concentrations are routinely recorded outside the Antarctic circumpolar vortex. I’m not sure of the exact mechanism that stalls the migration, but the evidence is visible. As to the photolysis and catalytic destruction when the sun first comes up over the horizon, I’m pretty sure it happens, but the effect is probably overemphasized.. The Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer was was unable to measure Winter ozone levels because it required sunlight, something in short supply over the South Pole in the Winter. So, what we see is during the earliest possible measurements, there is low ozone which continues to decrease in concentration until the vortex breaks up and the ozone sitting outside the vortex can mix with the depleted air. Once the sun gets high enough in the sky, it is capable of actually producing some ozone over the pole, although it is by then also supplemented by ozone from lower latitudes as it is free to migrate into that area in the absence of the vortex.
In order to accept your hypothesis that the ozone is “swept out” of the high latitudes, you need to provide a reasonable mechanism for extracting it that does a better job of explaining the process than what my summary above does.
Bill and Clyde
Ozone is destroyed continuously faster than it is being created when there are more GCR’s than there is sunlight, i.e. at the poles. The ingress of tropical ozone into Antarctic air is blocked by wind for part of the year, plus there is no sunshine in winter for a long time.
For this reason I lean more towards Clyde’s explanation but add that ozone is not a very long-lived molecule. It is continuously subtracted in the presence of chlorine, bromine, GCR’s and lack of sunlight. That CFC’s contain chlorine is co-incidental and minor. The ocean output vastly dominates the total.
I would have thought dihydrogen monoxide would be the next?
Everything, however finely spun, finally comes to the sun.
A wall with cracks will soon collapse.
The truth will out, eventually.
That first line is Biblical, from Numbers 32:23
This goes against the two scares.
First, if there is umprecedent warming, how come the atmosphere in Antarctica got so cold?
And second, Chemical reactions slow down as temperature drops. How come ozone gets depleted faster?
The stratosphere has cooled because increasing greenhouse gases cool the top radiative level of the atmosphere by increased emission of radiation. Colder polar stratosphere temperature favors the ozone-destroying reaction because it is catalyzed by polar ice clouds.
Donald, how did the greenhouse gases skip by the troposphere to get to the stratosphere? troposphere has not warmed……
This would only be true if there were a mid-to-upper tropospheric “hot spot” in tropical regions, required by the physics of the global circulation models if there is warming. The cooling of the stratosphere is, theoretically, supposed to be “compensation” for that hot spot.
However, no hot spot has been detected instrumentally. Sherwood et al. claim to have found it after dramatic and very questionable torture of the data, but the instruments still say it isn’t there.
Latitude asks about greenhouse gases skipping the troposphere: The uppermost troposphere has cooled and the lower troposphere has warmed over the period of the satellite record, which an increase of greenhouse gases would cause.
Does Trenberth know this or is he still looking for the stratospheric hotspot that “proves” global warming? You sound like the people who predicted warmer winters because of “global warming” and when cities like Boston get hit by the worst blizzard in years then it is also because of “global warming”. If North pole ice extension gets a record low, it is global warming, if South pole ice estension gets a record high, it is also global warming, if great lakes ice cover increases, guess what? also manmade global warming.
First, even catalyzed reactions slow down at colder temperatures and go faster at warmer temperatures.
And second, and more important. CFCs are out of the picture in the polar ice clouds hypothesis. So, if ozone depletion is catalyzed by polar ice clouds instead of CFCs, can we use our CFCs again?
Actually, the polar ice clouds hypothesis is even more ambiguous than the CAGW hypothesis. It looks like somebody saw some stratospheric clouds in the south pole and thought “that must have something to do with the ozone hole”. And that’s it. Nothing else is known. What is the reaction mechanism? Are CFCs involved in the reaction? If yes, then how? What are the structural features that make ice a catalyst for thar reaction? Does the ice on the poles or at the top of the mountains catalyze the reaction too? If not, why not? What is the difference of the free energy or activation between the catalyzed reaction and the non-catalyzed one? With that difference of free energies of activations we can calculate how much the reaction is catalyzed by applying the equation:
DeltaG = DeltaGº + RTln(cat/uncat)
For an example about a mechanism of action of a catalyst check: http://www.jbc.org/content/242/22/5212.full.pdf
The predicted upper atmospheric hotspot of rapid warming is not anywhere in the stratosphere, but in the middle-upper troposphere in a subset of the tropics – in and near the intertropical convergence zone. The fact that this is essentially nonexistent is evidence of climate change models considering feedbacks to be excessively positive. That issue apparently arose due to climate models being tuned to hindcast the past with an assumption of lack of multidecadal oscillations such as AMO or multidecadal patterns in frequency and intensity of El Nino or La Nina. So, the climate models seem to have been tuned to assume that the great warming from the early 1970s to 2005 was all manmade and none of it was from a natural cycle that started its downswing phase early in this century.
Ice on the poles and on mountains does not assist the destruction of stratospheric ozone because there is no stratospheric ozone on the polar surfaces or on mountains.
“First, even catalyzed reactions slow down at colder temperatures and go faster at warmer temperatures.”
With the PSC the chemical reaction is getting in a total different “environment”: The reaction move from the gas phase into the liguid phase when the temperatures plunges under a certain level. Thus the temperature dependency is not covered with your equation alone. In the different phases you have significant different reaction rate coefficients. The other questions can be easily answered using the usual online resources: I would recommend to study this:
http://www.ccpo.odu.edu/SEES/ozone/oz_class.htm
When you are thru you will be able to judge stuff you find on ozone hole in the web.
Duh. “unprecedented”.
Depleted because not renewed as it becomes O2.
ultimately don’t the Club of Rome have to claim credit for the human population collapse that they are so busy trying to achieve? Or is the idea to just manage from crisis to crisis always blaming the industrial system as the world suffers environmental collapse.
What collapse? Stats show major improvement.
Brian the point of the Club of Rome is to advocate for a “post industrial” society and a human population of around half a billion worldwide. That’s the “thinkers” behind the neo Malthusian wing of the AGW crowd. A human population reduction by 6.5 people on scales less than millennia would be a collapse!
Before that it was DDT
Susan Solomon will be judged by history as the equivalent of Rachel Carson. Both gained fame through bogus science that caused the deaths of millions of humans
Carson’s folly: DDT is not carcinogenic, but rather is immensely effective in killing malaria-carrying mosquitos. Millions of African children (in particular) have died due to banning of DDT.
Solomon’s folly: Human use of CFC’s changes the south-polar ozone concentration. We now know that polar ozone is largely governed by variations in solar UV radiation (hmmm … no human effect there). Montreal-protocol-forced reductions in CFC production have only made refrigeration more expensive, which reduces human-engineered cooling in hot climates and makes food storage more expensive.
These two women will share historical excoriation with Margaret Sanger (Planned Parenthood founder and architect of the Negro [eugenics] Project) as enemies of humanity, killers of millions, and icons of false science.
Our civil right to control our own bodies matter a lot to many of us females.
Good summary GeologyJim.
DDT is only banned for mosquito control in about a couple dozen countries, mostly ones more prosperous and industrialized than the ones in the malaria-stricken regions of Africa.
News: DDT is not even an insecticide, but a repellant that disrupts the ability to sense direction of CO2 sources. (DDT into a cloud of mosquitoes does not produce a rain of bug corpses, but a flight from the area.)
You seem to have a unique view of the properties of DDT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT
“Before that it was DDT”, in competition with Acid Rain.
Tim Ball loves to start his essays with quotes. Note above he quotes Aldous Huxley. In prior posts he starts his formulaic essays with a quotes from Winston Churchill or John Saul etc. There are a couple of reasons for this. 1) Borrowing wisdom. It is much easier to convince somebody of something if you plant an accepted truth, a well known truth is best, to prepare your reader that MORE wisdom is yet to come. It doesn’t have to be even relevant to the essay, just so long as it cultivates the mental soil, so to speak. 2) Tim wants us to believe that he is erudite. Quoting people is one of those methods to let y’all know that he has read stuff before. Again, it is to make us pay attention and maybe even awe him. Ok fair enough. He especially likes to make reference to quotes that sound like Shakespeare but are really from more obscure writers. Shakespeare is so ordinary. He also like to quote the bible, but oddly, he never attributes the origin of his quote to that source? His grandma apparently said “your sins will find you out”. Only she wasn’t the first to have said that. That is a quote from the Old Testament Numbers 32:23 “But if you fail to do this, you will be sinning against the LORD; and you may be sure that your sin will find you out.” Not specifically quoting Northrop Frye’s work The Great Code wherein Frye makes the case that all great literature has roots in scripture, so too did Ball’s grandma. I suspect Ball knew that but a defect runs deep in Dr Ball.
“Do you see a man wise in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him.”
Okay , you are no fan of the messenger……..what is wrong with the message ? I deal with many people ….some who seem to have been weaned on a dill pickle….and sometimes they are right…..it seems best to agree when they are right, and to let the rest go. YMMV.
Just right, Bob. Paul W’s criticism isn’t, as far as I can see, criticism at all. Just pointless waffle. There are some interesting challenges that could be made on the substance of Dr. Tim’s post but this sort of stuff is so distracting (perhaps that’s the idea?) that I’ll leave it for when cooler debate prevails.
Sweet Old Bob December 5, 2015 at 3:31 pm
Okay , you are no fan of the messenger……..what is wrong with the message ?
Plenty, he has no clue about the mechanism of ozone depletion and misrepresented what is known and observed.
Saying you do not like a man’s sources or quotes while finding nothing wrong with them does not mean anything. Neither does saying the man has a defect, we all have defects. But the fact remains that many people on WUWT think Dr Ball is a good writer, an honest man, and everything he has said is worthwhile. I have yet to see any substantial refutation of his work.
Paul, if it’s so terrible to use quotes, why did you do it? And what’s wrong with “borrowing wisdom”? Expecting everyone to reinvent the wheel instead of learning from the wisdom of others is pure foolishness. There’s nothing wrong with quoting others, even if they were quoting or paraphrasing someone else. Writers do it all the time. Your diatribe reeks of personal animosity. I fail to see any real basis for your complaint.
So what was the point of your post?
Very interesting observations, Paul.
Well, on second thoughts, not very interesting really, just observations.
Westhaver……The great defect lies in you.
Paul,
When they say “Don’t play the man, play the ball!” they do not mean that you should attack Dr. Ball.
I think that that advice is given to encourage you to swallow the zealous bile that clearly rises in your throat, and to affect a demeanour of emotional detachment, such that you can reveal your antagonist’s error with perspicuity and decorum.
Since you have disregarded that aphoristic counsel, you find yourself in the embarrassing position of hypocritical self-impalement.
Your assertion that ” That is a quote from the Old Testament Numbers 32:23″ is false; you are confounding ‘quote’ and ‘paraphrase’.
Tim’s grandma’ formulated (apparently) her own truism with input from the translation of the bible that she was familiar with. You appear to ignore that and, then, go on to begrudge Tim his nostalgic recollection.
You launch into a sophomoric psycho-analysis of Tim’s literary style, projecting your own puerile prejudices onto his motivation. You scour the “Compleet Workes of Shakespeare” (ThanK god for google) to validate your hypothesis of “Oblique Allusion”. You resort to a number of curious ploys, like folksy “y’all” to impute condescension. You seize this “god-given” opportunity to quote your favourite book. You throw in a revered (by some), Canadian academic, along with the title of one of his books. That’s not to suggest erudition. Is it?
Why?
It’s got nothing to do with Ozone!
Paul. Why are you so restrained today? Been taking your tranquilizers again?
I consider this to be ad-hominem argument. So what if he likes to quote others?
“When I quote others I do so in order to express my own ideas more clearly.” — Michel de Montaigne
I guess when you lose to the argument, it is not surprise you reach for the ad hominem.
So what! Who doesn’t .It detracts nichts from the article.Damn pettiness.
And the long running debate continues: is there such a thing as originality, in the pure sense, or is everything just a rehash of the ideas of others?
How now Horatio, you tremble and looke pale.
Is not this fomething more than fantafie ?
What thinke you on’t ?
I see that you cannot dispute the facts, so you foolishly display your ignorance by attempting to demean the author. So sad.
Still waiting for a reply.
Do try to be courteous, if you please.
Your time has run out.
Sturgis Hooper
Is there any error in any of the points that Dr Ball raised you you know and want to share?
Tim writes….”Their anti-humanity theme continued in the 1994 Club of Rome book, The First Global Revolution. It was written in 1994 but is more reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984.”
1994/1984 has a nice numerical alliteration but the book was published in 1991 (by Pantheon Books in the US, I have a British copy which was published by Simon & Schuster Ltd, Copyright © Alexander King and Bertrand Schneider, 1991).
Getting the publication date right is important, firstly as getting simple facts wrong affects how the veracity of the entire article is perceived.
More importantly 1991 predates 1992. The book was in print and therefore this important document was influencing policy makers in the run up to and during the Rio ‘Earth Summit’ of 1992 ( http://www.un.org/geninfo/bp/enviro.html ) which under (Conference Secretary-General) Maurice Strong produced ‘Agenda 21’.
You mention the Hole in the Ozone Layer and Global Warming. Another pseudo-scientific scare you did not mention was Acid Rain. Lakes in Northern Ontario were found to be acid. This was blamed on wind borne pollutants from the Detroit area..Scandinavian countries blamed the UK industrial Midlands for giving them acid rain. What the reporting “scientists” failed to mention was that the lakes whose acidity they measured were in the middle of coniferous forests. Conifers turn the earth around them acid and this leaches into lakes. Anyway, CO2 in the air will dissolve into raindrops forming carbonic acid. Another manufactured scare.
James: Maybe so, but we had real acid rain from the smelters at Sudbury and Rouyn. And if you ever spent a gusty summer’s day in Flin Flon. Honest, you could hardly see across the street.
Now they have found they can make money by trapping the SO2 and selling sulphuric acid (at Sudbury, anyway). The market provided a solution.
Yes, and the vegetation regrowth at Sudbury, Ontario is nothing short of fantastic compared to what it looked like in the 1960’s and 70’s. Haven’t been to Rouyn/Noranda or Flin Flon, Manitoba recently though.
Quote: “water vapor in the form of ice crystals”
Tim Ball you just blew “introduction to science 101”
Look, MFK,
Kudos to you for pointing out that whole ‘water’, ‘vapor’, ice thing!
Since you’re so clued in on this topic; which college offers “introduction to science 101”? Are you enrolled? Or, are there pre-requisites?
Is it a course in the Linguistics program?
Perhaps you might like look up the definition of cirrus clouds and, while you’re at it, the processes of sublimation and deposition.
@MFKBloulder,
What wrong with the phrase? Don’t clouds form when water vapor condenses to form ice crystals? I don’t understand your complaint.
It is simply as this: It is vapor or it is ice crystals.
And to make it a little bit tricky: when it is ice crystals it is likely that there is liquid water as well.
Please don’t show your scientific ignorance by trying to be clever and find fault. At the temperatures involved water vapor goes directly to ice crystals in the process of sublimation. That was part of the point I made when talking about Crutzer, Molina and Rowland’s inability to recreate temperatures and pressures at altitude over Antarctica.
Now you’re showing your scientific ignorance. The type I PSCs involved in O3 depletion are not water crystals, rather they are crystals of nitric acid trihydrate, or spherical drops of nitric acid and sulphuric acid solutions.
Talking about showing ignorance:
Tim Ball, you are comparing the Chemistry noble laureates appointed by (parts of) the scientific community with the peace Nobel Peace Price awarded by a committee appointed by politicians.
This spells ignorance IMHO.
Further on you write: “The award is arranged to give their work political credibility, a practice that makes the Prizes a mockery.”
At the time Rowland, Molina and Crutzen were awarded Nobel Price in Chemistry, the Montreal Protocol was already singed since 8 years. Why would they need the political credibility?
this is not a quote from the book
“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill … All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.”
The real quote which has quite a different interpretation:
http://www.archive.org/download/TheFirstGlobalRevolution/TheFirstGlobalRevolution.pdf
The common enemy of humanity is Man
In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill.
In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes.
All these dangers are caused by human intervention In natural processes. and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself.
And that changes the interpretation how exactly?
Chlorine from natural sources is different, due to its valence. It is in the form of chloride ions such as in salt, or hydrogen chloride which dissociates into hydrogen ions and chloride ions in contact with water such as cloud droplets that form in ascending air. These chlorine compounds are also water soluble and hygroscopic, and have a high rate of being rained out instead of even making it to the stratosphere.
True, but chlorine has nothing to do with the ozone hole, which will always be there.
Always?
At least it wasn’t there when Dobson went for his first measurements in 1957.
I wouldn’t be too quick to bet your paycheck on the claim that the so-called ozone hole didn’t exist before TOMS data started being collected in ’78. From Wikipedia, “The vertical distribution of ozone is derived using the Umkehr method [using the Dobson spectrophotometer]. This method relies on the intensities of reflected, rather than direct, UV light. Ozone distribution is derived from the change in the ratio of the same UV-pair frequencies with time as the sun sets. An ‘Umkehr’ measurement takes about three hours, and provides data up to an altitude of 48 km, with the most accurate information for altitudes above 30 km.”
This means that Dobson wouldn’t have been able to take profile measurements until the sun stayed above the horizon in the Spring for about 3 hours. More importantly, if the measuring station was located under the ‘hole,’ the spectrophotometer would be measuring the vertical distribution of ozone along a slant range south of the ‘hole.’ So, the reality is, we don’t have good vertical profile data prior to the launch of the first TOMS satellite.
All I said is that there are measurements during antarctic spring since 1957: measured was total ozone coulmn. This gives a fairly good measure for the ozone minimum. Do you have any indicator that in the last 50 years there were ozone column minima below 140 DU before the 80s?
The CFC exception for Primatene Mist (an over-the-counter epinephrine inhaler) expired a couple of years ago, so they took it off the shelves, even though there is as yet no non-CFC replacement.
The only over-the-counter alternative, AsthmaNefrin inhalers, quickly clog and fail, and they are not very portable.
Albuterol, the prescription “emergency” inhaler, is generally not as effective, is not available over the counter, and is not effective against allergy-related anaphylaxis.
As a result, the Montreal Protocol is killing people in the US, since there is no other over-the-counter medicine which will stop anaphylaxis in its tracks. For asthmatics this situation is an utter disaster.
Albuterol, the prescription “emergency” inhaler, is generally not as effective, is not available over the counter, and is not effective against allergy-related anaphylaxis.
Agree totally. I used to recommend and carry Primatine Mist, epinephrine, as a substitute for the immediate, on the spot and possibly life-saving treatment of Anaphylaxis and Asthma for anyone otherwise unprepared. There’s still no substitute.
Annie, Jpeden. I agree with you.
I use inhalers now that have a counter starting with 124 puffs. Well all of these inhalers need 2-3 puffs to start delivering medication. Then when the counter is about 20 or so they stop delivering medication. And rarely, I get one that either doesn’t have any medication included or somehow has eliminated the efficacy of the medication. I too miss Primatene Mist inhalers.
And if you calculate the volume or mass of the earth’s atmosphere and compare it to the propellant in all the inhalers ever made. A complete scam, and, as you say, deadly.
I’m glad somebody mentioned this so I don’t have to.
But yes- there is now a fully adequate solution:
AsthmaNefrin ampules are available from Walmart. The AsthmaNefrin nebulizer is total crap and the company certainly is fully aware of it. Apparently they have not been ragged on enough, yet.
However, there are other nebulizers that are good. One of those is the Mabis Minibreeze which will put out like a fog machine at and Alice Cooper concert.
Albuterol and Ipratropium do NOT stop an attack; adrenaline stops one in seconds, not minutes.
So nothing can substitute for adrenaline.
AsthmaNefrin is o.t.c. but the other drugs are not. While cheap (4$ for 20 ampules) they require you to pay a medical professional to scrawl something moderately legible on a special little form. That’s not so cheap.
So I’m interested if anybody has an idea how to figure out the number of deaths due to the banning of Primatene inhalers?
During the time from the drying.up of supply (a few months after the ban, the hoarded supplies became too scarce to find at any price) to the appearance of the AsthmaNefrin ampules, I enjoyed a morning waterboarding almost every day. It got so bad I wrote my will and made my peace. I can’t imagine everybody else so afflicted were quite so lucky.
In praise of Dr. Tim Ball:
This man had immense pressures brought to bear on him in an attempt to crush him.
He never broke. That’s a hero.
Paul, he’s not in competition with you for the throne of punditry. He’s not even playing in that sandbox.
If you throw yourself against him, you will be scratched and you will be broken because Dr. Tim is Mohs 12.
You are just talc.
I want to thank Paul Westhaver for confirming the validity of my article in the most traditional way possible.
“Argumentum ad Hominem (abusive and circumstantial): the fallacy of attacking the character or circumstances of an individual who is advancing a statement or an argument instead of trying to disprove the truth of the statement or the soundness of the argument. Often the argument is characterized simply as a personal attack.”
Believers seem to be running out of valid arguments, and slander is the currency of a bankrupt argument.
Yep, he’s guilty…sadly to this day they teach this crap in university courses across many disciplines, including biology and chemistry classes (and mathematics/statistics, too)..
IMO, your best article, and 100% correct on Ad hominem. Any individual using that tactic is slime.
BTW, did you ever delve into the DuPont R12 patent expiry and its relationship to the “Ozone Hole” in order to wind up with the newer refrigerant.
Kakoda asks: “did you ever delve into the DuPont R12 patent expiry and its relationship to the “Ozone Hole””
I doubt you’ll ever find anyone to admit that, the evidence as always going to be circumstantial. It was awfully convenient wasn’t it? The timing was perfect. I have an EPA Mobile HVAC Technicians certificate now so I’m able continue restoring antique cars from the 60’s and 70’s without being forced to convert them to R-134A, but I still pay about 4 to 6 times more for R-12 than I would have, so does anyone in an “undeveloped” country who’d like to maintain their refrigerator. No one’s ever going to prove the link. Ozone doesn’t form in the Antarctic because it just doesn’t get enough sunlight, nothing more to it.
What gets me is the green movement is so easy to co-op. You’d think they’d be smart enough to see they’re being manipulated by the same people they’re trying to regulate? Then they turn around and call me a tool of Big Oil or DuPont when I try pointing out the lies to them. It’s hard to watch it happen. Big Oil got them to shut down nuclear power. Now they’ve convinced all of them to stop fossil fuel exploration and development, knowing full well what that’s going to do to the energy markets. Give Exxon a choice between selling 100 barrels today for $50 each or 10 barrels tomorrow at $500? Which are they going to pick? The oil isn’t going bad on the shelves or anything.
It’s the almost criminal stupidity of these folks that bothers me more than anything else I think.
“BTW, did you ever delve into the DuPont R12 patent expiry”
Wikipedia says R12 was invented between 1930 and 1935. That means the patent should have expired about 1950, about 40 years before the ozone scam.
I did. Nothing to it. I am not a fan of dupont but they had nothing to do with cfc being banned., in fact they fought it.
Here you go…
Montreal Protocol fashioned by DuPont in lieu of an expiring patent and environmental pressure,
https://eng.ucmerced.edu/people/awesterling/copy_of_ESS141.2010/Assignments/DuPont
Equally unacceptable are the related tu quoque attacks.
It was good to see that none of those were present in Dr Ball’s article.
Monkies learn by mimicking other monkeys. We shouldn’t be surprised when an ozone ruse begets a CO2 ruse. What will be the next ruse whipped up by the rising political group ?
global cooling ?
residual pharmas in the water supply ?
runaway urban sprawl ?
deforestation ?
runaway quarks ?
runaway genetic mutations ?
self modulating artificial intelligence ?
the son of dengue ?
:::: fingering my thick beard … which one has the highest potential ROR ::::
Paul, are you there? Any comment Paul?
I wrote about this once…
http://www.floppingaces.net/2009/11/28/the-conspiracy-of-the-centuries-reader-post/
“There is and always was an area of thinner ozone over Antarctica that is totally due to natural causes”
What is the empirical evidence that there ‘always was’ such an area? The quoted claim occurs prominently early in the article, and I was expecting something in the rest of the article to back it up. It is impossible that there would be any direct observations beyond the fairly recent past, as Antarctica wasn’t even discovered until the late C18, but could we have some evidence from, say, 1950 onwards?
Please note that I am not saying I dispute the claim, but I would like some direct empirical evidence for it. From the article as it stands, it seems to be merely an inference from the geometrical fact that the incidence of solar radiation is less (per unit area) at the poles than at the equator.
I think the implication is that the “natural’ cause of depletion is due to colder temps in the stratosphere: less solar incidence, lower temps at the poles, of the air column as a whole. It can be reasonably inferred from this that the ozone would be “thinner” over the poles: expected and “natural”.
Probably not the ‘complete’ answer you’re looking for, but good evidence showing a close correlation between temperature and ozone since 1985,
http://www.awi.de/en/science/long-term-observations/atmosphere/antarctic-neumayer/meteorology/ozone.html
Then there’s this on the Arctic ozone hole in 2011 that,
“A NASA-led study has documented an unprecedented depletion of the Earth’s protective ozone layer above the Arctic last winter and spring that was caused by an unusually prolonged period of extremely low temperatures in the stratosphere.”
http://www.news.utoronto.ca/unprecedented-arctic-ozone-loss-occurred-last-winter
As was stated in Tim;s article; they knew / know the true science, it just doesn’t help them push the cart (meme) so they say something “different” to get the speed up.
So, I guess the South Pole discriminates against cold and CFC caused depletion preferring only the CFC sort, and the North Pole prefers cold caused depletion. Well, I guess they are polar opposites, right?
Cheers!
The data shows t he ozone hole has been stable since the early 1990’s (http://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/statistics/annual_data.html). How long does isd the effect of CFCs supposed to last?
They originally said 15 years.
The issue is not only CFCs, but also chlorocarbons and hydrochlorocarbons. A significant one is carbon tetrachloride, whose estimate for breakdown rate was recently lengthened, and it is still being present in the atmosphere to a greater extent than expected. I suspect possibility of a rogue source that is not obeying the Montreal Protocol or taking advantage of poor enforcement.
2015 Antarctic ozone hole 4th largest on record
http://www.theweathernetwork.com/uk/news/articles/climate-and-environment/2015-antarctic-ozone-hole-4th-largest-on-record/59252/
“How long does isd the effect of CFCs supposed to last?”
How long is a piece of (climate science) string?
The first reference to “Crutzer” should instead be “Crutzen.”
It’s the job of environmental scientists to find and help solve issues. These could be toxic hazards, carcinogenic hazards, etc. More often than note, they provide valuable societal benefits. The fact that the growth of CFC’s could be measured at trace atmospheric levels (by Lovelock’s electron capture detector – the Lovelock of Gaia fame) allowed a number of scientists to wonder whether there might be some unknown detrimental effects from CFCs. Of course, getting funding naturally leads to some exaggeration.
Perhaps lessons were learned in how to politicize science around the ozone hole, and many of the same people were involved, but while the science of ozone depletion may have been oversold, it was not a dry run for AGW, which was theorized decades earlier.
True, but we’re dealing with a revival of old FUD that’s a good fit for the current global political state.
Therefore more exaggeration leads to more funding? That’s not a slippery slope, that’s a precipice. Especially when exercised by those referred to by Reed Coray on Pointman’s blog (https://thepointman.wordpress.com/about/#comment-93) when he wrote: “…the large sums of money available for research have, in my opinion, flooded the process with charlatans.”
Conventional climatology proposes that an active sun increases ozone in the stratosphere whereas observations showed a decline in ozone with a cooling stratosphere during the late 20th century.
Being contrary to the usual assumption the observations were explained by proposing that human activity was depleting stratospheric ozone faster than the active sun was creating it.
There is now evidence that an active sun depletes ozone above about 45km in the mesosphere above the poles whilst increasing it below 45km above the equator.
That gives us an opportunity to explain a great deal as set out here:
http://joannenova.com.au/2015/01/is-the-sun-driving-ozone-and-changing-the-climate/
The concern of manmade ozone depletion is at altitudes where most stratospheric ozone is, which is well below 45 km.
If you read my link you will see that solar induced changes in ozone above 45km an above the poles feed down through the stratospheric polar vortices to affect the ozone concentrations lower down.
Stephen Wilde December 6, 2015 at 1:57 pm
If you read my link you will see that solar induced changes in ozone above 45km an above the poles feed down through the stratospheric polar vortices to affect the ozone concentrations lower down.
The evidence from Ozone profile measurements over the S Pole show this not to be true.
Here’s a recent one, note the total depletion of the O3 between 20 and 14 km altitude, but above at 22 km the O3 concentration is unchanged from earlier and much higher than at the lower altitude.
Try again:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/webdata/ozwv/ozsondes/spo/iadv/SPO_2015-10-12.21.png
That is a single snapshot and so is not helpful for long term changes acrosss decades.
Stephen Wilde December 7, 2015 at 7:52 am
That is a single snapshot and so is not helpful for long term changes acrosss decades.
It’s sufficient to debunk your hypothesis that the ozone hole is caused by downward transport of ozone deficient from above, which was my point.
Since we have similar data on a weekly basis since 1990 your following comment is also rebutted.
The hole is created by seasonal effects.
The average size of the hole across decades is influenced by the mechanism described in my hypothesis which you have not rebutted.
Stephen Wilde December 7, 2015 at 7: 52 and 8:52 am:
You find these snapshots on a weekly basis: these are showing that Phil’s argument shatters your hypothesis.
Those charts show seasonal effects only and are no assistance in identifying ozone hole variability from the top down solar effect over decades.
Walk under any High voltage lines (the ones on tall 4 legged towers) and you will smell Ozone. Working in a substation, where the wires with this very high voltage are closer to the ground at times makes me feel like I am breathing a toxic chemical. What happens to all of this Ozone?
in to any clean room, you smell ozone.
Go in to…
At the warmer temperatures and higher pressures associated with where people usually live, work and travel, ozone breaks down quickly. During smog alerts, the ozone problem is during the daytime and mainly outdoors, because ozone in smog is a result from a combination of sunlight, oxygen and pollutants that continuously forms ozone and maintains its presence while it is unstable.
I hope nobody ever warns these so-called ‘experts” about the dangers of hydroxylic acid.
Al Gore was involved in both scares.
You will note that the illustration at the beginning of the article shows an ozone-high crescent on one side of the so-called hole. Commonly one sees these as even more continuous arcs approaching a ring. Ozone is produced in much greater abundance in the equatorial stratosphere, where the UV is strong. It migrates polewards, and is stalled outside the Winter Antarctic vortex. It sits outside there until the circumpolar vortex breaks up in the Spring with the arrival of the sun showing up over the horizon. Note that during all the time that there is low ozone, the sun is never directly overhead. Indeed, sunlight is absent entirely during a considerable portion of the Winter. When the sun does finally start to illuminate Antarctica, it has a long slant range that causes sunlight to pass through portions of the stratosphere outside the vortex with normal and even anomalously high ozone concentrations. The transition between the Winter and Spring conditions can temporarily leave some orphaned patches of low-ozone air wandering around.
Back before the Montreal Protocol, I was struck by the fact that all I ever saw was claims about the low ozone and the POTENTIAL for creating cataracts and skin cancer. I never saw any measurements of actual surface UV fluxes. Therefore, I built a simple, yet sophisticated computer model to predict surface UV values. I used Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer data for ozone, made corrections for the changing footprint of a bundle of light rays with the seasons, and even had a correction for the ellipticity of Earth’s orbit. I made an assumption of approximately a 5% increase in UV during sunspot cycle peaks. Basically, what the model showed was that there appeared to be a slow drift upwards in UV during the Southern Winter over a period of years; however, during the Summer when the sun was highest in the sky (and when people get sunburns) the predicted surface UV was constant over the same period. Since humans, and presumably other animals, have evolved to deal with UV, they probably were at little risk from Summer UV levels that were much lower than are found in the tropics and did not seem to be increasing.
Basically, I agree with Ball that this was something blown out of proportion and an early example of poor science. It had the potential for being interesting science, but it got high-jacked by those with political agendas and little understanding of even where the sun is on the horizon during the different seasons.
The easy solution would have been to use R12a and R22a, both based on propane. They work at a lower pressure and save electricity. R410a is marketed as good for the environment as it does not reduce ozone. It does much more damage than CO2 could ever do. Europe has thousands of appliances running on R22a. No problem with the “boom” factor. Insurance institutes have no problem with it.