Where’s the Hole?

In all the Global Warming talk of recent years, I’m sure you’ve all noticed something missing in the “humans are evil” chatter; the hole in the ozone layer.  Where is it?

Well, the good news is, it’s shrinking; has been for years, actually, but no-one thought to splash it across the front pages, or lead their evening news with this ringing endorsement of Man’s ability to accept wrongdoing and change for the better. How could the media have made such an egregious error? Well, actually, there are a couple of reasons.

1. The shrinking hole doesn’t quite fit in with the current GW catastrophe scenarios. If it was reported, the Powers That Be might find people realizing that their doom scenarios, splashed so prominently around a decade ago regarding the Hole and now rendered meaningless, bore an uncanny resemblance to the ones currently being touted regarding Global Warming.
2. Some people might question exactly what is going on here, and rightly so.

See, CFCs are still around. Science informed us in dire terms that CFCs lasted for thirty years or more in the upper atmosphere, triggering millions of cascading free-radical interactions that will slowly kill the ozone layer. Even if we stopped producing CFCs back in 1995, they warned, the hole would grow for decades, until the chemicals were finally neutralized. And it’s not just the CFCs that are still there from our overuse dating back to the 50s… China, India, Africa and a host of other developing nations still use CFCs… in some cases, with even greater abandon than the West did, so they’re still being added to the atmosphere.

And yet the hole is closing…

Nobody seemed to notice a few points. Firstly, we didn’t even know that the hole (really a thinning, not a hole) was even present until we looked for it; there were no baselines for ozone concentrations over Antarctica before the 80s, when the hole was “found”.

Secondly, nobody had a mechanism for how the CFCs would actually get into the ozone layer in the first place; the tropopause, a boundary layer in the middle atmosphere, helps prevent atmospheric mixing from ground to top-level. This is why ozone does not drop to ground level, and why our ground level atmosphere has not slowly evaporated into space (well, not the only reason, but one of the top ones…) Neither could they explain how, once miraculously in the upper atmosphere, they were able to travel from the northern hemisphere to the southern hemisphere across the coriolis winds that circle the equator, and prevent a lot of atmospheric mixing between the hemispheres from occurring.

And finally, all the experiments that demonstrated CFC-driven ozone depletion failed to mention that the free-radical reaction was closed; O3 certainly broke down with CFCs, which themselves were dissociated free radicals at that point, but the resultant molecules were themselves very unstable at the best of times. Under the high radiation, high-UV environment of the ozone layer, that collapse would be even faster, resulting in more oxygen free radicals to mop up outstanding O2 molecules to create yet more O3… And that this was just a variant of the reaction that occurred to create ozone in the first place. Nothing was “permanently bound”, since all the molecules formed and involved in the reaction were unstable.. And the ozone layer operates by the dissociation from O3 to O2 and back again to block UV light.

The hole is closing now.. and its closing coincides with an increase in Antarctic sea-ice formation.  The same story is true in the northern hemisphere.

So what do we learn from this? Firstly, it is an example of leaping to a conclusion when there was little science to support it, massaging what science there was to fit the story, and generally going public before the research was complete.

Secondly, it is an example of the politicization of science; in itself, the studies suggesting a thinning of the ozone layer over the Antarctic would have been interesting, but simply a point for further study.  The same is true of early studies indicating a warming trend globally. However, these results were seized on by an environmental lobby desperate for a “win”; decades of environmental campaigning had resulted in little overall change in man’s attitude to the environment, and the lobby was getting desperate for some “proof” of large-scale damage being created by man.  Here was an opportunity to get a message – any message – out into the public eye.

Thirdly, today you would be hard pressed to find any scientist who stands proudly proclaiming “I found the ozone hole, and I fixed it”. In fact, the community had gone very quiet as yet more evidence comes in suggesting that the ozone layer fluctuates regionally every bit as much as the climate. And, it should be noted, that when the AGW argument is finally laid to rest, the same silence will ring through the scientific community then.

Don’t think it’ll happen? Do you remember the hysteria about the ozone hole? The daily reports, the full-color splashes in the newspapers?  The loving executed graphics on TV? And yet here were are, just a few years later and we’ve all forgotten about it.  Global Warming will fade away too, because the scientists, politicians and interest groups who have fanned the flames know that the general public will forget as thoroughly as they did about the ozone hole.