As with most regulations, the CFC ban hit the poor with a vengeance. Millions of perfectly functioning refrigerators could no longer be recharged with Freon, so everyone was forced to purchase new CFC-free appliances. This, of course, was especially difficult for those with low incomes. FULL ARTICLE by Rod Rojas
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/15077/the-ozone-scare-a-retrospective/
The Ozone Scare: A Retrospective
Previous post: The Left and Right within Libertarianism
Next post: Ron Paul in ePub
{ 70 comments }
The message “the govnmt made me do it” is all very nice but did I hear a baby being thrown out with the bathwater?
“Environmentalists claimed that CFCs would somehow travel 40 miles up above the surface of the earth, despite the fact that CFCs are about five times heavier than air.”
Umm… yeah? Amazing how water from the oceans is getting up there, or even CO_2, right? Sweeping conclusions based on Intelligent-Design-Level pseudoscience? You can, and should do better.
Anyway, the circulation of halogens is pretty well established and the ozone layer holes well mapped, thank you very much.
Yes I am curious where precisely the proof that the mechanism by which CFC’s enter the Ozone layer, and then proceeds to more or less corrode it away by chemical reaction was only a scare and had no basis in fact.
I do not mean to be combative; I seriously do not know. zsince the author did not provide one source to actually back that claim up I see little reason as to why he should be listened to on that topic.
Ozone is an incredibly unstable compound. It’s oxidizing abilities make water and normal O2 oxygen look like preservatives. CFCs literally do destroy the ozone layer due to the chemical reaction. Of course, so does raw elemental oxygen, which reacts to create the oxygen we breathe. It also gets wiped out by acids, particularly sulfur based ones.
As for how CFCs get up there, the air currents cycle around in a three dimensional pattern. Warm air in the lower atmosphere cycles up to the higher atmosphere to cool off. While CFCs may be heavier, the weight is only a factor at a constant temperature. When a CFC heats up, it becomes less dense than the upper atmosphere gasses and they’ll switch places. This allows the CFC to react with the ozone layer.
The CFC issue was actually a legitimate environmental concern. I don’t agree with the method of addressing it, but there wasn’t a huge lie about the negative impacts. The reason we don’t hear much about the ozone layer is that industry has mostly eliminated the compounds that react with it.
http://www.epa.gov/ozone/science/myths/heavier.html
How CFC’s destroy Ozone:
Ozone can be destroyed by a number of free radical catalysts, the most important of which are the hydroxyl radical (OH·), the nitric oxide radical (NO·), atomic chlorine (Cl·) and bromine (Br·). All of these have both natural and manmade sources; at the present time, most of the OH· and NO· in the stratosphere is of natural origin, but human activity has dramatically increased the levels of chlorine and bromine. These elements are found in certain stable organic compounds, especially chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which may find their way to the stratosphere without being destroyed in the troposphere due to their low reactivity. Once in the stratosphere, the Cl and Br atoms are liberated from the parent compounds by the action of ultraviolet light, e.g. (‘h’ is Planck’s constant, ‘ν’ is frequency of electromagnetic radiation)
CFCl3 + hν → CFCl2 + Cl
The Cl and Br atoms can then destroy ozone molecules through a variety of catalytic cycles. In the simplest example of such a cycle,[4] a chlorine atom reacts with an ozone molecule, taking an oxygen atom with it (forming ClO) and leaving a normal oxygen molecule. The chlorine monoxide (i.e., the ClO) can react with a second molecule of ozone (i.e., O3) to yield another chlorine atom and two molecules of oxygen. The chemical shorthand for these gas-phase reactions is:
Cl + O3 → ClO + O2
ClO + O3 → Cl + 2 O2
The overall effect is a decrease in the amount of ozone. More complicated mechanisms have been discovered that lead to ozone destruction in the lower stratosphere as well.
A single chlorine atom would keep on destroying ozone (thus a catalyst) for up to two years (the time scale for transport back down to the troposphere) were it not for reactions that remove them from this cycle by forming reservoir species such as hydrogen chloride (HCl) and chlorine nitrate (ClONO2). On a per atom basis, bromine is even more efficient than chlorine at destroying ozone, but there is much less bromine in the atmosphere at present. As a result, both chlorine and bromine contribute significantly to the overall ozone depletion. Laboratory studies have shown that fluorine and iodine atoms participate in analogous catalytic cycles. However, in the Earth’s stratosphere, fluorine atoms react rapidly with water and methane to form strongly bound HF, while organic molecules which contain iodine react so rapidly in the lower atmosphere that they do not reach the stratosphere in significant quantities. Furthermore, a single chlorine atom is able to react with 100,000 ozone molecules. This fact plus the amount of chlorine released into the atmosphere by chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) yearly demonstrates how dangerous CFCs are to the environment.[5]
Yes. That’s the standard tale. Perhaps it is accurate, perhaps it isn’t. Given the source of the assertion (EPA) it’d have to be treated with suspicion. Is it true? Or is it self-serving propaganda?
Needs proof.
Sione
It’s really not all that complicated. It’s akin to debating whether or not the sky is blue.If you visit the southern portion of windward islands in the caribbean you will encount red dust from Africa.Global convection currents move vast quantities of air: http://science.howstuffworks.com/nature/climate-weather/atmospheric/weather5.htm
This is all high school climate science.
You’d need to pull out a chemistry book, but it’s all true. That’s the full reaction.
it may well be true but ozone is a toxic gas at ground level. even perfluoromethane is incapable of rising to the level of the ozone layer, which is in the way upper atmosphere where no living thing can survive, and never mind that ozone will kill you dead almost as fast as carbon monoxide, it’s basically like the gaseous form of hydrogen peroxide.
i don’t know about chloro-fluoro hydrocarbons, i personally would be suspicious about chlorinated hydrocarbons altogether, but fluorinated hydrocarbons are a different story. fluorine holds onto the carbon extremely well, in fact it basically would take an oxygen enriched furnace to break that bond, something like what it takes to melt steel. fluorine is a nasty substance but the C-F bond is not one that can be broken by ordinary biological processes within the period of time it would remain inside a human gastrointestinal tract or lung cavity. it won’t mix with oil, or water, check out ‘fluorinert’ these are a series of various mixes of low molecular weight perfluorocarbons, they are so inert and nontoxic that you can fill your lungs with perfluorohexane without any adverse health effects. i actually speculated recently that a passive solar turbine system could be made with this stuff because it’s so safe and inert, can’t burn, isn’t toxic and doesn’t break down under even severe conditions it could easily be heated, boiled, drive turbines, then be cooled into a thermal storage and the heat returned to boil it later on for night cycle power generation (as well as water heating of course).
chlorinated hydrocarbons i don’t think are so safe. they do degrade moderately well under natural conditions and in doing so release chlorine gas. the same can’t be said about fluorinated hydrocarbons.
in any case, the idea that chemicals which sink below carbon dioxide (oh yeah, how come nobody’s pointed out that carbon doxide sinks as well? damn i didn’t even think about it until just then) could damage the upper atmosphere is nonsense.
also, the whole ozone hole thing is BS. ozone is formed when oxygen is struck by ultraviolet light. WHEN STRUCK BY ULTRAVIOLET LIGHT. damaging it is not really gonna cause any problem because the horse has already bolted, the oxygen absorbed the UV already. if they were saying that the chlorine gas was attacking the actual oxygen … well that’d be different. but it’s not about chlorine gas, we weren’t talking about that… they just dump that in our water instead. the hole in the ozone layer – they were just noticing a natural phenomena, during the long dark winters of polar regions, the oxygen in the upper atmosphere is not bombarded with UV and therefore does not form ozone.
Loki,
Your last statements are the absolute truth about the “ozone scare”. It’s sad to say that, once again, scientists and academia look like educated fools so many times. Indeed, the earth’s exposure to the sun, its orbit and axial position have EVERYTHING to do with the so-called “ozone holes” found at the poles.
I stopped watching the news ten years ago, wish I’d stopped sooner because of the absolute tripe thereon.
“also, the whole ozone hole thing is BS. ozone is formed when oxygen is struck by ultraviolet light. WHEN STRUCK BY ULTRAVIOLET LIGHT. damaging it is not really gonna cause any problem because the horse has already bolted, the oxygen absorbed the UV already. if they were saying that the chlorine gas was attacking the actual oxygen … well that’d be different. but it’s not about chlorine gas, we weren’t talking about that… they just dump that in our water instead. the hole in the ozone layer – they were just noticing a natural phenomena, during the long dark winters of polar regions, the oxygen in the upper atmosphere is not bombarded with UV and therefore does not form ozone.”
The arguement isn’t whether or not UV creates ozone, or whether or not there should be an ozone “hole” in the polar regions.The arguement is what is making it larger and it has been suggested that the natural rate at which ozone is replenished cannot overcome the rate at which CFC’s break it apart (It’s about the Chlorine acting as a catalyst to break ozone). Afterall it is the same UV which breaks apart the CFC’s.
In otherwords you’ll have to prove that the following are incorrect:
CFCl3 + hν → CFCl2 + Cl
Cl + O3 → ClO + O2
ClO + O3 → Cl + 2 O2
AS a refrigeration tech/owner for better than 25 years,I’ve always “wondered” where the TAX went.Everytime I tried to inquire, it led to an dead end.Even amoung the wholesale distributors it is/was a perplexing question. For instance, when the date for r-12 came prices where $1.09 per pound(US), the prices quickly shot up to $5.00 perlb. and then $10+ per lb. IT was “lined” on invoice sheets as a “TAX” over spot price . I understood getting the clorine out,but didn.t agree with the horrific tax, There still is very few replacement refrigerants that come to the chemical advantages…..WHERE is this TAX GOING….IT,s a WHOLE LOTTA DOLLARS!
Add to this that HFA’s are somewhat water soluble (CFC are practically insoluble) so environmentalists are “concerned” that things like the R134a found in automotive air conditioners and athsma inhalers are now being found in surface waters almost everwhere they look. Expect a lower performing, more expensive option in your future.
That water solubility means athsma sufferers will be absorbing a lot more propellant than they used to and for no good reason. Even if CFCs were the worst thing ever to happen to the planet, how much could these little inhalers emit? The fact that these bureaucrats care more for the fate of a theoretical ozone molecule than a fellow human being who is gasping for air, tells us everything we need to know about them. They are demons.
Also out with the bathwater went Halon fire supressants even for aircraft engine fire extinguishers. How much did they emit? Hint: every commercial aircraft engine fire makes the news and how many have we seen in the last decade.
And there’s more: if you make any of the banned compounds in a process step to sythesize something else, even if none of it ever leaves your plant or lab, you are in violation. EPA can’t help either because this is a treaty. If your new product needs one of these as an intermediate, you need to get permission from the folks at the UN. Good luck with that.
Even if we accept that these compounds are as bad as they say, there is still no excuse for the global zero tolerance policy they have imposed on us. Some flexibility could have been written into the treaty, but it wasn’t. As long as the world is run by bureaucrats whose idea of “progress” is zero tolerance for real progress, we are doomed.
Rod Rojas, you wrote that,
A few points:
(1) Nobody is “forced” to buy a refrigerator. In fact, humans survived for tens of thousands of years without refrigeration. Some still do. So, the poor for which you cry are at least party responsible for their ownership of a refrigerator.
(2) Responsibility must be shared by unaccountable manufacturers who chose to use destructive chemicals. Their motives are not difficult to discern, and had owners of those businessness not been sheltered by limited liability, they would have been more cautious about developing CFC refrigerant systems and selling them as aggressively as they did.
Your introduction is juvenile hyperbole. (Read: “Remember when the thinning of the ozone layer was going to cause us all to die of malignant melanoma, just a few years ago?”)
You added that “CFCs are about five times heavier than air. A common case of floating bricks, no doubt.” You need to demonstrate that any given CFC is more dense than air, not to mention ozone, way up in the atmosphere. Should be easy enough, but just to make your argument plausible you must disregard wind and convection. Ever heard of these?
Let’s hope that the new scare is “statist government caused the AGW, and libertarians, in the nonanarchist sense of the word, want to sustain it because they relish glutting their senses”.
Well, that wouldn’t actually be a scrare so much as plain, unvarnished truth. It’s not hard to see how statist government could be the #1 perp of AGW given the statist government interventionism to build roads and airports, the subsidization of which provides the capacity without which makers of cars and aircraft would be stymied until they found a private solution. Militarism spawned the widebodied aircraft industy, not to mention jet engine technology. But libertarian sense glutters like you would rather forget these little details about their unsustainable culture.
Finally, Derrick Jensen should have written “this “civilization is not and can never be sustainable.” And how could it be? Fraud and force are the ways and means by which it institutes itself, spreads itself, and sustains itself. So Jensen is correct if he supposes that this civilization is a cult of destruction and death. The fact that he, too, might call for destruction, is irrelevant to this conclusion.
Too bad Jensen is naive about statism, like the cheerleaders for wester civ are naive to think that individualism is a pillar of their culture. Nevertheless, his anti-imperialism suggests reason for faint hope that he can be lured out of the dungeon in which he’s preoccupied with “indigenous cultures”, misogyny, racism, and the other pigeonholes of leftish thinking.
Jensen should make a list of all the industries which are unstainable, then trace them back to their statist sponsorship, then make the obvious connection to imperialism. I’ve mentioned some industries already. Let’s add fuels and petrochemicals, telecommunications, banking, construction, power generation and distribution, mining, and all the industries which have sprung up to serve these industries or the owners of products they make.
Then let’s sweep them away.
Brutal force is always the issue. The debates always have as the underlying assumption that whichever side wins will be cramming their beliefs down my throat at gun point.
Same with debates about morals. It’s never simply a matter of right and wrong, it’s a matter of those in the right brutalizing the people who are considered wrong.
>>>(1) Nobody is “forced” to buy a refrigerator. In fact, humans survived for tens of thousands of years without refrigeration. Some still do. So, the poor for which you cry are at least party responsible for their ownership of a refrigerator.
This is an odd statement. Either refrigerators are harmful, or they are not. If they are harmful, then no one has the right to harm others or their property. If they are not harmful, then no one has the right to tell others what they can and can’t have.
People buy refrigerators not because they are “forced” to, but because they improve their lives. No one needs anyone else’s permission to improve his life, even if you (or some statist) deem it to be a luxury.
>>>It’s not hard to see how statist government could be the #1 perp of AGW given the statist government interventionism to build roads and airports, the subsidization of which provides the capacity without which makers of cars and aircraft would be stymied until they found a private solution. Militarism spawned the widebodied aircraft industy, not to mention jet engine technology. But libertarian sense glutters like you would rather forget these little details about their unsustainable culture.
What is a “libertarian sense glutter”?
I entirely agree that statism has wreaked more environmental harm than any other mode of social organization. Statist roads, statist militaries, statist electricity, etc. Just look at the environmental results in places with even more aggressive governments, like North Korea, Eastern Europe, etc.
I have been reading these Mises blogs and other books and such for years, and never found anyone here who would dispute the State’s culpability as to environmental damage, civilian or military. Why do you think the author has “forgotten” any such “details”?
>>>Jensen should make a list of all the industries which are unstainable, then trace them back to their statist sponsorship
One would need to begin with a list of all the industries with statist sponsorship. There is no way of knowing which of those industries is sustainable without such sponsorship until the sponsorship is removed.
It is safe to assume that some would be radically changed by such a removal of sponsorship, others less so, but that all would be altered.
Yes I do not understand exactly what this “sense of glutter” is supposed to actually mean.
Besides I see no inherent reason why such things as widebodied aircraft and fossil powerplants would not have been produced without state subsidies. I do not know of any new physical laws which would have been discovered which would have made their respective functions cheaper and cleaner. The only way I could see this is in relation to Walter Block’s point about government violating private environmental rights for the sake of industry back during the beginning of the 19th century, and thus skewing the paths of science which would have been taken otherwise.
I also do not think it makes one argument more valid to infer that AGW is settled science when it clearly is not. There is still no smoking gun which could overwhelmingly preclude the possibility that it could turn out as scientifically incorrect and a huge waste of current resources to spend so much time combating it.
Re: A Liberal in Lakeview
Refrigerators allow people to store food safely and with less risk of rapid spoilage. It also allows tempeature-sensitive medicines and vaccines to be stored.
They did not choose to use destructive chemicals. The effects of CFCs on the ozone layer were discovered much long after the chemical was developed and used.
Seems nobody bothered to tell that to the pollutants that cover Los Angeles. Just because there’s convection and winds, does not mean ALL CFC molecules end up in the stratosphere, that’s not how it works.
Old Mexican wotre: “Seems nobody bothered to tell that to the pollutants that cover Los Angeles. Just because there’s convection and winds, does not mean ALL CFC molecules end up in the stratosphere, that’s not how it works.”‘
-And ingesting dihydrogen monoxide into your lungs will kill you.
You usually want to refrain from using local weather/geology as a basis for arguing a global phenomenon.
“unaccountable manufacturers who chose to use destructive chemicals”
Clearly you are not aware that when the CFC’s were invented they were considered a godsend because they replaced methane and anhydrous ammonia refrigeration systems that could kill the owner at any given time. The whole point to them was that they were not as destructive as the alternatives. Ammonia is much better thermodynamically and much cheaper than Freon – safety was the value-add for this technology.
I think that this bit from Wikipedia says everything you need to know about CFC “science”:
The same scam is, I suspect, behind most alleged public “debates” about science and the regulation of patented substances. For example, garden pesticides. Perhaps there is something similar going on with the restrictions on cold medications – does the Big Pharma brotherhood have a bunch of new, expensive patented drugs coming down the pipeline?
Thank you, I came here to make the exact same quite
So that’s what Disney Co. should do to make sure people don’t use M. Mouse after the copyright expires.
IIRC, the fake Sudafed that doesn’t work is manufactured by a North American company with a lobbying presence. The stuff that works is manufactured by a whole bunch of Chinese companies with no lobbying presence.
It’s a good business decision. DuPont saw the writing on the wall and once their new product came on board they switched teams. It’s akin to saying “I see fire, there must be smoke!”
Please remember who was the main culprit behind the Freon ban.
It was DuPont. The patent of Freon was about to expire and it would have been either very expensive or impossible to renew. In some huge markets like Brazil and India DuPont would have been unable to get a renewal and would have faced stiff competition by local manufacturers.
There was also a serious concern about competition on traditionally safe markets (like the US or Europe) from aggressive developing world manufacturers.
So they got it banned and replaced with the HCF1134 family on which they hold the patent for next decades.
DuPont even generously sponsored the Montreal Convention which sanctioned the end of Freon and allied products.
As always follow the money, it never leads you astray.
The patent for Freon was not “about to expire”, it had in fact expired long before the ban.
Re: Ryan,
The critical point became 1986, when DuPont obtained a patent for a substitute.
If depletion of the ozone layer is a very bad thing, if CFCs deplete the ozone layer, and if the regulation to ban or heavily restrict CFCs was successfully in significantly slowing ozone layer depletion, what is the argument against that regulation?
Voluntary action.
Prime,
If depletion of the ozone layer… if CFC’s deplete… and if the regulation to ban…what is the argument against that regulation?
It’s a big “If”…
the modeling that links ozone-depletion to cfc emissions is coming under serious scientific attack:
http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070924/full/449382a.html
“Until recently everything looked like it fitted nicely,” agrees Neil Harris, an atmosphere scientist who heads the European Ozone Research Coordinating Unit at the University of Cambridge, UK.”
The money quote, it says a lot about the whole “modeling” business, and the question of ‘perfect’ answers in
science. They don’t exist. When a theory fits the facts ‘perfectly’, experience should make a scientist’s BS detector go crazy.
Perfect answers, in natural science, do not exist. The best a model can hope for is a good approximation. Most times, ‘good’ models are always a bit rough.
Nice to finally see a reference linking to the actual scientific article bringing forth these new claims, it can be somewhat damaging to mises.org’s credibility to make assertions of a scientific nature like in this article without properly citing the proper research to back them up. What is even more damaging to their credibility is when blatantly false and misleading assertions are made such as:
As has been pointed out by earlier comments the atmosphere is mixed and not strictly sorted by weight! I will say it again: having something this blatantly false is a real blow to the credibility of the mises institute.
Now into the actual study: it is just one study. Yes it does show potential problems with the theory that CFCs cause ozone depletion and it could even eventually end up leading to the whole theory being refuted, but it does not do so all on it’s own. It is basic science literacy that one study does not mean very much on it’s own save as identifying an area where more research is potentially needed – as appears to be the case here.
Now despite the complete scientific illiteracy the article does become much better in matters of governmental policy and economics, certainly a free market response would have been much better than what we did see. A public perception of dangers of CFCs would have led to their phasing out under the free market but under much different mechanisms. Imagine seeing the add “Brand A is callous and unfeeling and builds their refrigerators with cheap and dangerous substandard materials known as CFCs that help cause cancer where as we at brand B have taken a stand, refusing to use cancer causing materials in our products.” Do seriously thing this sort of competition on the environmental values of the product would not happen? A similar effect can be seen with the growing perception (not the science) of the dangers of global warming, there was a slight trend towards compact fluorescent lights before government came in with it’s ham-fisted (and typically useless) approach of outright banning incandescent globes. Back with the CFCs, higher value areas such as asthma inhalers would have certainly lagged behind refrigerators etc but the reduced volume would have helped and as the article notes the government granted patent monopoly was a major cause of the resultant problems. Free of this monopoly CFC free inhalers would have rapidly improved and declined in price due to natural competition.
In summary austrian scholars seem to do very well in areas such as economics where praxeology is often of more use in forming an understanding but in areas to do with physical and chemical effects rather than human ones then it is time to turn to science. Human motivations are certainly still important but in the end you need to look at the actual science, not just what motivates it. Then you can come back to economics to sort out how to deal with the results.
What’s the matter, Shaun? I’m getting the idea that you’re prejudiced against people with axes to grind.
LiL-
Which civilization would you say has “individualism” as one of its pillars if not western civ?
Chinese Taoism
Prime
If CFC’s depleat the ozone layer disasterously, that fact would not and does not justify government forcing people to use the products of its mercantilist cronies. Nor does it justify the government stealing property (tax etc.). Nor does it justify government coercion.
Sione
“As with most regulations, the CFC ban hit the poor with a vengeance. Millions of perfectly functioning refrigerators could no longer be recharged with Freon, so everyone was forced to purchase new CFC-free appliances. This, of course, was especially difficult for those with low incomes.”
was the level of freon use at the time really harming the atmosphere/ozone in a way to threaten human civilization??? would the growth rate of refrigerators using freon put enough additional freon in the atmosphere to harm human civilization….in a way that would offset having more beneficial/cheap refrigerators??? was/is there enough freon to ever really make the atmosphere/ozone dissapear in a way to harm human civilzation??? how much leaked???
I wonder what people hundreds of years from now will think of us. Will they laugh at how foolishly we believed in the equivalent of witches? Then it was the inquisition, today it’s the IPCC and others.
Rothbard used to write a lot about the court intellectuals. We have been conditioned to believe that someone who calls themselves a scientist is knowledgeable in everything, not just in their one area of expertise.
I was just listening to a round table of very “smart” bio-genetic scientists talking about the future of the new science of genomics. The area of health came up. They all agreed that what we need is government to tell us to do the right thing, like lose weight and exercise. One said, eat less or else… And the other one says, well, or else…. I don’t know, we still want them to keep eating to keep the economy going. ( http://twit.tv/fib64 )
Paul Krugman would be proud.
“Remember when the thinning of the ozone layer was going to cause us all to die of malignant melanoma, just a few years ago? The ozone scare seems to have dropped off the radar entirely.”
It does help cause many people to die of malignant melanoma in Australia and New Zealand. Compare the UV in Auckland right now, about 13.5, to the UV at an equivalent latitude in the Northern Hemisphere summer, about 8. That’s due to the ozone hole. We have some of the highest skin cancer rates in the world.
The problem is whether North Americans and Europeans should give up a tiny portion of their lifestyles for the sake of people in faraway places no one cares about. Should people of the day been forced by law to give up Belgian rubber just because they found out how it was extracted?
i dont think thats the problem at all if that isnt whats happening.
One question – are these rates of melanoma among aboriginals too, or just caucasians?
Glad someone noted the DuPont connection, Honeywell has the next generation of refrigerants sewn up, is there a detante with DuPont?
I found the author’s argument about recharging refrigerators to be reaching, since most refrigerators of the era were so bad they weren’t worth saving. But R12 car AC systems were a major casualty.
But please, the alleged catalytic ozone destruction schema was never conclusively demonstrated. The fact that it is just accepted is a major reason we are plagued with todays AGW models, which are beautiful theoretically, but can’t predict sh!t.
schema or an outright lie??
“Remember when the thinning of the ozone layer was going to cause us all to die of malignant melanoma, just a few years ago? The ozone scare seems to have dropped off the radar entirely.”It does help cause many people to die of malignant melanoma ……..what exactly helps cause many people to die of malignant melanoma??? the thinning of the ozone layer??? or other factors???
and has mankind ever gotten its hands on enough freon to create thinnign ozone layers and expansion of continent sized ozone holes???? that seems unlikely for mankind to accomplish.
The use of multiple question marks, a sure sign of a demented mind…
responding to multiple question marks is a surer sign of an idiot who should do better to stick the points raised.
and ???????s asked
Kiwi
“Compare the UV in Auckland right now, about 13.5, to the UV at an equivalent latitude in the Northern Hemisphere summer, about 8. That’s due to the ozone hole.”
So the ozone hole extends from the Antarctic all the way to the upper North Island of New Zealand, across the Tasman Sea to Queensland…
Sione
This is funny because everything I read on the hole puts it somewhere over Quebec in Canada.
And I think by “right now”, it’s pretty obvious that the UV radiation is higher because the southern hemisphere is pointing toward the Sun while the same point in the northern hemisphere is only getting glancing blows. The numbers should switch sometime in June.
J Murray
“This is funny because everything I read on the hole puts it somewhere over Quebec in Canada.”
It must be a veeerrrrrrry large hole then.
Sione
In the 1950′s Canada was launching rockets into the ionosphere to study the Van Allen belt and the causes of the Auroraborealis. They discovered that the ozone layer was not consistant and had huge areas over Canada that had almost no ozone at all. The CFC debate is about as credable as global warming.
1. Create the perception of crisis.
2. Proffer your own convenient, pre-determined solution.
3. Lobby your solution into law.
4. Profit by force at the expense of the masses.
5. Repeat.
This simplest of processes is how the establishment maintains its position at the expense of all us toilers. The good cause of all science seems to get co-opted by fascists and corporatists every time there’s a buck to be made. Sad to say it’s all about defining who makes money and who pays by force! And it’s gotta stop!
Indeed! As noted above, I think Murry Rothbard penned a wonderful piece on how the DuPont patent machinations date dictated the whole shebang, from start to finish.
You don’t need to wear tin foil head gear to suspect everything from the marketing of flouride to HIV remedies to CFC substitutes has a bit of a conspiracy tinge to it. The litmus test in my feeble mind is whether dissenters are treated as insufferable kooks to be crushed at any cost or are treated as potentially interesting contributors to a growth in knowledge. A good old sniffing along the money trail works, too. Everything about the CFC ban had fraud written all over it.
like babies pulled from incubators in kuwait…as stated by the former head of the cia turned president???
Another thing. There are now quite a number of patents on radio frequency equipment designed to project voices and even thoughts into the minds of people. A conductor such as aluminum foil blocks radio waves. In view of this, even the tin foil hats are looking more rational all the time.
Overpopulation is the new global warming.
There is a lot of truth to that. The worlds population passed the level of sustainablity in the 1970′s. Without fossil fuels (finite supply) you would see mass starvation and deaths.
is that like saying without air there would be mass deaths
Quoted for truth. Silly pseudoscience like this article not only call into question the author’s intelligence (or lack thereof) or integrity (or lack thereof) but casts the whole ideology in an unflattering light; its seems that this extremist belief system really has no good answers to environmental problems, so its adherents, vigorously asserting the infallibility of their faith, need to bury their heads and pretend large swathes of scientific fact don’t exist. Mature ideologies don’t need to do that.
Less trolling and more substance please. What you assert to be completely false has been defended during the course of the thread. Did you read the thread? Why have you not corrected the previous posters then? What would be the point of restarting an argument that is already underway above your comment?
Robert
Put aside the smearing and name calling for a while. It doesn’t validate your position in the slightest. Deal with the issue at hand and the underlying fundamentals.
Firstly, you make certain assumptions. For instance, you have on this and previous occasions pretended that man’s industrial activities are primarily harmful and so they must be restricted or halted to remove the harm. This leads to some questions it would be worthwhile for you to consider.
1/. Is the CFC theory of man caused depletion of the infamous “ozone hole” correct? Does that theory correspond with reality?
How do you know?
2/. For the purpose of argument let’s accept the notion that Man-made CFCs do depleat the ozone layer in certain regions and under certain circumstances (since the “hole” appears and alters on a seasonal basis).
Is Man the primary cause of that?
Is it harmful to Man?
3/. Accepting the premise in #2 and assuming that a real and existent harm is generated, does the harm of ozone depleation outweigh the benefits that Man derives from the use of CFCs?
How did you evaluate this to arrive at your conclusion?
4/. Again accepting the premise in #2, is the depleation of ozone a valid justification for compulsory coercion, application of force and suspension of individual freedoms?
5/. Do you have a right to force others to accept your ideas and values?
It’d be interesting to read your answers as it would go some way to demonstrating the fundamentals of your position and approach to dealing with ideas.
Sione
“accepting the premise in #2 and assuming that a real and existent harm is generated, does the harm of ozone depleation outweigh the benefits that Man derives from the use of CFCs?”
what are your thoughts??
James
I don’t think the evidence suports the contention that the ozone hole is harmful to Man, or, assuming that it were, that the harm outweighs the benefits received from employing using CFCs for certain purposes.
Sione
Let those harmed be damned? Since when did Austrians take up with utilitarian arguments, Sione?
I find this article a little thin. Was CFC prohibition successful, or did it fail (at patching holes in the ozone layer)?
If it failed, why are we no longer hearing about holes in the ozone layer?
What I don’t understand is: if curbing CFCs succeeded, why don’t we hear more about it?
Every AGW pundit would claim that “we” need to curb CO2 like “we” curbed CFCs and won the war on the thinning of the ozone layer.
the ban was very successful, but he holes are still there, doing nothing. The reason we don’t hear about it is because we have a new scare, the old scares are tapped out, scientists and politicians need a regular supply to keep the gravy train.
Once the(hidden) goal is achieved, the PR campaign is simply abandoned. So once DuPont got the off-patent CFCs banned, there was simply no more reason to continue the campaign. Likewise, once a carbon tax or cap-and-trade schema permanently subsidizes nuclear power and a permanent slice of the entire economy for Goldman-Sachs, we’ll hear no more about CO2.
The Top Five Environmental Disasters that Didn’t Happen:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67dcK5sjHsE&feature=player_embedded#at=17
Comments on this entry are closed.