CFCs and ozone
tlambert | April 22, 2011Matthew Nisbet's contrarian "Climate Shift" report has been rightly criticised for claiming that green groups outspent opponents of climate action, that the era of false balance in the media was over and for his own falsely balanced coverage.
Ted Parson, who wrote the book on protecting the ozone layer corrects another false statement from Nisbet, who wrote:
According to climate scientist Mike Hulme and policy expert Roger
Pielke Jr., climate change remains misdiagnosed as a conventional
pollution problem akin to ozone depletion or acid rain-- environmental
threats that were limited in scope…
tlambert | November 23, 2006Monckton responding to an email about how volcanoes cause ozone depletion:
I'm not familiar enough with the inner workings of the
general-circulation models, so I'm not sure how it is that the ozone
hole appears only over the Antarctic. One possibility is that the
circumpolar circulation (which sailors take advantage of) acts as a
cage for the weather within. Another, which I'm trying to find data
for, is the volcanic activity of Mount Erebus, Antarctica's active
volcano. In a good year for eruptions, Erebus can put out as much CFCs
as Man used to. It would be very amusing if the activity…
tlambert | June 6, 2005I wrote earlier about John Ray's profoundly ignorant arguments about ozone depletion. Now he's back, posting something even sillier: Despite all the information you may have read, there is not one shred of supportable evidence that CFCs have found their way 40 miles up above the Earth. No one has ever found any up there because they are roughly five times heavier than air. They are like a brick in a swimming pool. It is not often that you will see a brick floating to the surface of your pool. CFCs are so dense that even as a gas you could fill a bucket with it and pour the contents of one…
tlambert | March 27, 2005 William Connolley lists another ten global warming myths.
PZ Myers delivers a righteous smackdown to Paul from Wizbang for Paul's profoundly ignorant attacks on evolution. (Paul's responds by calling evolution a cult.) As well as having totally demolished\* the theory of evolution, Paul has also done for global warming:
Which is more plausible:
The established theory: CFC's (et al) don't destroy ozone at seal level, (or we would not have smog) they magically hold there electron stripping potential till they get to a higher altitude where they strip electrons off ozone and blah blah…
tlambert | February 19, 2004 There has been quite a bit of reaction to my post on Milloy.
Michael Peckham writes "Milloy's criticism may be right some of the time, but only when it fits his preconceived anti-regulatory agenda. "
John Quiggin, at Crooked Timber and at his own blog observes that the link between Cato and Milloy reflects badly on Cato. Also the comments in the Crooked Timber have some attempts to defend Milloy against the charge that he is boosting creationism. Yes, Milloy offers the Theory of Evolution some faint praise, but he also thinks Creationism should get equal time with…
tlambert | February 13, 2004 Apart from the one or two posts about John Lott I've also posted about ozone depletion denial, creationism and astroturf. All these topics, as well as Lott, come together in the person of Steve Milloy. Milloy runs a website junkscience.com that purports to debunk "junk science".
Unsuspecting visitors might think that Milloy's site is devoted to criticizing shoddy science, but they would be wrong. If you look at what he "debunks" you will find that the real criterion for deciding what is "junk science" is not the quality of the work, but the political agenda that it might…
tlambert | February 9, 2004 I wrote earlier about ozone depletion deniers John Ray and Sylvain Galineau. I've found another such denier and his name is John Lott. Lott wrote a positive review\* of Environmental Overkill, a book written by Dixy Lee Ray with Lou Guzzo. In his review, Lott calls ozone depletion an "environmental myth" and a "scare story".
Now, Lott's false statements about ozone depletion might have been forgivable if Ray had made a good case against ozone depletion, but the quality of the science and scholarship in her work is appalling. Robert Parson has written a…
tlambert | February 5, 2004 I while ago I wrote on John Ray's claims that environmentalists were wrong about ozone depletion. I think it is quite clear that subsequent research has vindicated the concerns of scientists about ozone depletion. The refusal of Ray to admit that the environmentalists could possibly be right about ozone depletion despite overwhelming evidence is telling---he believes that environmentalists are wrong, irrespective of the facts in any case.
I've found another ozone hole denier. In this post, Sylvain Galineau dismisses the ozone hole as "propaganda". I tried…
tlambert | December 28, 2003 On his blog, John Ray makes a remarkable claim: "Greenies" are wrong about ozone depletion. He writes:
In 1991, the Greenies got everyone to ban CFC chemicals. CFCs were the normal gases that has always been used to make refrigerators and air conditioners work. CFCs even used to put the puff in all our aerosol cans. The ban was because CFCs supposedly destroyed earth's ozone layer and caused the ozone "hole" over Antarctica. So the hole has of course shrunk by now, right? Wrong! As this U.N. report shows, the hole is as big as ever! Another…