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re: Ozone conspiracy
Greg — (archived)

It has nothing to do with the old patents. If nearly every fridge and air conditioner in the world has to get new gas and Dupont has patents on making the new gas then they would have made a lot of money. The quotes below seem to go against that theory, that the hole only opneed recently. The first quote says the hole was only lower ozone at that stage.

As a cause of environmental problems, CFCs were once considered very unlikely suspects because they are almost totally inert molecules. But in a startling revelation in 1974, the chemists F. Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina argued that ultraviolet radiation in the upper atmosphere could break apart CFC molecules, releasing chlorine atoms that would then strip the extra oxygen from ozone molecules to form molecular oxygen. As DuPont began its own in-house atmospheric modeling work in the wake of Rowland and Molina’s widely publicized revelations-for which they shared the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Paul Crutzen-there was neither corpus delicti nor smoking gun. But CFCs were on trial and widely presumed to be guilty. The corpse was discovered 11 years later, in 1985, when satellite data from the Antarctic revealed a transient "hole" in the stratospheric ozone layer, a vertical column in which ozone concentrations were half the expected levels-an effect ten times greater than that predicted by any models. Several more years passed before the weapon was pinpointed: reactions involving chlorine, mostly from CFCs, that were occurring on the surface of ice particles and other aerosols, a solid-phase reaction that modelers had been ignoring in their concern for gas-phase reactions in the atmosphere. It remained only for the Montreal Protocol to pass final sentence, eventually banning the use and manufacture of CFCs.

It was 1974 when two chemists in California published a technical paper predicting that certain chemicals invented by DuPont (chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs) would float upward in the atmosphere and begin to destroy the Earth's ozone shield, 10 to 15 miles up in the sky. The Earth's ozone shield is a thin layer of peculiar oxygen molecules (O3 instead of normal O2) which filter out deadly ultraviolet rays streaming in from the Sun. People have known for a long time that ultraviolet light is a powerful germ-killing disinfectant. Scientists now understand that life on land was impossible until the Earth's ozone shield developed 450 million years ago. Until the ozone shield developed, life had to stay in the sea because ultraviolet radiation killed anything that ventured up onto the beach. For these reasons, scientists in 1974 knew that loss of Earth's ozone shield would be a real catastrophe threatening to make Earth uninhabitable for humans. The nation's scientific establishment soon began studying the situation. By 1976 the National Academy of Sciences (NAS)--the most prestigious body of scientists in America--announced their conclusion that CFC use was most likely going to lead to a 7% loss of the earth's ozone shield--a chillingly large change in a fundamentally important ecosystem. 2 DuPont said, "Prove it" and continued CFC production, full steam ahead. In 1979 NAS revised its estimate to a 16.5% ozone loss. That year DuPont produced another 450 million pounds of CFCs and distributed them into the environment. From 1974 through 1985 DuPont's CFC production held steady at 450 million gallons per year and its corporate position on ozone loss remained unchanged: nothing has been proven, full steam ahead. Meanwhile NASA (U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration) scientists were looking for measurable loss of Earth's ozone shield. Since 1970, NASA had had satellites (Nimbus 4 and later Nimbus 7) 600 miles above the earth peering down making ozone measurements. But the satellites reported no ozone loss. Then in 1985 a British scientist named Joe Farman announced he'd recorded a 40% loss of ozone over the south pole and he revealed that his data had begun showing ozone depletion as early as 1977. Farnam had a tiny research program (funded by the British government at $18,000 per year--yes, 18 thousand, not 18 million) that had operated an instrument at the South pole for 25 years measuring ultraviolet radiation striking the ground. The news stunned NASA scientists whose multi-million-dollar satellites had still found nothing. It turned out NASA's satellites had been collecting data every year showing an ozone hole growing ominously, but NASA scientists had programmed their computers to ignore low readings because they "knew" such readings resulted from faulty instruments, not from a real ozone hole. They had the data but they had programmed their computers to ignore it. After Farnam published his findings, our rocket scientists reviewed many years of Nimbus data and found that, yes, the ozone hole had been visible for years, but they had simply missed it. By the time NASA finally found it, the ozone hole was much larger than the area of the United States and taller than Mount Everest. It was such a huge hole that it would have been visible from as far away as planet Mars if anyone had been there to look. Each year since 1985, the ozone depletion problem has gotten worse. Many scientists have created mathematical models to predict the rate at which ozone loss will occur. All such models have been wrong. Each year the measured losses have been greater than mathematical models predicted.

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