I truly think that the environmentalist push to ban freon throughout the world was an overreaction to some very sound science that created some interesting theories. The problem was that scientists, although they knew that freon could reach the upper atmosphere and chemically reduce ozone, immediately jumped on observations of Antarctic ozone levels observed over a very small period of time on the Earth. As much as I hate to discredit the good intentions of environmental scientists, I think they lost a huge amount of credibility crying wolf about the ozone. Without many thousands of years of data about ozone levels in our atmosphere, it is simply ludicrous to assume that only chloroflorocarbons were the sole contributor to shrinking levels. The theories completely discounted the effects of solar activity and other cosmic occurences that it may take centuries to understand. We have no idea about whether or not there are events on Earth that replenish those levels and how those events might fluctuate.

Hell, we can't predict most of our basic weather and yet we're willing to, with shaky data, create huge costs to our economy to change our vehicles over to an inefficient fluid for our air conditioners that has driven compressor failures and maintenance costs through the roof.

I'm glad that environmentalists (even the radical ones) have a seat at the table in our national discussions but their thoughts have to be tempered with common sense and long debate.