Is The Sky Falling ?


    For the past ten years Americans have been bombarded with stories about pollution, global warming, and environmental catastophies that threaten our very existence. The news media makes it a daily habit to enforce our eco concerns with such slogans as "don't mess with texas" and "earth day is every day." Millions of dollars have even been spent on movies and television brodcasts relating to heroes and villans of the environment.  In fact movies buffs all admit that the environment was the trend of movies in the 1990s just as drug wars were the trend of movies made in the 1980s. Is there any reality to all this hype ? Or are we all being decieved by the likes of tobacco science ?  In this essay I intend to show the reader that "falling sky" scenario is not very credible after all.  First we will examine some of the alleged causes of ozone depletion like the infamous chloroflurocarbons. Then the alleged effects, of ozone depletion,  the so called "ozone hole" and finnaly the people behind the hype.

    
    The myth that the sky is falling due to human activity was first put into place in 1971 by James McDonald, an atmospheric phyisict. He testified in court that the planes in the then current Super Sonic Transport program were destroying the ozone layer and allowing ultraviolated radition to enter the atmosphere and cause skin cancer. The nation went into a  and government funding of the SST stopped.

    Two years later F.Sherwood and Mario Molina put forward the theory that chloroflurocarbons (CFCs) were responsible for ozone depletion. CFCs were once widely used as refigerant gases, cleaning solvents, and in aresol containers. In 1990, several of the worlds leading nations met in London to sign a treaty known as the Montreal Protocols which called for the eventual ban of CFCs. In  1996 the USA stopped producing CFCs all togather.

    The Sherwood/Molina theory doesn't claim that the CFCs themselves deplete the ozone but that their breakdown is the problem. First the CFCs float up to the trophosphere where they look for sinks to hold them in. Since there are no sinks in this sphere, after five years they just float up to the stratosphere where they are broken down by the ultraviolate radiation. Then the break down of the CFCs release a  luftwaffe of chloroine atoms that go on a killing spree of the ozone atoms.

    As convincing as the theory might be it suffers two major flaws. First of all there is no evidence. There has not been a single paper published that observed this process in the sky.  Sherwood and Molina came up with this theory in a labratory. A theory that is created in closed place like a labratory can not always be trusted to reflect reality. In theory communism works. In the labratory only a few variables were able to be used. Today we know that there are 192 chemimcal reactions and 48 photochemical processes going on in the sky. Any usefull theory would have to take in all these variables.

    The second flaw of the Sherwood/Molina theory really shows how ridiculous it is.  As already mentioned, the chlorine released from the CFCs is blamed as the main culprit in the destruction of the ozone layer.Yet if that were true Mother Nature would be a suicidal maniac!  In 1992 CFCs were recorded to produce 750,000 tons of chlorine per year. The ammount of chlorine produced by sea water evaporation is 600 million tons.Volcanoes emit 36 million tons of Cl during periods of inactivity. In fact CFCs never represented more than 1% of the total chlorine produced  on the planet.

    In 1985 the CFC issue was revived when a British scientist working in Antartica "discovered" a hole in the ozone layer. Suddenly the world went into another panic that the sky was falling and the end of the world was soon. It did not matter that the CFC theory didnt even predict any holes in the ozone. Also it did not matter  that the hole shrinks from week to week as the sun rises over the horizon.

    However the media convienently ignored the fact that the hole was not really  discovered in 1985.  It was discovered  in 1956! The name used measure the ozone(dobson) in fact were named after the man who disovered the whole; Gordon Dobson.

    Some time after the rediscovery, two French scientists discoved that the hole was deeper in 1958 then it was during any time during the 1980s. P.Rigid and B.Leroy wrote a paper showing how the hole appears every year as part of a seasonal process. The ozone hole would appear during late August (Antartica's spring) and then suddenly starts to close up in October.  The simple explanation for this phenomena is that the higher the sun is the more powerfull the energy it exerts on the atmosohere.    


    It is believed that one of the consequences of ozone depletion  is skin cancer. When the ozone layer receades it allows ultraviolet radiation to enter the atmosphere which inturn gives us cancer.The warning of cancer throws us into a panic and causes the common man to obey the warner without futher questioning. If ozone depletion was not linked to skin cancer it would probably not be an issue today.

    Before proceeding on it is first necessary to know that scientists divide ultraviolet radiation into subcatagories of ultraviolate A, B, and C. Ultraviolet A has the longest wave length and ultraviolet C the shortest. Since the ozone layer doesn't filter out any ultraviolet A,  the culprit is most likely ultraviolet B. Ultraviolet B does cause sunburns and might be responsible for many skin cancers, but that doesn't mean it  causes malign skin cancer. The American Academy of Dermatology says that malign skin cancer occurs in places where sunlight doesnt evenreach like between the fingers or under arm pits. Dark skinned people rarely get skin cancer but they are also victims of malign skin cancer as well. However the tree hugers would not bother to point out the different types of skin cancer.

    Now if the ozone layer was dying than there would be more ultraviolet light entering the atmosphere.  In 1986 Robert Watson of the Ozone Trend Panel made the claim that the ozone layer decreased by 3% in the past 20 years.  If the CFC theory were true that would mean there was a 6% increase in ultraviolet radiation entering the atmosphere. But the recorded data shows the exact opposite of this.  In 1988 Joseph Scotto of the Biostatistics Branch of the National Cancer Institute, showed that ultraviolet radiation is infact decreasing. Scotto used measurements from gound stations all over the world from 1974 to 1985. This study was of course ignored by the major news media.

    Finnaly it is important to understand the people who make this environmental movement possible.  Let us dispense with the lie that environmentalism is phenomena that origanates from the grass roots level. The environmentalist movement has an annual revenue rate of about 8.5 billion dollars. If you add to that the law firms involved that would double its wort to about 16 billion dollars. That is more than the GDP of 56 underdeveloped countries.

    Dues from membership in these organizations  make up only 50% of the annual income in fact. Where does the other half come from ? They come from your average Joe worker acourse. You know your typical John Rockefeller and Ford Foundation associates. Environmentalism is very big bussiness. Giant chemical companies like Du Pont and th UK's Imperial Chemical Industry have already made billions of dollars from the banning of CFCs.

    We have all heard the fairy tale when we were kids of Chicken Little. The characters in the story were convinced that the sky was falling and that their security lay with Foxy Loxy. This fairy tale was ment to tell a point that we have long forgot. We must be critical of what we hear from our leaders and peers. If we decide to remain as a heard of sheep we will certainly be victims of a Foxy Loxy. Let us not scare ourselves with the environmentalist acpocalypse.