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.