People often wonder why I devote so much time and attention to the stratospheric ozone issue. After all, they say, isn't it a "done deal"? The Montreal Protocol of 1987 and subsequent amendments have succeeded in stopping the production of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and other useful chemicals by the end of 1995. What's the point, they ask, to exposing the shaky science that's been used to arrive at the current policies?
I have always been stumped to come up with a cogent answer-- until recently. On the ABC-"Nightline" program of February 24, 1994, Dr. Michael Oppenheimer, the reputed holder of the Barbra Streisand Endowed Chair at the Environmental Defense Fund, complained: "If they [skeptical scientists] can get the public to believe that ozone wasn't worth acting on, that they [the public] were led in the wrong direction by [our] scientists, then there is no reason for the public to believe anything about any environmental issue." Quite true!
CFC Policy is a Blueprint for Control of Energy Use
The real reason for attacking the present CFC policy is not just to demonstrate how science has been ignored, perverted, misused, and otherwise manhandled, but to avoid having this sad episode repeated for other issues on the international eco- activists' agenda.
The most prominent issue now is the specter of a greenhouse warming calamity. It drove President George Bush--under pressure from his EPA chief William Reilly in an election year--to sign the Global Climate Treaty at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Goaded into demonstrating environmental "leadership," the U.S. then became the fourth nation to ratify the treaty, right after Mauritius, the Seychelles, and the Marshall Islands. The Clinton- Gore Administration followed up in October 1993 with its Climate Change Action Plan to keep carbon dioxide emissions for the year 2000 at the 1990 level--knowing full well that this public relations exercise could only slow the ongoing increase of atmospheric CO2 and delay any putative warming by a few years.
But more reprehensible than the cynicism of the White House is the politically driven distortion of scientific information in the current push to reduce CO2 emissions further--by up to 60 percent!- -to achieve the activists' goal of no further increase in carbon dioxide by clamping controls on the burning of energy fuels. A recent example is a September 15 press release, issued by the leadership of the UN-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which not only misrepresents the underlying scientific report but invents conclusions that are not even in the report. By exaggerating the risk of climate change and raising public fears about hypothetical disasters, the authors of the press release betray the integrity of the many honest scientists who contributed to the IPCC climate studies yet do not share such apocalyptic visions.
Negative reactions to the press release have been swift and vocal, forcing the State Department to complain to the IPCC bureaucrats about violating agreed-to procedures. But judging from a report in the Oct. 6 issue of Nature, nothing was said about the willful distortion of the science, a substantive issue.
The sole reason for the distortion, I suspect, is to satisfy ideological objectives of constraining the use of energy and thereby stopping economic growth. The cost of such actions, in terms of human misery throughout the world, is beyond measure. But this matter seems of little concern to the activist elites that are demanding drastic reductions in energy development.
For many zealots the CFC-ozone issue is simply a blueprint for the global warming issue. David Doniger was lead attorney of the Natural Resources Defense Council (the folks that shamelessly promoted the Alar scare in 1989) and is now the global environmental pooh-bah in the Clinton Administration. Way back in the spring of 1988, in Issues in Science and Technology, he strategized about building on the CFC experience as a precedent for future international controls on carbon dioxide, methane and other trace gases.
The parallels are quite clear. The 1985 Vienna Convention on Ozone, an innocuous-sounding document, asked only that we keep an eye on the ozone layer. But it was soon parlayed into the Montreal Protocol, which called first for limits, then reductions, and finally, five years later, for a complete phaseout of CFC production. A similar strategy seems to be underway for carbon dioxide--although it is hard to believe that any substantial reduction in electric power, industrial production, and consumer uses of energy would be tolerated in industrialized as well as in developing nations.
Such a progression of controls might not be objectionable if indeed new scientific information were to show truly grave threats to human health or ecosystems--particularly if such threats were irreversible. But the new scientific facts, both for ozone and for greenhouse warming, show just the opposite. Science and policy are diverging more and more--and there seems to be no will nor way to stop what's taking place.
Ozone Science Does Not Support Policy
A major fear has always been a worldwide thinning of the ozone layer. But in spite of repeated claims of global ozone loss because of CFC emissions, there is no sound evidence yet to support this assertion. The basic data appear to be contaminated; the statistical analysis is problematic; and the natural variations of ozone are so large that the thinning claim cannot be substantiated.
It is interesting to watch the proponents of the ozone-CFC theory squirm when under scientific attack. They resort to evasion, double-talk, and often outright prevarication. The Bureau of National Affairs' Daily Environmental Report quotes from a debate at the August 1994 meeting of the American Chemical Society: University of California chemist Sherwood Rowland, coauthor of the ozone-CFC theory, could only respond that his critics (including this writer) had not published their doubts about ozone depletion in peer-reviewed journals. (Not only is his statement untrue, but Rowland must know it to be untrue since he replied to one of my publications in the very same August 27, 1993 issue of Science.)
Another public concern has been a possible rise in ultraviolet radiation reaching the earth's surface as a result of ozone thinning. Much to the chagrin of the activists, however, published information has shown no such trend. But in the November 12, 1993 issue of Science two Canadian scientists presented UV data covering a 4-year period and claimed a large upward trend, of as much as 35 percent per year! Activists were ecstatic. Professor Rowland exulted in the Los Angeles Times, "Now we have good data to point to." Which speaks volumes about how ill-founded these policies are.
The "smoking gun" proved to be mostly smoke. At the University of Virginia, Prof. Patrick Michaels repeated the statistical analysis of the Canadian UV data and found no trend. Michaels and I then called on Science editors to withdraw the paper from the scientific literature. Our critique appeared in print on May 27, but this was not the end of the story. Unfortunately, the initial publicity had already misled the public and even other scientists. Oregon biologists had been quick to blame increased UV as the cause of a reported decline in some species of frogs and toads. But when a Washington Post reporter apprised them that the Canadian UV trend was spurious, they suddenly found another cause--a fungus.
The final nail in the CFC-ozone-UV coffin should have been a research report by Dr. Richard Setlow and colleagues from the Brookhaven National Laboratory in the July 1993 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It reveals that malignant melanoma, the deadly form of skin cancer, is produced by a portion of the UV radiation which is not absorbed by ozone at all. If confirmed, this finding would remove the major public health argument for the present CFC policy. It certainly makes mincemeat of the scary EPA forecast of 3 million additional skin cancer deaths by 2075, an estimate that had proved a powerful persuader for the Montreal Protocol. But don't expect to see EPA change its CFC policy, or even mention the new scientific results.
The ozone experience provides a lesson on the folly of jumping ahead with costly policies, estimated as well over $100 billion for the U.S. alone, before the science is well understood and substantial disagreements are settled. Unfortunately, this lesson from CFC-ozone policy has not been learned by our public officials. They prefer to believe the myth of a "scientific consensus" and seem eager to repeat the same mistakes for the global warming issue where the potential for damage by ill-advised and hasty policies is so much higher. Scientists must share the blame; by not speaking up more forcefully, they are allowing regulators and international bureaucrats to run amok in areas in which they have no expertise.