or Should the Montreal Protocol be terminated?
Mike Jonas,
For years, I had wondered about the Montreal Protocol and the ozone hole that started in 1979, and whether the science behind it all had been twisted to suit DuPont or others. But where would you look to find the answer? Then, last year, I saw a report that the ozone hole, which had been recovering as expected, was suddenly as large as ever. It could have been this report. So I started downloading some data. I knew that it would be a lot of work, I had no idea exactly what I would be looking for, and I suspected that I wouldn’t find anything. Lots of others must have looked and found nothing.
I was stunned by the first significant thing I found: There was an ozone hole long before 1979.
But first, why did I suspect twisting by DuPont? Well, I think ‘everyone’ did back then, but no-one could prove anything. It certainly looked like some sort of shenanigans were going on. For a start, the ozone hole was defined in the 1980s as the area of ozone less than 220 Dobson Units (DU). Why precisely 220? Well, it was clear that the number 220 was chosen so that the ozone hole started in 1979. A different number would have given a different start date, and it seems they really did want the ozone hole to start in 1979. It had nothing to do with 220 DU being some sort of safe level, the number was plucked out of the air just like today’s ‘need’ to restrict global warming to precisely 1.5C. DuPont’s lucrative patent for Freon (basically a chlorofluorocarbon (CFC)) expired in 1979. In 1974, with their Freon income to protect, the Chair of DuPont said that “ozone depletion theory is “a science fiction tale … a load of rubbish … utter nonsense”“. But in the 1980s DuPont changed its tune when it was clear that they would profit more from a replacement product. The prime function of the Montreal Protocol seems to be to sustain the manufacture of unnecessarily expensive refrigerants. Incidentally, Wikipedia joined in the shenanigans, no doubt for its own purposes, using the ozone hole to attack Fred Singer. Wikipedia (thank you, Wayback Machine), said: “Some atmospheric scientists (for instance Fred Singer, founder of SEPP and also a global warming skeptic) and industry-sponsored advocacy groups question or completely deny a link between CFCs and ozone depletion. It is fairly common to see completely nonsensical arguments …“. Today’s Wikipedia entry has no mention of Fred Singer or the “completely nonsensical arguments” which appear not to have been said by him anyway.
But I digress.
I downloaded a lot of data files for the southern hemisphere (Willis Eschenbach knows all about how many files you need to download sometimes), and loaded them into old-fashioned spreadsheets in my ancient desktop (sorry, w, I never got round to using R). When I looked at the ozone data for the south pole, there were ozone holes in 1964, 1966, 1969, 1974 and 1977. They may have been less pronounced than in more recent years, but they were there. I have written it up, it has been published, and my paper is open-access at WJARR. CFCs were oh so close to zero at the first of those ozone holes …….
There are obvious questions arising from this: If the ozone measurements at the South Pole showed column ozone repeatedly below 220 DU well before 1979, how could NASA’s Ozone Watch say ” total ozone values of less than 220 Dobson Units were not found in the historic observations over Antarctica prior to 1979“? Were NASA lying, or had they simply not seen the data? If they hadn’t seen the data then did they make their statement without checking the data? The South Pole would have to be the first place to look for pre-1979 ozone data relevant to the ozone hole. Or had the data been found to be wrong? – I could find no reference in the literature to the ozone data having been wrong.
If the gatekeepers ever take the trouble to refute my finding, maybe they will do it the way they refuted Qing-Bin Lu’s 2022 finding of a tropical ‘ozone hole’ – they refuted it by deflection (I refer to Qing-Bin Lu’s paper in my paper). Qing-Bin Lu was very careful to say that the standard definition of an ozone hole – ozone less than 220 DU – was not used, but the critics managed to leverage “looking at percentage changes in ozone, rather than absolute changes” into “the research was riddled with serious errors and unsubstantiated assertions“. The detail in the criticisms actually supports Qing-Bin Lu’s findings, but it seems the critics just didn’t want an ozone hole anywhere outside the Antarctic. Another curious thing about it all is that Qing-Bin Lu was giving them another opportunity for scare-mongering – why didn’t they take that up? Was it because this ‘ozone hole’, reportedly seven times larger than the Antarctic ozone hole and above where a lot of people actually lived, was natural?
The other thing of note that I found as I ploughed through the data was that the annual ozone minima not only didn’t correlate very well with CFC data, but also looked more like a phase change. Here’s my Figure 4, illustrating it:
I was careful to derive the phases mathematically not manually, but it would obviously be credible to draw the phases differently. I did a check through the literature, and Bingo! an early 1980s phase change in south pole surface temperature had been detected (Lazzara et al 2012). Then I checked the south pole radiosonde temperature data, and there was a temperature phase change in the lower stratosphere and in the troposphere too. Everything tallied. Another thing I discovered after submitting the paper was that Qing-Bin Lu’s tropical ‘ozone hole’ is thought to have started in the 1980s – that tallies too.
My paper covers both the non-correlation of ozone with CFCs and the matching phase changes in ozone and temperature. Those who don’t like non-emphatic words like ‘could’ and ‘suggests’ will be disappointed, but it really isn’t possible to prove much definitively from correlation or non-correlation with limited data. The analysis is complicated by the relationship between ozone and temperature being bi-directional (each affects the other), and of course, air moves. My paper does not argue against chemical reactions involving ozone and CFCs, but it does highlight that it really isn’t known just how much of the ozone hole the CFCs are responsible for.
Incidentally, the fact that air moves is very relevant. Say there’s an ozone hole near the south pole. Then it moves a little. One day, ozone at the south pole is over 220 DU, the next day it’s under. The ozone hole hasn’t changed at all, it just moved a little. There are many days in the south pole ozone record where there is a large change from the previous day.
My paper’s Abstract:
Abstract
Depletion of ozone over Antarctica was first observed in the late 1970s, and discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole was announced in the 1980s as having started in 1979. The ozone hole was defined as the area with total column ozone less than 220 Dobson units. Analysis of ozone, temperature, chlorofluorocarbon and nitrous oxide data from 1963 onwards suggests that the annual ozone minimum at the South Pole is related to lower stratospheric temperature independently of chlorofluorocarbons and nitrous oxide. There were ozone holes, ie. column ozone less than 220 Dobson Units, at the South Pole in several years before 1979 (the date that the ozone hole is reported to have first appeared) when chlorofluorocarbon concentrations were much lower than today and lower than in 1979. An early 1980s phase change in the lower stratospheric temperature at the South Pole at altitudes between 250 hPa and 100 hPa, and at some lower altitudes, coincides with a phase change in the annual South Pole ozone minimum. The phase change is not visible in chlorofluorocarbon or nitrous oxide data. This raises the possibility that, over a multi-annual or decadal timescale, lower stratospheric temperature has more effect than chlorofluorocarbons or nitrous oxide on atmospheric ozone concentration over the South Pole. Alternatively, temperature and ozone may both be reacting to some other influence.
The paper is open access and can be read in full at https://wjarr.com/sites/default/files/WJARR-2024-0531.pdf.
I mentioned above that this study would be a lot of work. A lot of the work is ploughing through the literature to see what has been discovered already, and checking that what I was finding hadn’t been found or refuted already. As I read the literature, I formed the opinion that a lot of scientists were sceptical of the CFC-depletion narrative, but they couldn’t quite put their finger on anything that definitively disproved it, so they were restricted in what they could say about it. Maybe my findings will help. Or, if NASA really did lie about ozone levels, or even if they simply ignored the data, then should the Montreal Protocol be ditched anyway?
There’s a really interesting statement in a phys.org article: “Lu’s observation of the ozone hole comes as a surprise to his peers in the scientific community, since it was not predicted by conventional photochemical models. His observed data agree well with the cosmic-ray-driven electron reaction (CRE) model and strongly indicate the identical physical mechanism working for both Antarctic and tropical ozone holes.“. Unfortunately, I didn’t see that until later.
I ask above whether the Montreal Protocol should be ditched. My study didn’t look at CFC chemistry, so it isn’t about that. The question is whether the Montreal Protocol is based on a lie. If CFCs are to be banned, they should only be banned for a valid reason. And remember, CFCs were very close to zero at the first of those ozone holes and there is no fuss about natural ozone depletion over where millions of people actually live. But in the paper I couldn’t say explicitly that anyone lied, so I said we would have to wait until ozone levels correlate with one of temperature and CFCs more than with the other. That could take a long time, especially if there’s another phase change. The reality is I suspect even worse – we will have to wait for the gatekeepers to get out of the way.
PS.
In the man-made CO2 “climate change” narrative, increasing CO2 supposedly cools the stratosphere. A global phase change in stratospheric temperature followed by decades of no temperature trend would pretty well knock that narrative on the head too. Qing-Bin Lu: “all the datasets show that significant O3[ozone] or LST [Lower Stratospheric Temperature] reductions only occurred in the 1980s and 1990s with no significant trends over the past ∼25 years. This is similar to the observation by Polvani et al. and that reported in the newest IPCC AR6. The latter states “most datasets show that lower stratospheric temperatures have stabilized since the mid-1990s with no significant change over the last 20 years” “. [my bold] Maybe that’s another reason why they were so keen to tear down Qing-Bin Lu’s paper.
Addendum from Charles
The article above leaves out the fact that satellite observations began just as the “Hole” was “Discovered” with the launch of The Nimbus 7 satellite on October 4th 1978. The Nimbus 7 contained the TOMS (Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer).
Initially, the dearth of ozone was not noticed because the data was so far off from the expected range that it was discarded as invalid by the data processing algorithms. When the fact that something like 2/3rds of the instrument’s measurements were being discarded was finally noticed and analyzed, that’s when the panic set in about the “Hole in the Ozone”.
While the article above does cite a distinct global polar temperature regime change in the late 70’s that probably affected the ozone levels, it just seems too much of a coincidence that the panic set in just as a new measurement technique was deployed. Supposedly the TOMS measurements match ground based measurements to a reasonable degree; however, like the fact that “sea level acceleration” only shows up in Jason satellite measurements and not in tide gauges, there is a not insignificant chance that the “Ozone Hole” is an artifact of instrument changes.
Here is a clip from a PBS documentary on the discovery of the “Hole” describing the discarding of out of expected range measurements and the ensuing panic when the data didn’t match preconceived expectations.
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