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Published online 5 September 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.1081

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The world we avoided

The Montreal Protocol rescued the ozone layer, but also prevented drastic regional climate changes.

The Montreal Protocol has not only helped to prevent damage to the Earth's ozone layer — it has also slowed global warming, say climate chemists.

Twenty-one years ago the Montreal Protocol was drawn up to restrict the use of chemicals such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that contributed to the destruction of the ozone layer, the part of the atmosphere that filters out most of the Sun's potentially cancer-causing ultraviolet rays.

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  • An event that does not occur requires no explanation. Proximity is not causality. The Ozone Hole greeted the International Geophysical Year, 1958, less CFCs. CFC-12 with a 110-year half-life will not disappear given 20 years' enforcement (and then only in the First World). This article is not even wrong. It is an old discredited model being validated by a new disreputable model, both with abundant facile adjustable parameters.

    • 05 Sep, 2008
    • Posted by: "Uncle Al" Schwartz
  • I just want to see the views on this , i have big ideas im afraid to say , ones that will probably never come to see the light of day , yet i think them and see it can be done. ive been watching the global warming doc on the descovery . it seems to me that there are two simple solutions to the problems facing the ice caps , and the human race as a whole , yet we have set about none of these solutions. one is to send a satalite approx two thirds closer to the sun than the earth is now , machinery incased in compressed ozone blisters, that will stop alot of sola radiation damage to the working mechanism,and have it unfold on route a big enough set of material to efficiantly prevent sola radiation bombarding the north pole, this inturn would aid the caps in staying as ice , then attacking the home front also , by reducing the carbon dioxide rate , with floatation saline filter feeding plants , like massive areas of ocean with whichever plant would survive, eating the co2 and sustaining sufficiantly themselves. Sure it would need all the governments in on it , but are we not the whole planet and its people, in danger if we do not. these were the simplist solutions my brain could get round. i geuss its going to be that or mess with the fact we are going to suffer major changes in weather patterns . could ,would this not be possible. i do not work , and i am sure if so many unemployed in the world had a shot at saving the planet , actively playing a role in making this work across the world. we all would feel alot happyer in what we do . Daniel Jordan

    • 08 Sep, 2008
    • Posted by: Daniel Scott Jordan