The protocol designed to heal the ozone layer may also have fended off warming

Good, so we have shown that we <i>can</i> make a difference. That means the defeatist argument (&quot;we can&#x27;t, so what&#x27;s the point&quot;) does not hold, and we can proceed to actually do something. Patting ourselves on the shoulder that something has been done in the past will not help.

Ditching CFS is laudable. Ditching oil is a bit harder.<p>I remember the hole in the ozone layer thing from start to not being quite finished (there are still a few holdouts in some parts of the world)<p>I remember the breathless announcements on the TV news and realizing that the underarm deodorant I was using was a wrong one and doing fuck all about it (I was a teenager.) The manufacturer of that deodorant switched chemicals.<p>I remember fridges and freezers being dumped because they were using the &quot;wrong&quot; refrigerants by well meaning owners. Could they have been re-gassed up with a non CFC and continued to work? No idea but I suspect that a lot of waste was generated.<p>Pollution is hard to deal with, it&#x27;s so easy to emit and so hard to withdraw. At the risk of trivializing the issue: try farting in front of your parents-in-law or considering doing it in front of &#x27;er Maj Queen Elizabeth and considering the consequences.

Except CFCs have been on the rise [1] because not all countries follow the ban. They are a more potent GHG that fall right in the middle of the atmospheric window. It&#x27;s a big deal...<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;s41586-019-1193-4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;s41586-019-1193-4</a>

Oh, so this is about the indirect effect of UV on plant growth reducing carbon uptake. Cool study. CFCs are also highly potent greenhouse gasses due to their long atmospheric residence time and the fact they have very different absorption spectra than everything else out there.<p>The Montreal Protocol is a lot like the chemical weapons ban: a ban of something the rich and powerful really don’t need that is incidentally the right thing to do. This kind of enforcement regime will work on fossil fuels in about 20 years when we have fusion power, but until then incentives are too greatly against it.

This article is an interesting retrospective on some really good environmental moves the world has undertaken and may serve to help wash away doubt folks have about the ability for global cooperation to actually materialize buuuut... Gosh that title is just itching to be abused by apologists, we&#x27;ve managed to not end mankind in a whole bunch of ways during the past century - some people were quite convinced that a nuclear apocalypse was going to be the inevitable conclusion to the cold war.