The Ozone Hole is Shrinking: The CFC ban Has Nothing to do with the closing of the ozone hole

On October 24, AT published the article Ozone Hole Shrinking, NASA Announces. The author, Howard J. Warner, correctly wrote that there are many factors that cause the Earth’s ozone layer to grow or shrink, and that chlorofluorocarbons (CFC’s) are merely one factor of many. Mr. Warner cited volcanoes as one of these factors, for example. He provided a link to an article, which stated that although the Antarctic ozone hole is now shrinking overall, it actually grew in 2016, owing to the recent one-time eruption of the Chilean volcano Mount Calbuco. This eruption injected sulphur into the atmosphere, which formed the compound sulfuric acid (H₂SO₄) -- which ate away at the ozone layer.

Ozone Hole in 2010 (Photo credit: NASA)

One of the commenters to Mr. Howard’s article was kind enough to include the entire chemical reaction by which every CFC molecule is alleged to eat away at some 100,000 ozone molecules, in a catalytic chemical reaction, before the CFC molecules themselves are “washed out of the upper atmosphere.” This reaction was discovered by F. Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina, for which discovery they won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 1995, and it led to the ban on CFC’s. One wonders why it wasn’t the Nobel Peace Prize instead.

According to the news reports, now that CFC’s have been banned, the Antarctic ozone hole is on track to heal itself by 2050. The reduction of the Antarctic ozone hole is being touted as a vindication of the theory that banning CFC’s was needed to accomplish this. Environmental activists across the world have seized upon the news of the closing of the ozone hole as proof that the world was right to ban CFC’s during the 1980s.

This is faulty logic. It is, in fact, the logical fallacy of the post hoc ergo propter hoc argument. That’s Latin for “after the fact therefore because of the fact.” As this writer’s Jesuit philosophy professor remarked in 1971, “That’s like saying that hospitals cause death.” For example, people check into hospitals all the time, and many of them die there. Therefore, hospitals cause death, right? Similarly, to say that a ban on CFC’s caused the ozone layer to heal itself is a post hoc ergo propter hoc argument, if there are other hypotheses that can explain the same thing. Suppose that there are other sources of upper-atmosphere acids that can do every year what Mount Calbuco did in 2016?

The ozone layer is self-repairing. CFCs were causing the ozone layer to deplete. Banning them has allowed that healing to happen.

The CFC ban was a good example of straightforward, science-based environmental science. Experiments were done, experiments were replicated in other locations to verify the original research.

A solution was proposed and adopted. No problem. No ‘belief’ involved.

Exactly this headline is BS..

You can’t say “CFC’s are one of MANY factors”, but the claim Banning CFC’s had nothing to do with it...

There is NO doubt CFC’s reached the upper atmospheres, and were broken down by sunlight, the chlorine molecules would then steal an O from the O3, creating ClO... which would then lose its O to another stray O molecule, creating Cl again and O2 and the CL would then steal an O from another O3 molecule and the process would continue to repeat...

CFCs were bad, are bad, and the worldwide ban has been a good thing... sadly some countries still manufacture them, but the vast reduction in their production and release into the atmosphere is a good thing.

Uh, not sure what world you live on, but CFC’s were around LONG before 1957-58....

Secondly, the atmosphere isn’t segregated by atomic weight, if it were, you’d see a haze near the ground of the heavier gases.

You really need to read up a bit on things, your arguments are ones of ignorance.

A friend once told me about something in the eye of penguins or some creature in the Antarctic. In essence the creatures had an eye behavior or structure that was a defense against ultraviolet rays (the value of the ozone layer is that it absorbs ultraviolet rays).

He said this behavior was something that would have evolved over thousands of years, proving that the ozone hole phenomenon has been around for thousands of years.

Evidence is absolutely clear on this, this isn’t some debate.

They believed, (incorrectly) that CFC’s would not break down... however, evidence showed that they did indeed break down from sunlight in the upper atmosphere.

This isn’t some conspiracy theory, or fudged hockey stick data, this is proven and repeated and observed science, there is no debate that CFC’s caused OZONE depletion.

Anyone arguing otherwise is just wholesale ignorant.

The ozone hole is a cheap graphic fraud. All they did was designate some low value of Dobson units the color black and presto, it looks like a hole. It would be like if USA Today replaced the color purple with black on their winter weather maps. It would look like there was a black death sweeping across Minnesota and the Dakotas. A hole is physically impossible due to Fick’s law of diffusion. Rather, there is a lower concentration of ozone over a pole during the winter (surprise, because ozone is made by the sun), but on the opposite pole, there is a higher concentration. 6 months later, those stats reverse.

During the same time period women used less perfume... so I’m going with that as the reason... it’s just as likely.

I suspect this is one more example of the earth being a self correcting closed system. And some day we’ll understand the cycles and not fear them.

For now this is one more liberal ‘the world is ending scare story’ that just bit the dust.

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