This time his headline is about a press release that he copied and pasted, about the ozone layer (archived here). Anthony's denial only comes via his headline: Claim: ‘Severe ozone depletion avoided'. It's not the first time he's denied that ozone-depleting substances such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) react with ozone in the stratosphere, destroying it (see further reading below).
The paper, by Professor Martyn Chipperfield and colleagues, is in Nature Communications. The authors discuss how the ozone hole would have been much worse had the world not agreed (through the Montreal Protocol) to stop releasing ozone-depleting substances. The researchers developed a model to investigate what would have happened if action had not been taken. They describe this as (from the abstract, my dot points and emphasis):
- A deep Arctic ozone hole, with column values <120 DU, would have occurred given meteorological conditions in 2011.
- The Antarctic ozone hole would have grown in size by 40% by 2013, with enhanced loss at subpolar latitudes.
- The decline over northern hemisphere middle latitudes would have continued, more than doubling to ~15% by 2013.
