Seriously deluded: wacky conspiracy theories at WUWT with more ozone hole denial

Denier blogs are in the doldrums and have been for quite some time. I wrote about Judith Curry, who actively agitates for no mitigation of global warming, complaining about scientists warning US Congress about the dangers of climate change. Seriously! Is that all she's got?

Jo Nova has been focused on politics. She likes One Nation's climate conspiracy theories and in one article she urged her readers to vote for a Senate candidate from an ultra-conservative populist party that stands on climate science denial, homophobia, islamophobia, and against almost all the values that decent Australians cherish. That is the Christian Democrat Party, which is the creature of Fred Nile. Joanne is a proud deluded conservative (DelCon) who regards centrist conservatives as socialist. She paints everyone to the left of Ghengis Kahn as subversive commies.

Anthony Watts has been posting a lot of political articles too. He hasn't been around much except to put up some very silly articles from his band of freeby contributors. His latest contribution is another wacky article by one of his favourite uber-conspiracy theorists Timothy Ball (archived here).

The ozone hole grew bigger this year

If you were a first-time visitor to WUWT, you'd never believe that Anthony Watts had been posting articles about climate and ozone for going on eight years. You'd think he was completely ignorant of all things science. And you'd be correct.

This false-color image shows ozone concentrations above Antarctica on Oct. 2, 2015. Credits: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

Today he's got an article about the ozone hole (cached here). It's a mite disturbing, especially for those of us who live in southern Australia. The ozone hole over Antarctica grew to be the fourth largest ever. That's because of the colder stratosphere. Stratosphere cooling arises from greenhouse warming, so as I understand it, this is partly because of our CO2 emissions.

WUWT goes from denying the ozone hole to blaming it for global warming!

You'd hardly credit it. There are umpteen articles in which Anthony Watts and his crew denied the ozone hole (it's existence and that human activity caused it - yep! Probably both at the same time.). Now he's now posted an article where it's real and blamed for global warming (archived here, latest here). Some new bloke called Steven Capozzola has written an article in which he says: "The evidence is compelling, and the subject deserves further scrutiny."

The evidence for what exactly? Well, that's not so easy to figure out. I'll see if I can step past the waffly bits to the nuts and bolts of his hypothesis. It goes something like this:

Anthony Watts and his ozone hole deniers are out in force (again)

In yet another "claim" headline, Anthony Watts shows yet again how he denies science. Not just climate science but atmospheric chemistry as well. This, mind you, is the same week as he sent his fans to spam Wikipedia denying his denial of science.

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.

Denier weirdness: Paranoid conspiracy blog WUWT branches out into ozone hole denial

WUWT has earned a reputation as the go-to blog for climate science denial. Now it's branching out into ozone hole denial. It wasn't always so.

Here are some facts from NASA about the Ozone hole.

Denier weirdness: WUWT denies human-caused ozone depletion - again!

Dumb denial comes in bursts. Today there is more ozone hole denial at WUWT.  Hot on the heels of Anthony Watts's announcement of a "new" (five year old) paper about ozone depletion, he's posted an article by justthefactswuwt (archived here).  The article is about the fact that scientists have found that there are some ozone-depleting gases that are rising in concentration.

The article has the title:

Mysterious new man-made gases pose threat to ozone layer…

The only mystery is the source of the gases.  The gases themselves are known.  In other words, they are coming from somewhere.

Justthefactswuwt didn't post any link to the news release s/he copied and pasted.  Just said it was from the BBC.  It wasn't hard to find with a google search.  The WUWT article pinched the BBC's headline but WUWT readers chose to interpret it differently from normal people.

As reported in the UEA press release, the gases were detected "by comparing today’s air samples with air trapped in polar firn snow – which provides a century-old natural archive of the atmosphere. They also looked at air collected between 1978 and 2012 in unpolluted Tasmania."  And it was confirmed by other sources, too.

The gases are CFC-112, CFC-112a, CFC-113a, and HCFC-133a.  I don't have access to the paper itself, which is paywalled, but in the supplementary information there is:

It should be noted, that our observations do not prove that CFC-112, CFC-112a, CFC-113a, and HCFC-133a are entirely man-made. If these substances are not conserved in firn air, or if they are produced by biologically mediated processes that have been enhanced in recent years such as by climate change, then there could be an alternate explanation for the observations reported here. Such alternate explanations cannot be entirely excluded but are very unlikely given the evidence for the industrial usage of these compounds.

The scientists reported that:

Measurements show that all four new gases have been released into the atmosphere recently – and that two are significantly accumulating. Emission increases of this scale have not been seen for any other CFCs since controls were introduced during the 1990s. But they are nowhere near peak CFC emissions of the 1980s which reached around a million tonnes a year. 

So, the gases are newly released into the atmosphere and two are accumulating "significantly".  Even WUWT reported:

"Our firn air measurements suggest that all four newly reported compounds are anthropogenic (see also Supplementary Information), with insignificant atmospheric abundances before the 1960s.”

Somewhat mysteriously, justthefactswuwt wrote:

For reference, the images the head of this article show the current Northern “Ozone Hole” within the Northern Polar Vortex, at 10 hPa/mb – Approximately 31,000 meters (101,700 feet). Draw your own conclusions… 

I'm not sure what conclusions justthefactswuwt wanted drawn, but I'd conclude that s/he doesn't know much about ozone depletion.  I don't know why s/he put up lots of charts of the ozone layer in the Arctic. Ozone depletion has been detected in the Arctic recently, but that was when there was unusual cold, which is common in Antarctica (and necessary for CFC reactions) but isn't as common in the Arctic.  (It's been a concern that Canada cut back on monitoring this.)

From the WUWT comments

This is the weirder part.  The article brought out the utter nutters and there were few comments that showed WUWTers understand anything about ozone depletion.  The author of the article, justthefactswuwt, doesn't have a clue.  Other WUWTers are hypothesising sources ranging from solar panels to marine animals.  Here is a sample:


Col Mosby says it's being emitted by solar panels!:

March 9, 2014 at 6:25 pm
What leads these folks to claim these agents “could be from agricultural insecticides.”? That’s a bizarre thing to claim without explanation. To throw in my own out-of-left-field possible origin : could solar panels be emitting such agents? After all, agricultural insecticides have been around for a very long time, solar panels not very long.

Karl doesn't know much about chemistry and says, irrelevantly:

March 9, 2014 at 6:25 pm
Fluorinated Drinking Water (Fluorine) and Water Treatment (Chlorine and carbon and bacteria)?? (remember fluorine started to be added post WWII but really ramped up in the 1960′s)

Oh nooes!!!
Bueller? Bueller? Anyone? Anyone?
That’s my hypothesis, where is my grant for the research and to develop an alternative??????
Jut give me money, money, that’s what I want.

Peter Laux is an ignorant bum who says:

March 9, 2014 at 6:36 pm
Zombie Science strikes again.

So lets get this right, CFC’s don’t “destroy the ozone” above Industrial Centres where they are released but migrate too & have an annual jamboree and convention every year at the same time in Antarctica.

Extraordinary really when hardly any atmospheric water vapor from other latitudes can penetrate the Circumpolar winds surrounding Antarctica, thus making it the driest continent on earth.

So ozone is not in a layer but is formed in the Ionosphere as solar UV hits O2 – this “hole” forms during the Antarctic winter where no UV has been wrecking O2 to form Ozone – and we blame a gas as the ‘guilty party’ ………. Detective Colombo would still be asking questions !

Yes, Peter. CFC's don't destroy ozone in the troposphere above "Industrial Centres". (I'd guess Peter is an older bloke, with his unfashionable use of capitalisation).  They are very stable molecules and generally inert in the troposphere, which is one reason they were so useful as refrigerants.  They are dissociated by UV. They are precursors to a catalytic reaction that reduces the amount of ozone, mainly in the lower stratosphere in very cold temperatures. Wikipedia explains it fairly well.


Katherine says it might be dolphins have started manufacturing CFCs or something like that:

March 9, 2014 at 6:41 pm
If the sources are unidentified, how can they say the gases are man-made? How do they know there isn’t a natural source for the gases? After all, there are natural sources for CFCs; for example, volcanic processes, bacteria, fungi, plants, lichen, insects, and marine animals.

As noted above, the scientists have said that they don't absolutely preclude other origins, but point out that it's extremely unlikely.


Mike Tremblay thinks, wrongly, that he's got a "gotcha" and says:

March 9, 2014 at 6:47 pm
I hate to break it to these researchers, but these are not ‘new’ gases. All were identified in the Montreal Protocol as ODS (Ozone depleting substances) back in 1989, and their production, or use in production of other than non-ODS materials was banned, or due to be phased out completely by 2030 – the phase out of production is currently at 98%. The hyperbole that these are ‘new’ gases and increased threats to the ozone layer has no place in responsible scientific research when simply looking at the ODS listing at the EPA’s website shows that they are already considered.

I hate to break it to you, Mike, but these might not be "new" gases, however they are "new" in the atmosphere.  That's what the paper is all about.  They are accumulating after everyone agreed not to produce them.


hunter injects a rare word of wisdom in a backhanded way and says:

March 9, 2014 at 8:43 pm
Let us not forget that eventually the boy who cried wolf was crying about a real wolf.
CO2 obsession can cut both ways.

It can make skeptics reflexively dismissive of real threats, simply because of the source of the warning.

Let’s keep ourselves on the right side of things and learn more so we can ask informed questions.

otsar says the source is here (eg like this):

March 9, 2014 at 7:15 pm
R113a , CAS No 75. may be purchased from Zejiang China. It may be purchased in 250Kg ISO tanks. It is used as a precursor for other useful molecules such as R134a. I am not surprised that they claim not to know the major source. It can be easily found on the web. They probably are afraid to mention it.

I'm not sure I'd bank money on a web shopping page.  There could well be a black market in the stuff though.  Under the Montreal Protocol, waste CFCs cannot be vented to the atmosphere so it doesn't mean that the producer is the source, it is just as likely (or more likely) to be the buyer or the company supposed to be destroying it.  Anyway, according to the supplementary information the scientists are trying to track where the emissions are coming from (my bold).

Ozone Secretariat significant amounts of CFC-112/112a were still being produced from 1989 up until 2001 with imports of up to 533 tonnes per year after that period. Production and imports could however only account for the cumulative emissions inferred from observations if (a) a large part was released directly into the atmosphere or (b) production was much higher before 1988. For CFC-113a and HCFC-133a reports are much more fragmentary with only one import of CFC-113a reported in 2011 and one country reporting production of 1490 t of HCFC-133a in 2010. In accordance with the Montreal Protocol these data has been anonymised which precludes further discussions. 

The scientific illiterati come out in their droves

Have a look at the type of person Anthony Watts targets.  The bottom of the barrel, the dregs, the illiterati.

goldminor says:

March 9, 2014 at 7:22 pm
Insanity at it’s finest. A tiny amount , but it may get worse. Watch out for the kitchen sink, they must be about ready to throw that in, also.

fobdangerclose says:

March 9, 2014 at 8:07 pm
97% sure my bs meter is pegged.

Bill Sticker is a conspiracy theorist who says:

March 9, 2014 at 8:17 pm
Ah. Sounds suspiciously like the climate units funding must be up for review.

Santa Baby is one of the "scaredy cat" deniers and says:

March 9, 2014 at 8:40 pm
It’s about the 2014 state of fear awards? The competition is hard and lots of state funded are competing?

A Crooks of Adelaide says irrelevantly (does s/he seriously think that the scientists are financially dependent on this, not the emitters?):

March 9, 2014 at 8:46 pm
“Two of the gases are accumulating at a rate that is causing concern among researchers.”
Wake me up when it causes concern among people who are not financially dependant on this.

philjourdan says:

March 9, 2014 at 4:59 pm
They are not out to save the planet but to destroy mankind. 

---

Johannes C. Laube et al, Newly detected ozone-depleting substances in the atmosphere. Nature Geoscience (2014) doi:10.1038/ngeo2109

The ozone hole and the scientific illiterati @wattsupwiththat

This article has been prompted by a copy and paste of a press release at WUWT, and the reaction to it. The NASA press release is about how the hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica is not yet showing any signs of recovery. Since the 1990s it has stopped growing but there is not yet any sign of recovery.  AFAIK, this is not unexpected, given the long-lived nature of CFCs.  The research is useful in that it explores the situation in much more detail than has been done before now. (Anthony Watts didn't link to the actual press release as usual.  I don't know why he doesn't.  However he did link to the Ozone Hole Watch website of NASA, which is really good.)

Click here for the archived WUWT article.

The ozone hole should shrink measurably after the mid 2030s

The article is about research by Susan Strahan and Natalya Kramarova (reported at the AGU Fall Meeting), uncovering the complexity of the ozone hole over Antarctica.  Wind in the upper atmosphere is moving the ozone around.  From the NASA press release:

This work shows that the severity of the ozone hole as measured by the classic total column measurements does not reveal the significant year-to-year variations in the two factors that control ozone: the winds that bring ozone to the Antarctic and the chemical loss due to chlorine.

Until chlorine levels in the lower stratosphere decline below the early 1990s level – expected sometime after 2015 but likely by 2030 – temperature and winds will continue to dictate the variable area of the hole in any given year. Not until after the mid 2030s will the decline stratospheric chlorine be the primary factor in the decline of ozone hole area.

"We are still in the period where small changes in chlorine do not affect the area of the ozone hole, which is why it's too soon to say the ozone hole is recovering," Strahan said. "We're going into a period of large variability and there will be bumps in the road before we can identify a clear recovery."

Full recovery by 2070

Based on the slide presentation from Anne Douglass, Natalya Kramarova and Susan Strahan, after around 2035 the ozone holes should be smaller than they are today, although in the intervening years there will be some holes that are smaller than others.  By around 2070 there should be full recovery.

Ozone hole science - a simple view

Jeff Masters at Wunderground has a good summary of the history of the science and response to finding the hole in the ozone layer. He also describes the tactics used by "ozone hole deniers".

Way back in the 1970s, scientists warned that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) could cause serious harm to the ozone layer.  The hole was first observed in 1985 and prompted immediate attention, resulting in the Montreal Protocol which came into force in 1989.

Most ozone (around 90%) is in the stratosphere.  It acts as a UV shield.  There are oxygen reactions in the stratosphere that absorb UV and require O3 to do so.  Until we began to add CFCs to the air, ozone was constantly being formed and destroyed with these reactions in balance:

O2 --UV radiation---> 2O

O + O2 ------> O3

O3 ----UV radiation ---> O2 + O

CFCs in the stratosphere have their chlorine atoms split off, which then react with ozone, producing O2 and reducing the amount of ozone.  This upsets the balance.  With less ozone more UV gets through to the surface.

There is a simple explanation of the reactions on the Bureau of Meteorology website here - with diagrams and an animation.

The thing is, CFCs are very long-lived and they aren't water soluble, so they don't get washed out when it rains.  If you're wondering how they get into the stratosphere, this article in Scientific American explains it in simple terms.  The CFCs we put into the air before the Montreal Protocol are still having an impact.  While we won't start seeing a real impact for a couple more decades and will have to wait for another 60 years for full recovery, if we hadn't acted when we did, we'd all be in deep trouble.

The ozone hole and climate

The ozone hole doesn't just cause damaging UV radiation to get to the surface, as David Karoly explains, it's also affecting the wind winds in the upper atmosphere over Antarctica and thereby affecting southern currents.  It therefore has an indirect impact on climate.  Where I live in south eastern Australia, the climate is being affected by CO2 warming as well as by shifts in climate zones as a result of the ozone hole over Antarctica.  It is making much of Antarctica colder than it would otherwise be but warming the Antarctic Peninsula.  It's also probably a contributing factor to sea ice around Antarctica.  (Does this mean that the land ice in Antarctica will melt faster when the ozone hole mends? I don't know the answer to that.)

Here's a diagram from the article by David Karoly.

The climate system is complex, meaning that the ozone hole does indirectly alter the surface temperature and climate of the Earth.

Source: The Conversation

Credit: WMO/UNEP Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion 2010

From the WUWT comments, with a preamble

Climate science deniers reject climate science relating to human emissions of carbon dioxide. They have a tendency to reject any science that finds that human activity is having an impact.

Today at WUWT, many science deniers are rejecting the well-established science explaining the hole in the ozone layer.

This highlights the "reasoning" of science deniers.  For many of them I imagine that when they face any problem, not just a huge problem faced by all of humanity, their first reaction is: "it wasn't my fault".  The first reaction of a mature person, by contrast, would be "Let's fix it" or "What can I do to help fix it".

That's why I view science deniers as being basically self-centred, immature, instant gratification-seeking sooks.  I don't see different views about climate science as primarily an ideological divide. I think the divide is one of character and maturity. Personal maturity is a bigger indicator of a reaction to problems than education, intelligence or ideology.  I don't know if there have been studies that show this.  It might even be that emotional maturity is not correlated with acceptance that there is a problem. It could be that it is correlated with the reaction to the problem, regardless of whether the problem is accepted as real or not.

Whatever - science deniers at WUWT are a distinctly immature lot in this regard as you can see from the comments below. Interestingly, the illiterates at WUWT don't deny the holes in the ozone layer, they just deny what's caused them.  A bit like how many (most?) of them don't deny that CO2 has increased hugely, they just deny the greenhouse effect or the extent of it.

Doug Proctor says "scientists don't know nuffin'":

December 11, 2013 at 3:29 pm
Or CFCs were not the primary driver of the OBSERVED ozone hole: meaning that even without CFCs, there would still be a significantly large hole in the ozone layer. CFCs could make an ozone hole worse, but no-CFCs won’t make the hole completely collapse.

Like CO2 and the thermal regulation of the planet, the assumption is that CFCs control the size of the Antarctic ozone hole. Why? Because “we” don’t have any other idea about what might cause large variations in its size.

The obsessive drive for a Unique Solution is everywhere politicians, scientists and laymen want or need simple solutions easily and cheaply put in-place.

el gordo says "it's a conspiracy":

December 11, 2013 at 3:35 pm
There was a multinational that did very well out of this scam, but its name eludes me.

scarletmacaw combines the two and says "scientists don't know nuffin'" and "it's a conspiracy":

December 11, 2013 at 3:41 pm
Chlorine in the atmosphere has natural sources. The ocean releases far more chlorine into the atmosphere than CFCs. It was always about control, never about science.

Brian H makes an irrelevant and meaningless comment and says:

December 11, 2013 at 3:43 pm
All based on another failed presumption of attribution.

Jimbo, like a lot of WUWT-ers asks (excerpt):

December 11, 2013 at 4:02 pm
Is it just possible that the Ozone hole has always been there?

So does Quinn who says (excerpt):

December 11, 2013 at 4:21 pm
The first satellites that specifically went looking for ozone depletion found the hole, but for all we know the hole has been there for hundreds, thousands, or millions of years or longer. As far as I know, there is no conclusive data indicating that the hole was not there prior to the widespread use of CFC’s. 

Answer: No.  It's not possible that the ozone hole has always been there, regardless of how little Jimbo and Quinn know.


William Mason is ignorant of the fact that the hole has stopped growing as a result of our actions, and that CFCs are long-lived and that the hole is acting on the time frame expected and says:

December 11, 2013 at 4:30 pm
If you suspect that something is causing a problem and you apply the fix for that but somehow it doesn’t cause a recovery would you at some point conclude that you were mistaken about the cause in the first place? Why do they stick to their original theories so adamantly? I think it’s time to reevaluate.

There is more of the same at WUWT - boring, boring same old scientific ilterati nonsense as you'll find on global warming topics at WUWT. (Archived here.)

Is Matt Ridley a Crackpot?

I have just watched a YouTube video of a lecture by Matt Ridley, who I've written about before - here and here and here.  He's in Australia and spoke to the IPA (the Institute of Public Affairs is a right wing lobby group posing as a "think tank").

The crackpot comment

In the video Matt Ridley complained that some people call him a crackpot.  I don't think he's a crackpot. He's a climate science disinformer who knows exactly what he's doing and what he wants.

He's not a crackpot but he was wrong when he claimed (citing his GWPF mate, Richard Tol) that earth will benefit from global warming for the next 70 years.  That is, until 2083.  And I expect he knows he's wrong. If he doesn't he should. He's clever enough to figure it out. (Matt didn't say what he thinks will happen after that or whether, just maybe, we should start acting now to reduce the harm after his 70 years are up.)

I'm not familiar enough with Richard Tol's work to know if he's ever found that the world will be better off with global warming for the next seventy years.  Or whether Matt or Richard have more prescience than climate scientists and know exactly how much CO2 we will emit over the coming seventy years.

Who made the world a better place - the pessimists or the optimists or both?

In the first five minutes of the video, Matt Ridley complained about what he regards as left wing pessimists who warned the world about overpopulation, famine, the hole in the ozone layer, unbreathable air, acid rain and other problems the world faced.

He spent the next ten minutes gloating that we shouldn't have been concerned about any of those things because none of them caused major problems.

He argued against government intervention.  He is very much against government intervention.

Why is the world as clean as it is today?  Why isn't the world population even greater? 

What Matt didn't admit to (does he even recognise it?) was that the reason that these are no longer the big problems that they might have been is because of people power.  Because of environmentalists and scientists and particularly because of people like Paul Erlich, who Matt seemed to think was an irrational pessimist:

• Ozone hole - addressed by the intergovernmental agreement, the Montreal Protocol
• Over-population - being addressed by international aid programs and particularly by family planning education and subsidised access to birth control - in the developed world and the less developed world
• Acid rain - being addressed by clean air regulation and pollution controls
• Smog - being addressed by clean air regulations and pollution controls

So why is Matt Ridley arguing against controls to limit the harm we are doing to the earth by polluting the air with CO2?

It was controls and government intervention that addressed all the problems he cited as not being as bad as the pessimists said they would be.  Matt must realise that but decided not to admit it.

A bit boring...

Incidentally, Matt Ridley is not a very good speaker.  His speaking voice is okay with sufficient intonation but his speech was overpopulated with quotes, rambled from one topic to another and came across as nothing but a sop to the audience.  I guess the audience liked it enough.  At least some of them stayed awake and laughed when they were supposed to.  However his talk had no coherent message that I could fathom.  He shifted from climate change and environmental issues to free trade.  I'm in favour of free trade (ie I don't favour tariffs and quotas as a rule) but I also think that societal controls are very important.  We can have both.

Rich capitalists are kind people  

Matt spent much of the latter part of his speech rationalising his approach to the world, extolling the virtues of capitalism and saying how kind all the rich people are because they are giving work to people in sweatshops. Is that what he means by "a rational(ising) optimist"?

CO2 is plant food!

Oh, and he finished up with "CO2 is plant food"!

Anthony Watts gets it wrong again, this time with CFCs

Anthony Watts, who runs an anti-science blog known as WUWT, thinks he has found more science to mock.  As usual, whenever he attempts to write an article himself he stuffs it up.  He writes (archived here):

Busted messaging: CFC’s cause warming AND cooling
From the make up your freaking minds department comes this oopsy juxtaposition of alarmist messaging.

In an attempt to explain “the pause”, researchers are now grasping for explanations:

Anthony mucks it up - again!  It's he who can't figure out the science.

Statistical derivation of human influences on global temperature in the twentieth century

Anthony is writing about a new paper in Nature by Francesco Estrada et al that explored factors operating during the twentieth century and their impact on earth's climate.

According to the associated article in Nature News, Estrada13, using a statistical approach rather than a climate model, found that cooling of the surface temperature was associated with reductions in greenhouse gas emissions associated with economic downturns.  They also found that if it weren't for the Montreal Protocol, earth would be warmer still.  However just how much warmer it would be is disputed.  Maybe not as much as the Nature paper suggests.  Probably about 0.1°C.  (I don't have a copy of the paper so I don't know the numbers they've worked out.)  From the Nature News article (my bold italics):

A cooling period between 1940 and 1970 had previously been chalked up to natural variability and the Sun-shielding effect of pollution emitted by European industries, as they recovered after the Second World War. But Estrada and his colleagues found that it folllowed a reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions associated with economic downturns, when industries were less active. Significant drops in emissions occurred during the First World War, the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Second World War....

...For the 1940-70 period, the way the paper shows how economic factors drove emissions down is “very nice,” says Ross Salawitch, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Maryland in College Park. “It hits the sweet spot.”

Warming has also eased off since the mid-1990s. Estrada's study links that to the 1987 Montreal Protocol that banned the release of CFCs — once used widely in refrigerants, solvents and propellants — to stop ozone depletion, which allowed more warming solar radiation to reach Earth. Temperatures today might have been 0.1 °C warmer had CFC emissions continued unabated, according to a commentary to be published alongside the study.

“Without the Montreal Protocol, we’d be warmer than we are now,” agrees Salawitch. “But I question whether the recent pause in global warming is due to that.” Estrada's study would be stronger had it also considered changes in ocean heat uptake and aerosol cooling, he says.

The headline of the Nature article (not the paper itself) reads: Ozone-hole treaty slowed global warming.  I'm probably picking nits, but I think that headline is misleading.  The sub-headline is better.  It reads: Montreal Protocol helped to curb climate change and so did world wars and the Great Depression.

The take-away message from the abstract is this one:

We conclude that reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are effective in slowing the rate of warming in the short term.

If they are correct, and what I've read elsewhere would seem to indicate they are, then action to cut emissions would slow warming perceptibly.  Maybe even on timescales suited to the political calendar.  No, it won't start to cool down but it won't warm up as quickly as it otherwise would.  It would be good if we cut emissions by shifting to clean energy and didn't wait for another GFC or Depression.  (If we don't do it ourselves then I'll bet that nature itself will force our hand and probably sooner rather than later.)

Where Anthony goes wrong...

Back to Anthony Watts.  What Anthony did was dig out a Science Daily article about a 2010 paper by Korhonen et al.  He picked out a line that said that Antarctica was not as warm as it might have been because of the closing ozone hole.  Closing the hole in the ozone layer led to high speed winds which caused summer-time clouds to form.  These clouds reflected more of the sun and shielded the Antarctic from warming.  This is what Anthony pointed to:

The Antarctic ozone hole was once regarded as one of the biggest environmental threats, but the discovery of a previously undiscovered feedback shows that it has instead helped to shield this region from carbon-induced warming over the past two decades.

Anthony's reasoning is probably fair enough for a science illiterate as far as it goes.  The article does discuss the impact of the ozone hole on constraining warming - if only in southern latitudes (50-65°S is mentioned in the paper itself).  But Anthony's attention span is seriously limited as we shall see later on.

Summer clouds over Antarctica are more reflective because of the ozone hole

Here is what was in Anthony's second paper.  If you are easily confused about feedbacks and forcings, I suggest skipping this next bit.  The paper seems to be a bit inconsistent in the use of these terms, but maybe that's just the way I'm reading it.  The difficulty arises because the paper is discussing two different but connected forcings:-  greenhouse gas forcing (positive) and ozone loss forcing (negative) - which act in concert to affect the polar winds.

First of all, in the abstract of the paper the authors talk of the increase in cloud reflectivity in terms of it "acting against that from greenhouse gas forcing over the same time period, and thus represent(ing) a substantial negative climate feedback".  It's not causing cooling.  It's dampening the greenhouse gas forcing.  However later in the paper it describes the impact in terms of being a positive feedback to the negative forcing from stratospheric ozone loss.  As I understand it the authors are talking about two different things.  One is greenhouse gas forcing.  The other is ozone forcing.  These act together in the Antarctic to alter the circulation of the atmosphere.  So it's all quite complicated.  The discussion section of the paper states (my bold italics):

The calculated changes in SH aerosol represent a potentially important climate feedback in which anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases and ozone depleting substances alter the circulation of the atmosphere [Thompson and Solomon, 2002], which in turn induces greater emissions of sea spray that cause a negative radiative forcing through higher cloud drop concentrations in low level clouds. The annual mean positive forcing from all well mixed greenhouse gases at these latitudes (50 – 65S) is 1Wm² over the two decades studied [Forster et al., 2007]. The only other important forcing at southern high latitudes is stratospheric ozone loss, the annual average of which has been estimated to be approximately 0.5 W m² since the late 1970s [Forster and Shine, 1997]. Thus, during the summer season over high latitude ocean the feedback on low level clouds through wind intensification (0.7 W/m²) together with ozone loss may have cancelled out the positive greenhouse gas forcing since the 1980s....

... The implications for future climate need to be evaluated. If, as recently suggested [Son et al., 2008], ozone depletion is the primary cause of wind speed increases, then this cloud forcing acts as a positive feedback on the ozone induced cooling. It more than doubles the negative radiative forcing from stratospheric ozone loss and suggests that future ozone recovery would cause a positive radiative forcing.

Back to Anthony again.  Strangely enough, Anthony seemed to have missed the headline to that article, which was:

Ozone Hole Healing Could Cause Further Climate Warming

Yes.  That's right.  In his zeal to find something wrong with the science, Anthony skipped over the headline saying that as the ozone hole heals, Antarctica will warm.  He ignored the thrust of the article and instead he went straight to one of the paragraphs in the text.  He also seems to have missed reading the rest of that article, in which was written:

"If, as seems likely, these winds die down, rising CO2 emissions could then cause the warming of the southern hemisphere to accelerate, which would have an impact on future climate predictions," he added.

As I wrote in the feedback/forcing section above, the Science Daily article goes on to explain that the high speed winds whip up sea spray and tiny salt particles, which eventually form part of the clouds, making them more reflective.  As the ozone layer recovers that particular feedback mechanism could slow or even reverse, leading to accelerated warming in Antarctica.  This means that any dampening of warming by CFCs effect on the ozone hole and cloud formation would disappear.  However CFCs remaining in the atmosphere will still have their greenhouse gas properties and add to global warming, albeit not hugely (provided we don't increase them).

CFCs and global warming

Of course the Nature article wasn't referring to clouds over southern oceans.  It was referring to the global effect of the reduction of CFCs in the atmosphere following the Montreal Protocol.

CFCs do contribute to global warming, but nothing like what CO2 contributes.  The AR5 WG1 IPCC report states on page TS-19, for example (my bold and italics):

Atmospheric N2O has increased by 6% since AR4 causing a RF of 0.17 [0.15 to 0.19] W m–2. N2O concentrations continue to rise while those of CFC-12, the third largest WMGHG (well-mixed greenhouse gas) contributor to RF for several decades, are decreasing due to phase-out of emissions of this chemical under the Montreal Protocol. N2O is now likely the third largest WMGHG contributor to RF. The RF from halocarbons is very similar to the value in AR4, with a reduced RF from CFCs but increases in many of their replacements. Four of the halocarbons (CFC-11, CFC-12, CFC-113, and HCFC-22) account for 85% of the total halocarbon RF. The former three compounds have declining RF over the last five years but are more than compensated for by the increased RF from HCFC-22. There is high confidence that the growth rate in RF from all WMGHG is weaker over the last decade than in the 1970s and 1980s owing to a slower increase in the non-CO2 RF.

And on page 2-11, the report states:

Atmospheric HFC abundances are low and their contribution to radiative forcing is small relative to the CFCs and HCFCs they replace (less than 1% of the total by well-mixed greenhouse gases; Chapter 8). As they replace CFCs and HCFCs phased out by the Montreal Protocol, however, their contribution to future climate forcing is projected to grow considerably in the absence of controls on global production (Velders et al., 2009).

There is more in the report on CFCs and their replacements.

The crux of the matter is that although the Montreal Protocol had the effect of reducing CFCs, the replacement halocarbons are adding to radiative forcing.

The IPCC report has a diagram on page TS-91 showing the relative contribution of different components of radiative forcing. (Click for larger view.)

Source: IPCC AR5 WG1 Fig TS-7

Anthony Watts doesn't know where he is going

Anthony Watts closed his article with the following:

I don’t think anybody really knows which way it is going.

Well, that may be so.  It certainly looks as if Anthony Watts doesn't have a clue.

As for "which way it's going", it depends on what action we take in regard to all the gunk we throw into the air.  However scientists do know that some gases cause warming.  And they do know that halocarbons in the main cause more warming than cooling.  What happens to the winds in Antarctica as the ozone hole closes is probably still to be determined.  But if the winds slow down and stop whipping up sea water as much as they've been doing, then it's on the cards that southern regions of the globe will be in for a fair bit of warming.

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Francisco Estrada, Pierre Perron and Benjamin Martínez-López (2013) Statistically derived contributions of diverse human influences to twentieth-century temperature changes, Nature Geoscience (2013) doi:10.1038/ngeo1999

Korhonen, H., K. S. Carslaw, P. M. Forster, S. Mikkonen, N. D. Gordon, and H. Kokkola (2010), Aerosol climate feedback due to decadal increases in Southern Hemisphere wind speeds, Geophys. Res. Lett., 37, L02805, doi:10.1029/2009GL041320.

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From the WUWT comments

The illiterati is out in full force at WUWT - archived here.

pinroot points out that Anthony didn't remember he's already posted a (suspect) article (archived here and disputed here) about CFCs and warming and says:

November 11, 2013 at 4:21 pm
There was this from late May, which claimed to show a link between CFC levels and warming:
http://archive.is/zaDVp
So now there are at least two papers linking CFC’s with warming. That’s a consensus, right? ;)

Rhoda R hasn't even scratched the surface when it comes to climate science and says:

November 11, 2013 at 4:47 pm
Frankly, until they can explain why the world goes into and out of ice ages AND then can show that what is going on now is unique, then, and only then, will I buy into man-made climate anything.

Bruce Cobb joins in the illiterati chorus and says:

November 11, 2013 at 4:48 pm
Oh look! Bright, shiny new climate control knobs to play with on their dial- o-climate contraption.

alexwade takes the opportunity to show off his ignorance too and says:

November 11, 2013 at 5:05 pm
There is a simple answer for all this: Somehow, someway for every bad event that happens, we are at fault. So now surrender your rights and pay up. P.S. I, the enlightened telling you this, don’t have to pay and will still have full rights.

When you remember that is how environmentalists think, then nothing is a contradiction.
I am reminded of an old saying: “Jesus, save me from your followers.” Although I do not believe in “Mother Earth” or Gaia or anything like that, we could just as well re-word that saying as “Mother Earth, save us from your followers.”

ROM joins in and says:

November 11, 2013 at 5:28 pm
This is what you get when the inmates get to running the climate change mental asylum.
Or as an old saying goes and this is ever more applicable to climate change science and scientists. “Some minds are like concrete. All mixed up and set hard”.

Bryan A says:

November 11, 2013 at 6:12 pm
Must be the latest “Hypothesis de-jour”
They did need something to explain the Antarctic ice extent increase that would blend in with the Global Climate Scare MEME

p@ Dolan is really flying with illiterati wisdom and , with lots of "ilks" and "well saids" says (and this is but an extract from an overly long comment):

November 11, 2013 at 7:15 pm

@Rhoda R says: November 11, 2013 at 4:47 pm
Frankly, until they can explain why the world goes into and out of ice ages AND then can show that what is going on now is unique, then, and only then, will I buy into man-made climate anything.

Applause! Well said!

@geran says: November 11, 2013 at 5:53 pm
Based on the abstract, this might be the funniest paper ever submitted.
“Here we analyse radiative forcing and temperature time series with state-of-the-art statistical methods to address this question without climate model simulations.”

Give ‘em props, man: they DID, after all, try to do it WITHOUT the Great and Powerful Oz. The rest of their ilk are programming their own prejudices and liberal self-hatred into computer models and then statistically measuring their results against similar idiotic programs, and claiming that their conclusions have some basis in reality…obviously never heard the old computer term GIGO…

@Jimbo says: November 11, 2013 at 5:51 pm
By the way Pippen Kool, how do you know the Ozone hole hasn’t always been there? The hole was discovered in 1985.

Way to GO! I’m amazed at all these folks who assume that CFCs actually caused something they only discovered a short while ago, have no idea when it first occurred, or if it had been there since the dawn of time for all they knew, and THEN have the audacity to claim that their treaty to reduce CFCs is what’s responsible for it’s reduction in size, when they have yet to prove that’s the cause!

Are you all suitable amazed and impressed at p@ Dolan's cleverness and insight?  Wait! there's more archived here (if you have the stomach for it).