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July 11, 2007 (the date of publication in Russian)

Roman Bagdasarov

THE EXPOSED MYTHOLOGY OF THE "OZONE HOLE"

How Russian scientists confronted the global climatic fraud

The efforts of a number of EU countries, participating in the so-called Kyoto Process, to squeeze out certain concessions on environmental issues from the United States, were only partially successful. George W. Bush's Administration, which recently categorically refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on Prevention of Global Warming, admitted the necessity to reduce emission of greenhouse gases – but not more.

However, the United Nations are going to elaborate a new version of a "Climatic Code" for the planet. With its approval, the Kyoto agreement is likely to be revised.

None of Western observers would bother to mention that the ripening shift in environmental thinking is becoming possible only due to efforts of Russian scientists, who had strongly resisted to all kinds of commercial speculations around global problems, proposing a substantiated critical revision of the Kyoto Agreement, as well as to the earlier Montreal Agreement.

In order to apprehend the present stage of research in probable climatic changes (global warming, or cooling) and the impact of human activity on relevant processes, as well as efficiency of measures undertaken by today, it is expedient to go deep into the essence of the problem, tracing back the history of the global debate on environmental protection, particularly the aspect of the so-called "ozone scare".

 

HOW THE "GLOBAL PROBLEM" EMERGED

Since mid-1970s, the global scientific community recognized rapid depletion of the ozone layer of the Earth's stratosphere as a globally significant problem. Ozone absorbs the major portion of solar radiation, protecting the surface of the Earth from pathogenic doses of ultraviolet rays. Intensification of ultraviolet radiation potentially results in irreversible changes in the flora and fauna, in extinction of plankton, in reduction of cropper fertility, in accelerated exhaustion of composite and polymeric construction materials, as well as in proliferation of such malignant human diseases as immune insufficiency and skin cancer.

Depletion of the ozone layer can be expressed in general reduction of stratospheric ozone, and in emergence of local gaps, or "holes" in particular areas.

In 1977, thirty-two nations signed a joint "Plan of Actions on the Ozone Layer". In March 1985, scientists from virtually all nations, assembling at a grandconference in Vienna, adopted a Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer, supposed to serve for a joint research in the problem's origin and the ways of its resolution.

The participants of the Vienna event presented around a dozen versions of ozone depletion. By today, the variety of theories reaches twenty, dividing into five categories, corresponding with processes presumably influencing the concentration of stratospheric ozone, such as:

1) dynamic processes in atmosphere (internal gravitation waves, the Azorean anticyclone, etc.);

2) space processes (i.e. increase of solar radiation);

3) geological processes (volcanogenic freons, fluctuations of the Earth's magnetic field etc.);

4) natural changes in the superficial layers of the Earth (activity of nitrogen-producing germs; the El Nino phenomenon; forest fires).

Especially heated agitation was raised around hypotheses explaining ozone deficiency with "anthropogenic factors", i.e. influence of human activity on global climate.

The United States even promised to allocate some of its military expenses for research in the ozone depletion phenomena. Still, to promise does not yet mean to marry, as Ukrainians say.

 

HOSTILE FREONS, AND AMIABLE HYDROFLUOROCARBONS

The Vienna Convention identified an impressing number of gaseoussubstances suspected of depleting ozone. During the next year, however, this list strangely shrunk to a single chemical group – namely, chlorocarbons (Freon 12, 11, 115 etc.) used across the globe in household and industrial refrigerators.

In 1987, a new congress, convened in Montreal, efficiently reduced the range of discussion from a scientific debate to bare administrative instructions. The supposedly negative impact of household freons on stratospheric ozone was dubbed "potential of ozone menace", classified according to a table, whose authors were not named.

The Montreal documents include conditions and terms of an international ban on freons, while alternative substances are not mentioned. The Soviet delegation officially introduced a remark demanding substantiation for the choice of alternatives. This notice was neglected.

Still, the alternative to traditional freons was named unofficially at a number of special seminars in the back rooms of the Montreal Conference, in specially prepared reports supposed to "promote the shining ideals" of chemical selection. This alternative was embodied in high-cost cryogenic substances, belonging to the succession of hydrofluorocarbons ( R134a, R125).

By a fluky coincidence, the powerful trio of chemical corporations, namely DuPont, ICI, and Elf Atochem, appeared to have just launched industrial production of those "salutary" gases! The mankind could consider itself rescued.

No alternative to the DuPont's production was permitted to discuss. No substantiation of the ready-made choice was presented as well. Russian specialists, including Igor Mazurin and Anatoly Korolev, repeatedly raised relevant doubts at international symposiums, insisting that selection of each refrigerant – as well as adjuvant bodies like sprays, solvents and gallons – be correctly substantiated. However, corporate greed had conveniently overcome scientific truth.

The scenarists of the Montreal and Kyoto conferences conveniently overlooked such "subtleties" as probable damage for human health, resulting from combustion and explosion of hydrofluorocarbons. For instance, isobutane HFC (R-660a) alone "unpredictably" vapors out at the moment of unsealing, frequently inflicting burn injuries in welding (medical regulations ignored). Its high chemical activity sharply reduces durability of cryogenic technique (consumer rights ignored either).

The private backers of pompous international propagandist events "for the sake of environment" conveniently overlooked the fact that most of new substances were implemented without due exploration of their physical and biogenic properties, and without elaboration of the system of their recycling (the term "recycling" being central in environmentalist propaganda). In other words, unsealing of a cryogenic device, charged with hydrofluorocarbons, causes emission of substance into the atmosphere. In a number of nations which have signed the Kyoto Protocol (including Russia), utilization and recycling of DuPont's chemicals is not performedat all.

 

NOBEL PRIZES ARE NEVER TAKEN BACK

A scientific substantiation of "freonophobia" still had to be invented. It was based on a single research, authored by Mario J. Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland. In 1974, these two American authors discovered what they called the chlorine cycle of ozone disintegration, supposing that active chloride that facilitates this reaction penetrates the stratosphere with freons. The latter hypothesis is based on the assumption that freons are inert in the troposphere and therefore likely to accumulate in the stratosphere. The hypothesis, being never proven, perfectly fit into the backdoor agenda of the Montreal Conference.

The writings of Molina and Rowland are abundant of accurate calculations. Still, all of them refer to annual outputs of freon production which are a known secret. Meanwhile, further conclusions on the ascent of freons to the stratosphere are invalid without experimental evidence.

The authors performed only one single experiment – in the Antarctic, the only continent where freons are not used at all. In August-September 1987, direct measurements in the stratosphere above the continent, taken from board of a US aircraft, revealed a "reliable correlation between concentration of ozone and chlorine dioxide in the vicinity of the ozone hole".

Molina and Rowland were reluctant to undertake new experiments. That was understandable, as already since 1985, model calculations made on the base of their hypothesis, more and more spectacularly deviated from data obtained by direct observation. Vladimir Syvorotkin, Dr. Sc. (Geol-Min.), a major opponent of the Molina-Rowland theory, insists that the views of the two US researchers did not foresee any phenomena but just provided interpretations for the incoming data: "The original postulate on photolysis of freons in the stratosphere was replaced with heterogenic reactions in stratospheric clouds in the specific conditions of the Antarctic. However, ozone anomalies were later discovered in the Northern hemisphere, where meteorological conditions are significantly different. Enormous efforts and expenses were mobilized to confirm the technogenic interpretation for the northern anomalies as well. Still, despite waste of millions of dollars, reliable evidence was never provided".

Still, in October 1995 the precarious Molina-Rowland hypothesis was rewarded with a perfectly real Nobel Prize. Ironically, in this very year the ozone hole over the Antarctic, to which the two authors used to refer, vanished. Instead, ozone deficiency was detected on the equator, where the processes, described by the prize winners, could not take place at all.

 

THE TARGETS OF THE MONTREAL PROTOCOL

One of the reasons to hurry with the Nobel Prize for Molina and Rowland was the competition of the monopolist trio of hydrofluorocarbon producers with Russian companies. Since January 1, 1996, the Montreal Protocol introduced sanctions against Russia. In the later years, scientists found out more facts of inconsistence and forgery in the celebrated hypothesis. Still, the objective was reached: the Russian production of freons was doomed to extinction.

In 1990 in London, the agreement on a complete ban on chlorocarbonic freons was signed already by 92 countries. The following Copenhagen conference (1992) expanded the range of "forbidden" substances. Though Russia refused to adopt the Copenhagen amendments, it was obliged – as the successor of the USSR – to erase the whole enormous list of "ozone-destructing" substances from its register of production.

On May 26, 1995, Russian Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin signed a request to the sides of the Vienna Convention and the Montreal Protocol, urging them to delay the earlier established terms for four years. The delay was provided. The Global Ecological Fund and a number of industrial nations, starting with the United States (where "safe" refrigerants are now imported from), generously promised to disburse $26.2mln to Russia for re-profiling the remaining seven freon-producing facilities. In 2000, they were closed (see Ukrainian proverb above).

The hasty extermination of Freon-producing industries across the globe, on the background of reluctance to discuss properties of alternative cryogenic agents, can hardly be explained from the standpoint of altruistic "struggle for a clean environment". It is especially noteworthy that by the time of the Montreal Conference, Soviet industry already possessed a number of ready-for-use "ozone-secure" refrigerants, completely satisfying not only the demands of the Montreal Protocol but also the norms ignored by the DuPonts and other pushers of hydrofluorocarbons. In particular, Russia-produced Freon 218 with a small addition of sulfuric hexafluoride successfully serviced the Mir space station for fifteen years. Other patented Russian refrigerants, like Chladon 510, were also neglected.

Instead, the Russia-produced Freon 218 was included into an amendment to the Montreal Protocol as a "greenhouse gas", allegedly responsible for the "greenhouse effect".

The fact that two unrelated phenomena, ozone depletion and the greenhouse effect, have acquired a common approach as two processes emerging from one another, needs special analysis. In any case, this "duplex" hoax, due to efforts of Greenpeace and similar environmentalist organizations, has become a perfect international bugaboo for everyday use, efficiently brainwashing ignorant public but conveniently exploited by a narrow circle of interested and quite competent persons.

Global climate pacts easily "denounce" elementary physical laws. According to the Framework Convention on Climate Change, which Russia was forced to sign at the 1992 UN conference in Rio de Janeiro, the local physical effect of increase of ground-level air temperature from an increase of humidity of the atmosphere's lower layers, familiar to any owner of a country-house, is automatically extrapolated to the whole atmosphere of the Earth, allegedly being capable of causing a new Deluge. One more "discovery" concerns the parallel of water steam with carbon dioxide, though CO2's concentration in the air is ten times smaller than H2O. In order to confirm all these doubtful assumptions, Rio's organizers reanimated an ancient "but illustrative" hypothesis of James A. Tindall, dating back to 1861.

When Russia's Academy of Sciences discussed the subject of the debate on the request from the President of Russia, its specialists unanimously concluded that the "greenhouse effect hypothesis" is not substantiated with any reliable scientific evidence. Unfortunately, the Montreal Protocol was ratified, with no regard of this highly competent verdict.

 

THE COUNTDOWN

A new curve of "greenhouse propaganda" started in 1997. In Kyoto, all the major industrial nations, including the United States and Russia, signed a protocol, strongly restricting emission of greenhouse gases.

The apocalyptical overtonesof the protocol (tinted with then-widespread millennium catastrophe mythologies) added heat to the environmentalist pathos. However, the tail has already overplayed the cat: the Kyoto Protocol challenged not only chlorocarbonic but also hydrofluorocarbonic refrigerants – not due to their above mentioned toxic and combustive properties but only because hydrofluorocarbons also "increase emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere".

Quite naturally, the United States, recognizing this supplement as an assault on its monopolistic producers, categorically refused to join the Kyoto Protocol. After Australia shared US reluctance, the split among lobbyists of refrigerants, underlying the whole environmentalist hullabaloo, became apparent. In addition, the Kyoto Protocol became a shop for trading quotas for clean air – beyond a transparent intention to prevent emergence of new highly industrialized nations.

The fear of competition with newly emerging economies is especially articulated in the bureaucratic circles of the European Union, which has exhausted its own natural reserves. At the G8 meeting in Heiligendamm, the most zealous advocates of the Kyoto Protocol were Germany and France. In particular, French President Nicolas Sarkozy claimed, "I am telling the great powers, particularly the United States, that they are committing a serious mistake by refusing to join the Kyoto Protocol?.

The further ways of the global environmentalist lawmaking are hard to predict. Still, it is clear that the potential of Russian science, which has been maintaining – despite pressure from outside and lack of political support from inside – a decent scientific approach towards the problems of global climate, thus serving as a counterbalance to corporate appetites backing the quasi-scientific dictate of Montreal and Kyoto. The countdown has started. Now, we have got at least a tiny hope that international scientific forums may become a mechanism of prevention of real troubles for the humanity, instead of serving as a playground for global-scale corporate fraud.


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