A Cool Look At Global Warming

Sometimes ‘global warming’ and ‘ozone layer depletion’ get wrongly conflated.

However recently it seems to me we have not heard too much about the ozone layer issue. Perhaps that is because it had been thought that the problem was going away. The “hole” was thought to be repairing itself or at least stabilizing.

Now it is back on the radar. It seems that scientists at the European Space Agency are reporting that 2006 saw record losses of ozone over the south pole.

What caught my eye however was the conjectured explanation: Far from global warming being to blame, on the contrary, it is thought that record cooling is the culprit!

“Such significant ozone loss requires very low temperatures in the stratosphere combined with sunlight. This year’s extreme loss of ozone can be explained by the temperatures above Antarctica reaching the lowest recorded in the area since 1979″

This from ESA’s atmospheric engineer Claus Zehner (see here and here)