Earth Equity News

Ozone Treaty Protects World from Warming. By Katharine Sanderson, Nature News, September 7, 2008. "Twenty-one years ago the Montreal Protocol was drawn up to restrict the use of chemicals such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that contributed to the destruction of the ozone layer, the part of the atmosphere that filters out most of the sun's potentially cancer-causing ultraviolet rays. But now, sophisticated climate chemistry models have shown that the protocol has done much more than rescue the planet from sunburn. [In a resent study, The World Avoided by the Montreal Protocol, published in Geophysical Research Letters,] the models show that coupling increases as more ozone is lost, and that its effects induce temperature changes at different regions of the planet. These changes were most marked at the poles. In the most southerly latitudes in their spring, for example, the surface temperatures in some places would be 3°C colder and in others 3°C warmer in 2030 if ozone had not been controlled."