Meet the Environmental President.............. Ronald Reagan

Ronald  Reagan was as good a  listener as he was widely read.

That's why , despite the president's well founded skepticism of the UN environmental bureaucracy , his science advisers had no difficulty persuading him to sign the Montreal Protocol , which phased out the manufacture of the spray-can and refrigerant Freons that had begun a generation before. This , the National Academy of Science now reports, did more than curb the photochemical erosion of the ozone layer. Because the now banned Freons absorb radiant heat thousands of times more strongly than CO2 , Reagan's prescient environmentalism took a huge bite out of the rate of global warming.

Far more , in fact , than the much-touted Kyoto Convention that the US   Senate overwhelmingly rejected.

In the forthcoming  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , Velders et al. reckon  stopping  CFC production here and abroad has removed the equivalent of about 11 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. By comparison, had the Kyoto Protocol been fully ratified , only about 2 billion tons of  equivalent carbon dioxide  emission would have been saved.

Without firing a shot in the Climate Wars , the Cold War 's victorious Commander in Chief  did five times as much environmental good as Former Next President Gore aspired to when he led the Clinton administration's drive to ratify the Kyoto treaty .

Comments

[Robert Speirs]

This doesn't pass the smell test. Why weren't the CFC worry-warts pushing this years ago? Has the level of certainty about atmospheric dynamics really advanced that much since the '80s? I seem to be seeing different stories about the "health" of the "ozone layer" right now, some saying it's been all "healed", representing a great victory for environmental activism, others that it's worse than ever. Even with a testable hypothesis like the effect of CFC's on the rate of skin cancer in Australia, nobody seems to have his story straight.

[Author]

"Has the level of certainty about atmospheric dynamics really advanced that much since the '80s? "

Wrong question- the fact of stratospheric transport of CFC's was proven empirically by isotopic tracer experiments twent years ago, and the photochemistry of ozone depletion by the interaction of chlorine containing species and cold aerosols in the polar stratosphere is a done deal, witness the Nobel prize it won.

The state of the art in atmospheric dynamics has indeed advanced as fast as Moore's law, witness the excellent quantitative fit of the MOZART model of mesoscale transport of CFC's and other pollutants to empirical airborne measurements.

One gather's you have not been reading JGR or for that matter broader coverage of these matters in Science, nature and elsewhere. Please do.

[Mark Bahner]

"...his science advisers had no difficulty persuading him to sign the Montreal Protocol in 1987, and stop the flood of spray-can and refrigerant Freons into the air."

Spray can CFCs were banned in the United States way back in 1978.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion#Public_policy_in_response_to_the_ozone_hole

[Edo River]

hate to rain on your parade for the Great Fabricator, but since then whatever was gained by that one shot of scientific good fortune has wasted away by not even a mote of a follow up, for example Kyoto. The Kyoto Protocol may not have been much, but at least it was something. IN stead all you have left in your pocket to praise is what was done 20 years ago. Pretty and pitiful.

Go look for the scale of production for Chinese plants supplying parts for the Indian Air conditioning industry. I couldn't find them. But what I have found are stories about the booming Indian market for air conditioners. NPR reported 5 per family in an interview of a new middle class house. And guess what gas these new, cheap air conditioners use?

RESPONSE My umbrellla is pretty spotless , thank you.
Mostly they HCFC's ,as CFC's are toast. and as you will discover if you read the Montreal Protocol's amendments, we are headed back into the age of pre-Freon refrigerants.

[Kevin Jaeger]

And you could add a couple of other points - Thatcher shutting down the coal mines in Britain and switching to gas was not only economically beneficial but was the greenest accomplishment in Britain in the last century, at least.

And if any of the credit for the collapse of communism goes to those two, they should indirectly be credited for shutting down the massively polluting industries in the east bloc.

Funny how free enterprise and conservative policies also tend to be green - but loathed by the Greens.

[Konstantin Tsiolkovsky]

You are a pompous scientific fraud.

And I meed that in the most un-exemplary manner.

NOTE TO THE READER
Mr. Tsiolkovsky has his own political party