ALARM#1: Governments urged to go beyond net zero climate targets
Leading scientists and campaigners say cutting emissions alone is not enough. THE GUARDIAN: LINK: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/nov/13/governments-urged-to-go-beyond-net-zero-climate-targets

Leading scientists, academics and campaigners have called on governments and businesses to go beyond “net zero” in their efforts to tackle the escalating climate and ecological crisis. The former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and the leading climate scientist Michael Mann are among a group of prominent environmentalists calling for the “restoration of the climate” by removing “huge amounts of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere”. Net zero targets have been a focus of governments, local authorities and campaigners in their attempts to address global heating. Although stopping emissions is “a necessary prerequisite”, governments and businesses must be more ambitious and work to “restore the climate” to as safe a level as possible. The climate crisis is here now. No matter how quickly we reach zero emissions, the terrible impacts of the climate crisis will not just go away … As such, no matter how quickly it is done, solely cutting emissions is not enough. The idea of removing emissions from the atmosphere – either directly from the air or by capturing it from power plants – has been a strongly debated subject among environmentalists and engineers for years. Critics point out that it has proved difficult to replicate the technology at scale and that constructing the necessary machinery would itself be environmentally damaging. Many fear that the idea of carbon capture is a “technological fix” used as an excuse by corporations which are opposed to the radical changes needed to move to a zero-carbon economy. However, there is a growing body of evidence that natural solutions – protecting and restoring natural forests and habitats and allowing native trees to repopulate deforested land – could help remove large amounts of carbon. The letter, which is also signed by the Guardian columnist George Monbiot and several leading members of the global school climate strike movement, said their call for restoration was not about “promoting one specific removal technique, but supporting the basic aim of trying to restore the climate and urges activists to start including restoration in their campaigning. We urge governments and companies to start acting, not only to reach net zero as soon as possible, but to achieve restoration as well. And we urge every citizen to do what they can to make the dream of restoration a reality.

RESPONSE TO ALARM#1: That achieving net zero is not enough and that we should go beyond that and use forest restoration to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is a contradiction. The term “NET ZERO” means that it is not necessary to reduce fossil fuels to zero emissions because the remaining fossil fuel emissions can be offset by human interventions in nature’s carbon cycle such that the net emissions of the industrial economy is zero on the emissions ledger. LINK TO RELATED POST ON NET ZERO: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/02/25/net-zero/

The other issue here is that eco whackos that oppose human interventions in nature at the same time assume that humans are the managers of nature and that therefore human interventions in nature are necessary to manage nature. As for the the change in language from GLOBAL WARMING to GLOBAL HEATING, kindly note that that the word HEAT is used in climatology only to describe a rise in temperature of 4C above long term averages and climate scientists say that so far global warming has caused a warming of 1C above pre-industrial although they are not sure exactly when pre-industrial is. LINK TO RELATED POST : https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/12/25/earth-day-wisdom/

If the weather in England is bothering you, come on down to Thailand where the weather is just fine as you can see in the image below.

ALARM#2: TVO.ORG: What these 58 Ontario lakes can teach us about climate change: LINK: https://www.tvo.org/article/what-these-58-ontario-lakes-can-teach-us-about-climate-change

Scott Higgins, a scientist with the Experimental Lakes Area, has data on what a 50 years of research reveals about climate change. Published on Sep 16, 2019. He is part of International Institute for Sustainable Development. TVO.ORG says that they are doing this story to strengthen coverage of the climate.​​​​​​​ Between Kenora and Dryden, there are 58 small lakes set aside exclusively for scientific research. Called the Experimental Lakes Area — and, since 2014, managed by the International Institute for Sustainable Development — the region has been the subject of scientific examination since 1968. The IISD calls the lakes “the world’s freshwater laboratory” and “one of the only places” on Earth where researchers can conduct experiments on entire ecosystems. Scientists introduce species and other variables to the waters and study everything from algal blooms to mercury poisoning to oil spills. The program serves as an invaluable resource for scientists studying climate change. Using a half-century of rigorous data, IISD researchers have found that the higher temperatures and increased precipitation associated with climate change are affecting northern Ontario’s lakes and watersheds. How does the ELA ensure that the data it collects is accurate and useful? Whenever you do an experiment in a lab — or, in our case, in the natural environment — you need references or controls. So they set aside a number of lakes to be “reference lakes,” where no manipulations were done. When we’re understanding the impacts of climate, what we’re doing is using five lakes that haven’t been manipulated but that we’ve monitored very intensively. They weren’t designed to monitor climate change, but, over 50 years, the data we’ve created and the intensity of that data have made those data sets incredibly useful. We have an onsite meteorological station, which we’ve operated with Environment Canada since 1969, where we get all the standard meteorological data, and it’s within the watershed of one of our lakes, so it’s less than a kilometre away from our reference lakes. There, we get air temperatures, rainfall, barometric pressure, solar radiance, wind speeds, and the nutrients that are in the rain. You point out that, in the region more broadly, air temperature is rising five times faster than the global average. How has that affected the ELA?
The surprising thing to me and to many when we look at the data is when you hear air temperatures are increasing, we make the unconscious assumption that it’s evenly distributed across the seasons. What the data says is that the winter’s warming much, much faster than the summer is. In our data, the summer isn’t even significantly increasing. I suspect that, over time, the summers will become significantly warmer, but the big changes are occurring in the winter and the shoulder seasons. December, for example, was increasing by over a degree per decade — so, much faster than the mean trends. Right now, it affects the phenology of the ice. When the ice forms in the fall and when it melts in the spring, those dates are significantly changing. The period of ice cover is shortening dramatically. ELA research shows that average annual precipitation has increased by 19.1 millimetres per decade since 1970. What impact has that had? The big story is that we’re seeing more dissolved organic carbon coming off the watersheds in the wetlands and moving into these lakes. Dissolved organic carbon stains the water a tea colour from the acids that are associated with wetlands and these soils. As more DOC comes into the lake, you lose transparency. That’s when you step into a lake and you can’t see your feet after the first foot or two in the water. That affects things that depend on light to grow, like plants, and those are the base of the food web. We’ve looked at the whole range of lakes in the region — the clear lakes and the really dark lakes — and asked how it affected the physical properties and the chemical properties. In our darkest lakes, plants can only grow in the top four to five metres, but, in our clearest lakes, they can grow down to 20 metres or more, so you lose three-quarters of your habitat in that range. We have a study that’s just wrapping up right now. Essentially, what they’re finding is that the changes in dissolved organic matter have a strong impact over primary production, which is plant growth: the base of the food web. Climate change is making our watersheds more sensitive to land use, so, as we move into the future, we’re really going to have to think about how we manage and use these watersheds appropriately, because it can lead to these very costly issues around algae blooms. The City of Winnipeg is talking about spending upwards of $1.4 billion on upgrading its north-end sewage-treatment plant. The main purpose is to reduce these algal blooms in lake Winnipeg. You’ve noticed that lake trout are shrinking in size as their habitat changes. Can you explain why that’s happening? We think it’s related not to the changes in surface-water temperatures, because, remember, our summer air temperatures haven’t changed very much. But what has changed is that the summer period has gotten longer — what we call the “summer starvation period” for lake trout. Lake trout feed intensively in the spring and fall when water temperatures are mesothermal — they’re the same from top to bottom because it’s mixing. As the summer gets longer, that summer starvation period gets longer. Then the thermocline [the water temperature gradient] starts to deepen over time, and this anoxic zone [an area uninhabitable because of low oxygen levels] at the bottom of these lakes creeps up. Habitat becomes unavailable for lake trout. And, if the summer gets longer and longer, the higher temperature and the lower oxygen will overlap, so there will be no optimum habitat for lake trout. What lake trout have to do is decide, “Am I going to live in a sub-optimal oxygen habitat, or am I going to live in a sub-optimal temperature habitat?” No matter what they choose, there’s an impact on their metabolism, and growth rates will slow. We believe we’re seeing the first indications of that in the lake trout data. They’re getting shorter in length and skinnier in size. The ELA is in the southern section of the Boreal Shield Ecozone, which stretches from Saskatchewan to Newfoundland. What do your findings tell us about the ecozone as a whole? Boreal lakes are both carbon sinks and carbon emitters. It’s the biggest ecozone on the planet, so it plays an important role in the global carbon balance. We talked about how increases in rainfall push dissolved organic carbon from wetlands into the lake. Once that carbon goes into the lake, some of that carbon sinks to the bottom and becomes permanently buried in the sediments. That’s how lakes are carbon sinks. But a portion of that carbon gets worked over by bacteria and respired up to the atmosphere, so that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming in a positive feedback loop. More rainfall means more carbon-dioxide emissions from lakes, even though lakes are net carbon sinks. As Canada moves forward to reduce its carbon emissions to do its part in reducing climate change, what happens in the boreal zone is also really important because it could dwarf all those efforts. We need to be able to model how carbon fluxes in the boreal forest. That’s important to every Canadian and everyone around the planet,

RESPONSE TO ALARM#2: The region under study is about 20,000 square kilometers at about 50 degrees north latitude. In terms of the area, this region represents 0.0037% of the land area of the earth and about 0.0011% of the total area of the earth. The geographical limitations of this study make it impossible to relate the findings to global warming because it is known under such geographical limitations, Internal Climate Variability (ICV) makes it impossible to detect global warming because “Internal variability in the climate system confounds assessment of human-induced climate change and imposes irreducible limits on the accuracy of climate change projections”. The ICV issue is described in detail in a related post on this site: LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/07/16/the-internal-variability-issue/ .

Yet another issue with this research is the methodology used in which the researcher looks for things that have changed and assumes that the change must have been caused by anthropogenic global warming. Such causation cannot be assumed, they must be established by he data and critical evaluation of the data with the null hypothesis that the observed changes are natural. Such standard research procedures are absent in this study.

A third issue is that the IISD (International Institute for Sustainable Development) is a UN organization and part of the UN’s SDG program (Sustainable Development Goals) that is part and parcel of the UN’s climate change and climate action program. The SDG is an entirely bureaucratic tool as described in these related posts: LINK#1: https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/03/06/sdg/ LINK#2: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/03/18/the-eco-crisis-ambition-of-the-un/ . That the Canadian research project is part of the SDG program is not serve to validate its scientific credentials.

ALARM#3: GUARDIAN: LINK: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/oct/12/climate-crisis-campaigns-pledge-real-change

Why the green movement can overcome climate crisis

Leaded petrol, acid rain, CFCs … the last 50 years of environmental action have shown how civil society can force governments and business to change. “Leaflets printed on grotty blue paper” is how Janet Alty describes the successful campaign against leaded gasoline. In the late 1970s, the UK was still poisoning the air with leaded gasoline despite clear scientific evidence that breathing in lead-tainted air from car exhausts has detrimental effects on development and intelligence. Lead had been phased out in the US from 1975 for these reasons. In the UK, the anti lead campaign amassed a trove of scientific papers to support their cause and finally after months of an agitated citizens uprising against leaded gasoline the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution prompted the UK government to decree that both petrol stations and manufacturers must offer lead-free alternatives. Leaded petrol was finally removed from the last petrol pumps in the UK in 1999. This success in the environmental movement provides the evidence that the movement against climate change will also succeed.
Faced with multiplying, and interlinked, environmental crises in the 2020s – the climate emergency, the sixth extinction stalking the natural world, the plastic scourge in our oceans, the polluted air of teeming metropolises – it is easy to feel overwhelmed. The Covid Lockdown offered a tantalising glimpse of a cleaner world, but also revealed a starker truth: that the global economy is not set up to prioritise wellbeing, climate and nature. It is easy to forget that environmentalism is arguably the most successful citizens’ mass movement there has been. Environmental activists have transformed the modern world in ways we now take for granted. The ozone hole has shrunk. Whales, if not saved, at least enjoy a moratorium on hunting. Acid rain is no longer the scourge of forests and lakes. Rivers thick with pollution in the 1960s teem with fish. Who remembers that less than 30 years ago, nuclear tests were still taking place in the Pacific? Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior ship was blown up by the French government in 1985, with one death and many injuries, in a long-running protest. These victories contain important lessons. We’ve had so many campaigns and wins. Sometimes it’s been hard to claim success, and sometimes it takes a long time. And sometimes things that worked before won’t work now.

THE ACID RAIN PROGRAM OF THE EPA: Acid rain, first identified in the 1850s, took decades to address. The first murmurings of concern came about after the second world war and there were concerted efforts to solve it in the 1960s. The acid rain success story shows that global environmental movement can succeed. Acid rain occurs when sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides react with moist air to form weak acids, which then fall from clouds, killing plants and aquatic life. The scars can still be seen in parts of the US and northern Europe, where acid has etched limestone building facades, and faces have dissolved from statues. But in most of the world – except China, where the problem persists – the lifeless lakes and leafless trees that acid rain created have long since revived. Public pressure in the worst-offending countries – chiefly the US and the UK, which were responsible for acid rain that fell largely on neighbouring countries such as Canada and Scandinavia – was key. Watson recalls one telling advertising campaign: posters printed on litmus paper that said: “When acid rain is falling, you should see red” – offering a vivid illustration of the problem. Getting businesses to cooperate was a different matter. In the US, that was achieved through a novel mechanism that offered financial incentives from rivals, rather than the public purse. It was the first successful demonstration of a market-based approach. says Keohane. US power plant operators were issued with a limited number of allowances for how much sulphur and nitrogen oxides they could emit. They could buy and sell these among themselves, meaning the dirtiest companies had to buy them from those who cleaned up fastest, while the number of allowances available was gradually reduced. This cap-and-trade system operated successfully from 1990, becoming the model for a similar approach to greenhouse gases under the 1997 Kyoto protocol – though that attempt was less successful, because the US rejected it. The benefits were 40 times greater than the costs. There was an 86% reduction in pollutants, from 1990 to 2015, and there were huge unappreciated benefits beyond acid rain, on cleaning up particulates. What acid rain showed is that businesses can be successfully regulated, without causing economic damage. As with the campaign against lead, companies resisted new rules for years, but when they came, they responded swiftly, showing governments they could afford to be less timid. When we need to act, we can. There are also lessons for today’s campaigners. Climate change threatens to melt the ice caps, raise sea levels, destroy agriculture over swaths of the world, and is already causing humanitarian disasters. Time is short. But a lesson from 40 years ago shows the world can move quickly and decisively if it has to.

THE OZONE DEPLETION PROGRAM OF THE UN:

About 15-35km above the surface of the Earth, the ozone layer acts as a filter against the sun’s radiation, blocking about 97% to 99% of medium-frequency ultraviolet light. That is important, because over-exposure to ultraviolet radiation is harmful to most living things, including plants and animals, and causes skin cancers, eye problems and genetic damage in humans. In 1974 came the first indications that all was not well in the lower stratosphere. Research by Mario Molina, who died last week, and Sherwood Rowland, both later awarded Nobel prizes, found that chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), commonly used as propellants in aerosols, were likely to be reacting with the ozone and depleting it. The first moves against CFCs were in the US, Canada, Sweden and a few other countries in 1978, but others hung back, as chemical companies dismissed the fears as theoretical. Then, in 1985, the British Antarctic Survey published clear evidence of damage, in the form of a patch of drastically thinned ozone across the south pole. Their measurements showed 40% less ozone than had been detected 20 years earlier. The science was indisputable. The world moved quickly. Governments got together under the aegis of the UN and forged the Montreal Protocol in 1987, which phased out ozone-depleting chemicals globally. “The Montreal protocol is the best environment treaty the world has ever created. {CITATION: Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development}. “It solved the first great threat to the atmosphere, and put the ozone layer on the path to recovery by 2065. There’s very strong empirical evidence that it has done its job. When the Montreal protocol was signed, the world was rapidly approaching a precipice. The further the ozone depleted, the less likely it was to regenerate naturally. If the damage continued beyond a certain point, recovery and natural repair would have become virtually impossible, even if production of the harmful chemicals ceased. “It would have been beyond repair in about five or 10 years if we had not acted. The Montreal protocol shows, as the response to Covid-19 demonstrated, that the world can move quickly when governments want to. If a government needs to act, and Covid has shown this, my God can a government act. When we need to act, we can.

A key factor in the Montreal protocol and its success was making the economic case for action. When it came to ozone-depleting chemicals, the chemical companies found they could manufacture substitutes – and make more money doing so. Car companies made a similar calculation on lead in petrol, and US power plants had the incentives of cap-and-trade to halt acid rain. Today, a comparable economic shift has already happened in the field of climate action: renewable energy is cheaper in many countries than coal, gas and oil, and costs are likely to fall further. But some companies with fossil fuels to sell will still be left stranded, and corporate vested interests have not gone away. Fake news is everywhere. Disinformation from rightwing thinktanks on air pollution and climate change is all over the internet. And the media landscape has shifted to the right. One of the most striking aspects of successful environmental campaigns of the past is how they straddled the left-right political divide. Key green legislation and decisions, including the Montreal Protocol and the 1992 UNFCCC were put forward and signed by leaders from across the political spectrum. This may be partly because world leaders in the past were more willing to listen to scientists than today. Margaret Thatcher got it, on the ozone layer – she was a chemist, she read the scientific papers. Ronald Reagan got it because he’d had skin cancer. But a changing political discourse in many countries, driven by a rightwing populism that has forsaken reality in favour of stoking imagined grievances, has created a harsher political environment for climate change. The opponents of climate action have learned that in a culture where people get their news from politically dominated outlets and the internet, they can get away with lying but younger people are rejecting these lies about climate change. Consensus across political divisions is possible if green campaigners focus on the outcome rather than the process and bring forward constructive ideas. Reaching out across divisions to foster a sense of community is essential. Emphasize what people have in common despite surface divisions. The environmental movement crosses barriers because we are all human on the same planet, and interdependent. The environment is a shared experience.

RESPONSE: THE SUCCESS OF ENVIRONMENTALISM AGAINST LEADED GASOLINE AND ACID RAIN. In a related post: LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/03/30/the-humans-must-save-the-planet/ we note that “The rapid industrial and economic growth in the post-war era progressed mostly without adequate safeguards against environmental degradation. This situation became sensationalized through a series of high profile events that captured public attention. The wanton use of pesticides such as DDT was blamed for killing butterflies and birds (Carson, 1962). The explosive growth in automobile ownership shrouded large cities like Los Angeles and New York in smog (Gardner, 2014) (Haagen-Smit, 1952) (Hanst, 1967). The widespread dumping of industrial waste into lakes and rivers was highlighted by events such as the fire in the Cuyahoga River (Marris, 2011) (Goldberg, 1979). The hippie counter-culture movement of the 1960s rejected conventional values in particular, the assumed primacy of technological advancement and industrial economic growth. It opposed the unrestricted use of pesticides, herbicides, preservatives, food additives, fertilizers, and other synthetic chemicals. It fought against the release of industrial waste into the atmosphere and into waterways, the harvesting of old growth forests for the wood and paper industries, and the inadequacy of public transit that could limit the number of automobiles in big cities and the air pollution they cause (Rome, 2003) (Zelko, 2013).

This environmental movement was the driving force behind the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the USA which was given the laws, the ways, the means, and the power to act quickly and decisively to clean up the air and water (Ruckelshaus, 1984). The EPA cleaned up the air and the water in the USA with strictly enforced new laws and procedures that limited the concentration of harmful chemicals in all industrial effluents and also required all new enterprises to obtain the approval of the EPA of their environmental impact before they could proceed. The remarkable success of the EPA made it a model for environmental law and environmental protection in countries around the world (Ruckelshaus, 1984) (Andreen, 2004) (Dolin, 2008).

THE EXTENSION OF ENVIRONMENTALISM TO THE BAMBI PRINCIPLE Environmentalism in its conceptual sense is the idea that humans should take care of the environment for their own good such that human life, health, and security are enhanced. This idea is contained in the original hippie environmental wisdom that if you shit in bed you will sleep in shit. At some point, the enthusiasm of environmentalism became separated from this fundamental reality and the conceptual underpinnings of environmentalism was arbitrarily extended in a spirit of emotional enthusiasm into the The Bambi Principle in which the concept of environmentalism is extended to a role of humans not as part of nature but as caretakers of nature. RELATED POST ON BAMBI: LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/11/15/the-bambi-principle/

Global environmentalism: It was found that industrial waste in rivers draining into the ocean ,ay have detrimental effects on oceanic biota and chemistry. It was thus that the “environment” to be taken care of became extended beyond national boundaries in the context of the role of man as nature’s manager and keeper. Environmentalism now meant more than man making sure his environment will sustain him. It meant that man was now in charge of nature. This is the conceptual bridge that when extended to the planetary scale led to the idea of the Anthropocene that gave man a godlike role on the planet earth.

THE EXTENSION OF ENVIRONMENTALISM TO THE PLANETARY SCALE:

Late in the year 1972 the first picture of the planet was taken from space and flashed on TV screens around the world. THIS WAS A TRANSFORMATIONAL EVENT IN THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT.

The picture was taken by the crew of the Apollo-9 space craft. This image created an overwhelming sense of awe as well as a sense of insecurity to see the finite little thing that we live on that had seemed so infinitely big as viewed from the surface. This image caused a profound change in environmentalism such that our “environment” became redefined as the planet itself and the “environment” of environmentalism underwent a grand and dramatic change. In the new planetary context of environmentalism, our environment is the same wherever we are and it is the whole of the planet. For example, the environment I live in is not just the rice fields and sugar palms you see in the picture below, but the whole of the planet earth.

THE RISE OF PLANETARY ENVIRONMENTALISM This image from space encouraged environmentalists to look at wider impacts of pollution and they quickly learned that both water pollution carried by rivers to the ocean and air pollution anywhere on earth have a reach much larger than they had imagined. For example ocean pollution in Southeastern USA could be carried by ocean currents thousands of miles away where it could have a detrimental impact. And air pollution in Corsica could affect air quality in Athens; and environmentalist James Lovelock found long lived chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) compounds used in refrigerants and hairspray in the atmosphere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Soon thereafter, environmental scientists Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina of UC Irvine proposed a theory that the long life of CFC discovered by Lovelock implies that these chemicals could eventually end up in the stratosphere where they could act as catalytic agents of ozone destruction. This was a global environmental issue and not the regime of any specific nation state.

The United Nations entered the scene to take charge of global environmental issues by forming the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) and immediately went to work on the global environmental problem of ozone depletion implied by the works of Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina with empirical evidence of ozone depletion published in the Farman etal 1985 paper. LINK TO UNEP GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTALISM: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/03/18/the-eco-crisis-ambition-of-the-un/

THE ANALYSIS PRESENTED ABOVE SHOWS THAT THE 1960S ENVIRONMENGTALISM THAT HELPED TO UNDO THE POLLUTION OF THE POST WAR ECONOMIC BOOM AND TO CREATE THE EPA AND ITS RATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY FOR THE INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY CANNOT BE COMPARED WITH THE GLOBAL OZONE AND CLIMATE MOVEMENTS OF THE UN. THEREFORE, THE SUCCESS OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENTS AGAINST THE UNLEADED PETROL AND ACID RAIN HAVE NO IMPLICATION FOR THE CLIMATE CHANGE MOVEMENT. THESE CITED SUCCESSES WERE AT THE NATIONAL LEVEL WITH THE ISSUES FRAMED IN TERMS OF NATIONAL HEALTH AND WELL BEING AND MANAGED BY NATIONAL ELECTED GOVERNMENTS AND JUDICIARY WITH THE NECESSARY LEGAL AND GOVERNANCE INFRASTRUCTURE AND ACCOUNTABILITY TO THE GOVERNED TO MAKE THE REQUIRED CHANGES. IN THIS ENVIRONMENTALISM, THERE WAS NO BAMBI PRINCIPLE, NO GLOBAL ASPIRATION, NO ANTHROPOCENE, AND NO SEPARATION OF HUMANS FROM NATURE AS A WAY OF IMPOSING HUMANS AS THE MANAGERS AND CARETAKERS OF THE PLANET. IT WAS PART OF NATIONAL GOVERNANCE WITH A WELL DEVELOPED LEGAL, POLITICAL, AND GOVERNANCE INFRASTRUCURE TO SERVE THE NEEDS OF THE CITIZENS AND TAX PAYERS. WHERE POLLUTION ISSUES WENT ACROSS NATIONAL BOUNDARIES, THEY WERE RESOLVED WITH SPECIFIC POLLUTION ABATEMENT TREATIES BETWEEN THE GOVERNMENTS INVOLVED.

BY WAY OF CONTRAST, THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTALISM OF THE UN OPERATES IN A LEGAL AND GOVERNANCE VACCUUM AND AN ACCOUNTABILITY VACCUUM AS DESCRIBED IN A RELATED POST: LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/02/25/un/

AS FOR THE SUCCESS OF THE MONTREAL PROTOCOL, WE FIND THAT IT HAS NO IMPLICATION FOR CLIMATE ACTION BECAUSE OF THE VAST DIFFERENCE IN THE COST OF COMPLIANCE. SUCCESS OF THE MONTREAL PROTOCOL IS BEST UNDERSTOOD IN TERMS OF THE RELATIVE EASE OF COMPLIANCE COMPARED WITH CLIMATE ACTION. THE COST OF COMPLIANCE OF TENS OF BILLIONS OF USD FOR THE MONTREAL PROTOCOL (WITH SIGNIFICANT FOREIGN AID FROM THE RICH COUNTRIES TO THE POOR) IS A PITTANCE COMPARED WITH THE MANY TRILLIONS ESTIMATED FOR CLIMATE ACTION WITH UNCERTAINTIES SO LARGE THAT THE UNITED NATIONS ADMITS THAT IT DOES NOT KNOW HOW HIGH THAT COST COULD GO: LINK TO SOURCE: https://www.oecd.org/env/cc/2482300.pdf

THEREFORE, THE ARGUMENT THAT THE CLIMATE MOVEMENT SHOULD SUCCEED BECAUSE THE UNLEADED GASOLINE PROGRAM AND THE ACID RAIN PROGRAM DID AND BECAUSE THE MONTREAL PROTOCOL WAS A SUCCESS IS NOT VALID BECAUSE IT OVERLOOKS IMPORTANT DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THESE ISSUES.

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POSTSCRIPT ON THE OZONE DEPLETION ISSUE AND THE MONTREAL PROTOCOL. In related posts on this site, we show some serious issues in the ozone depletion crisis and the apparent success of the Montreal Protocol. Here are the links to the relevant posts on this site:

LINK#1: https://tambonthongchai.com/2018/08/07/history-of-the-ozone-depletion-scare/ The history of ozone depletion agitation by environmentalists predates Rowland and Molina by decades. It is a very old environmental issue that had tried and failed multiple times at the national level in the USA and in other countries but succeeded in 1987 when the issue was globalized with the UN and its newly formed UNEP in charge.

LINK#2: https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/03/12/ozone1966-2015/ . To this day, the only empirical evidence of ozone depletion as described by Rowland and Molina, is the Farman etal 1985 paper. In this post we point out serious errors in the Farman paper. These errors invalidate the findings. Therefore, to this day, we have no empirical evidence of ozone depletion. Excerpt: ” The overall structure of changes in total column ozone in time and across latitudes shows that the data from the two stations in Antarctica prior to 1985 are unique and specific to that time and place. They cannot be generalized into a global pattern of ozone depletion. Here we show that declining levels of total column ozone in Antarctica during the months of October and November prior to 1985 do not serve as empirical evidence that can be taken as validation of the Rowland-Molina theory of chemical ozone depletion. The chemical theory implies that ozone depletion must be assessed across the full range of latitudes and over a much longer time span than what is found in Farman etal 1985 which serves as the sole basis for the ozone depletion hypothesis that led to the Montreal Protocol and the ascendance of the UN as a global environmental authority.

LINK#3: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/11/04/the-ozone-hole-of-2020/ Excerpt: Briefly, RMTOD is about long term trends in global mean total column ozone which forms only in the Tropics and which is distributed to the higher latitudes by the Brewer Dobson circulation and by other means. These distributions are volatile and variable. The variability increases sharply with latitude. Therefore the dynamics of ozone concentration at the most extreme possible latitude do not contain useful information about global mean total column ozone. Therefore, “ozone hole” data have no interpretation in terms of RMTOD.{RMTOD=Rowland Molina Theory of Ozone Depletion}

Large variability in South Polar ozone levels has no RMTOD interpretation and the description of brief periods of low ozone levels there as some kind of a hole that we need to worry about has no scientific or empirical basis and no implication in terms of RMTOD. IN CONCLUSION, IT APPEARS THAT THE OZONE DEPLETION ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUE AND ITS RESOLUTION WITH THE GLOBAL MONTREAL PROTOCOL IS A CASE OF ESTABLISHING THE UN’S ROLE AS GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY BY FIRST IDENTIFYING A NON-EXISTENT PROBLEM AND THEN SIMPLY DECLARING IT SOLVED.