The Hole in the Ozone Hole Story

The comic book serial, Asterix and Oblelix, presents an ancient Gaulish village where people are brave enough to resist the onslaught of the Roman Empire, but are frightened that the sky may fall down on their head. The global village that we live in now, has an almost similar fear: the ozone hole in the Polar Regions will keep increasing and the ultraviolet rays will damage vegetation, increase the incidence of cataract and mutate our skin cells to make them cancerous and we will die of skin cancer. The pale face, the white race, will suffer the most. The black and the browns will resist the effects of ultraviolet better because they have melatonin pigment in their skins.

The implication of the story that is presented by the media is that the people who live in the tropics are responsible. These people who live in hot climes are stinky and therefore use body sprays. They want to drink cold water and keep their food from rotting and therefore use refrigerators. They use air-conditioners to keep themselves cool. And in the process they liberate what the media fondly calls CFCs – Chlorofluorocarbons. It is these CFCs that are responsible for the ozone hole. In other words, these browns and blacks – they will ultimately take over the earth after killing off the white skinned people with skin cancer.

This doomsday prediction and the implied blame are based on some seemingly scientific facts. Let us take a look at the facts and separate them from the mediated myths.

The CFCs are mostly liberated in the tropical areas, less in temperate zones and almost none at poles. And yet, the hole is at the poles. What is the mechanism by which the CFCs from the sea level in tropical areas are selectively funneled to the Polar Regions and then taken up through a few kilometers of troposphere so that they can selectively destroy the ozone in the stratosphere and make a hole there?

In Malayalam, my mother tongue, there is a saying which means that if you accidentally fall down, make sure that you roll around a bit so that the onlookers think that you fell down purposely. When media people and the self styled experts are asked this question, they do exactly that. They will tell you that there is a highly mathematical model, which we, ordinary mortals, can never hope to understand and that it explains how this happens. If you say that you are still interested and would like to take a look at the mathematical model, you will suddenly become invisible. They will look through you and pretend that you do not exist.

There is another way to become invisible. Ask this question: how do we know that the ozone hole did not exist before human beings started using CFCs?

CFCs as a refrigerant was first proposed in the early part of the 20^th century. They were marketed extensively by the middle of the 20^th century. Though there were suspicions that the ozone layer may not have the same thickness at all times, the ozone hole was first observed in the mid 1980s. Before that there were no scientific observations. It is possible that the ozone hole was present in the 19^th century, two million years ago when the bipeds, which go by the name of Homo sapiens, were not walking on the planet.

Now here is another inconvenient question that you might ask – since you are already invisible, it won’t harm you any more to ask it. Why does the ozone hole shrink and expand?

During the last two decades of observations, the ozone hole does not seem to keep pace with the production and use of CFCs. It shrinks and expands in a way, which is quite disconcerting to the proponents of the CFCs-cause-ozone-hole theory.

Though the questions are quite inconvenient to the proponents, the theory that CFCs are responsible for ozone hole is quite convenient to business. The replacement is costlier.

The situation is quite similar to the ban on di-iodoquine (di-iodo-hydroxyquinoline which was marketed as Mexaform), a low cost treatment for amoebiasis. As soon as Metronidazole, which could be marketed at a much higher price, became available, di-iodoquine became a horrible drug. The reason – when taken at very high doses for a very long period, it may damage the optic nerve. It does not matter that people in the tropics, where the disease is rampant, do not take the drug for such long periods or for such long duration – not when there is money to be made.

But let us go back to the ozone hole story and ask some more questions that the invisible people on earth should learn to ask. It is ultraviolet that creates ozone in the stratosphere, right? Yes, ultraviolet dissociates molecular oxygen into two atoms which are highly reactive and they immediately combine with the nearby oxygen molecule to form ozone. Ah, so we are saying that if the ozone layer gets depleted in the stratosphere, ultraviolet will go through 7 kilometers of troposphere, somehow avoiding all the oxygen molecules – nearly 20 percent of the atmosphere is oxygen – just to cause skin cancer and cataract?

Since it defies the concept of light traveling in straight lines, there should be a theory which explains the photons being like a football kicked around to avoid the legs and heads of 11 players to reach the goal. Please can you explain that theory?

By now you are not only invisible, but also inaudible to the self-styled experts and the proponents of the CFC-ozone hole-ultraviolet-skin cancer theory in the media. So they will not even pretend to roll around. But then, you are not dead – though you are curious, you are not a cat. So here is another question: if CFCs are not causing the ozone hole, what is the reason for the ozone hole?

The Sun spews out not only photons in the visible, infrared and ultraviolet ranges, but also a large number of charged particles. These charged particles cannot enter the earth’s atmosphere at the tropical areas since earth has a magnetic field which deflects the charged particles. But they can enter the poles where they create the splendour of the arorae. The arorae are phenomena produced by the interaction of the charged particles with the earth’s atmosphere. The atmospheric atoms are excited – meaning that the electrons are pushed into higher orbits – and when they come back to their ground state, they liberate light which we see as the arorae.

Now - besides exciting the atmospheric atoms, the charged particles also ionize them – remove the electrons. Ionized atoms are more reactive. Since nearly 80 percent of the atmosphere is nitrogen and nearly 20 percent is oxygen, they combine to form nitrous oxides. Nitrous oxides are known to react with ozone. Ozone depletion in the “hole” could be because of that.

Large columns of nitrous oxides have been detected in the upper atmosphere at the poles.

Since the input of charged particles from the sun increases and decreases depending on the sun’s activity, the ozone hole thus produced also increases and decreases.

The notion of non-anthropogenic Nitrous oxides depleting ozone may not be quite convenient to the experts. But it has more explanatory power and answers questions that the CFCs-cause-ozone-hole-theory cannot.

The ultimate question is - which one do you like better? One which has too many holes or one that sounds reasonable?