University of Waterloo professor Qin-Bin Lu recently published a paper in peer-reviewed journal, Physics Reports that showed that the warming of the last few decades up to 2000 were caused by CFCs. And since the level of CFCs in the atmosphere is starting to drop because of a worldwide agreement in 1987, the temperature is now starting to drop.
Professor Lu, a path-breaking scientist in the field of ozone protection, made his CO2 discovery by accident — he was looking for culprits in the formation of the ozone hole over Antarctica. A chief suspect was CO2: Climate models produced by climatologists showed that CO2 would have devastating effects on the ozone layer, significantly enlarging the ozone hole over Antarctica and dramatically enlarging it over the Arctic. But when Dr. Lu compared the imagined output of the climate models with the actual measurements taken real-time by satellites and weather balloons, the models turned out to be soaring failures.
“I didn’t see any CO2 effect on temperature or ozone depletion over the South Pole from 1956 to 2008,” explained Dr. Lu, surprised at how totally different the real-world measurements were from those that the climate model predicted. The real-world measurements showed CO2 to be largely irrelevant -”the global warming on Earth’s surface between 1950 and 2000 is pretty much due to CFCs,” he concluded. “The models say that CO2 is a major greenhouse gas but the facts show otherwise.”
In contrast, CFCs have long been known to be a greenhouse gas that, on a molecule per molecule basis, is 10,000 times more potent than CO2. Professor Lu’s satellite and balloon measurements showed that factor of 10,000 to have been a gross underestimate!
Had CFCs never been widely used in our air conditioners and refrigerators, Dr. Lu believes, the Earth would not have warmed in the last century. And had CFCs not been banned, he would not be predicting a period of global cooling.
But with the CFC ban, and the subsequent phase-out of this ozone destroying chemical, global warming stopped and, early this decade, a period of global cooling began. This cooling will last “at least 50 years, and possibly 70 years” as the global temperatures return to their pre-CFC levels, he explains, barring the rise of an alternative to CFC, or the introduction of another greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.
The cooling, he predicts, will be gentle -”after 2010 or so, the globe temperature will experience a small bounce back but a general declining tendency will not change.” Neither will the new levels be worrisome -Earth will find itself back at the levels of the 1950s, which themselves hadn’t changed much over the previous century.
His only concern right now is that some aspects (although not the main conclusions) might be suspect because he used data (as did many others) from the U.K. Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University which is now suspect.
Source National Post
