An Inconvenient Truth

[Occhidiangela]

In order to shed a ray of hope in the environmental wars I will tell a story.

When I was in my senior year (1985) of college a professor mentioned the deterioration of the ozone layer due to CFC's. Legislation was passed and newer non CFC refrigerants are now ubiquitous. Recently I read in the news that the ozone hole is healing itself.

http://www.nationalcenter.org/NPA388.html

To be taken with a grain of salt, the article is aimed at the political issue, the imbalance, of the Kyoto deal. While it provides an interesting counterpoint based on a local observation, it has the shortcoming of using a very short term trend, in geologic time, to project a long term "cooling." IIRC, some of the best CO2 studies were done in Antarctica, which makes this article seem a bit ironic.

The consideration that this article raises in my mind isn't that global warming must not be happening, but perhaps our data are skewed. Are the studies/effects predominantly concerned with the changes in the Northern Hemisphere? That is where most of the Earth's population lives, and where the bulk of the land mass is. How does that imbalance influence global climate? Are average temps and weather patterns in the southern hemisphere trending in the same direction as the Northern Hemisphere? How much cross flow is there in air masses between hemispheres? The heat output in the Northern Hemisphere, based on human population density, would be, I guess, about an order of magnitude greater than in the Southern Hemisphere.

Occhi