Theft at the Public Till
that’ uses alternative refrigerants. Offices, shopping malls, hospitals, hotels, schools, supermarkets, colleges, churches, factories, and owners of homes all face expensive cooling-changeover costs. Car air-conditioning repair costs have already exploded. What was once a minor expense can now cost as much as $1,000-more than fixing a failed transmission. Many home air-conditioning systems will have to be replaced when they lose their ex- isting coolant. Invented in the 1930s as safe nonflammable and inexpensive alternatives to deadly air conditioning coolants, such as one that leaked and killed 100 people in a Cleveland hospital in 1929, CFCs were once highly esteemed. In the 1970s however they were demonized on the basis of specu- lative theorizing. Allegedly, CFCs percolate up into the stratosphere release chlorine and destroy the ozone shield against ultraviolet radiation from the sun causing increased skin manner among humans. H. L. Meneken once said that “the whole-aim of practical polities is to keep the populace alarmed by menacing it with an endless series of hobgob- lins all of them imaginary.” Ozone depletion seems to be such a hobgob- lin. No global reduction of ozone levels has ever been detected. Moreover measurements show a decrease in ultraviolet radiation reaching the earth’s surface, and a recent study by Brookhaven National Laboratory finds that malignant melanoma is caused by a type of ultraviolet radiation not ab- sorbed or blocked by ozone. The evidence for ozone depletion is the hole in the ozone that has recently been noticed over the Antarctic for a couple of months a year. Whether or not CFCs are involved, most scientists regard the ozone hole as a purely localized phenomenon due to the exceedingly cold polar night that freezes nitrogen oxides (which inhibit chlorine chemistry) out of the stratosphere. When temperatures rise the ozone hole disappears. Other scientists believe the ozone hole is a natural and transitory phenom- enon related to sea temperatures volcanic eruptions tropical wind patterns and sunspot activity. Actual historical readings of Antarctic ozone levels are inconsistent with the CFC buildup theory. Ozone levels in the 1960s and 1970s were twice as high as in the 1950s. Whatever the true story turns out to be eventually, propaganda has prevailed over scientific fact up until now, and a government policy that is going to impose undue hardship on
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