REILLY RIDES AGAIN

On Oct. 23^rd [1991] a "panel of international scientists" appointed by the World Meteorological Organization and the UN Environment Program, released a new alarm on the "dangerous thinning" of the ozone layer.

United Nations my foot. Only a press release, no serious report was available; even so, it was crystal clear that the report was nothing but a rehash of EPAcrat Reilly's arbitrary concoctions of last March [AtE Jul 91]. The UN has no significant independent research on the ozone layer, which is mostly performed by NASA satellites; and in their interpretation, the panel of stooges chose not to consider the NASA scientists' interpretation, but Billy Boy's hype. The quality of his UN parrots is illustrated by the head of the UN Environmental Program, Dr. Tolba, who took the opportunity to cast doubt on the safety of nuclear power with the obvious intent of denying all energy options but SLCM (sun light and chicken manure). Just about the only new point (or had I missed it before?) is that the alleged thinning of the ozone layer over the last 12 years from satellite data, which they put at 2.9%, could be off by 2.1%. Yep: The tooth fairy weighs 20 lb, plus or minus 200 lb.

Reilly repeats, I repeat. I try to take good care not to let AtE become repetitious, but this point is so important that I hope readers will not mind if I reprint the figure from AtE July 91, to which I have added the thick arrows to mark the 1986 solar mini-mum. The jagged line of data was taken from a preprint which I was fortunate to obtain in the summer; since then, the article has been published [J.R. Herman and others, "Global average ozone change from November 1978 to May 1990," J. Geophys. Res., vol. 96, pp. 17,29717,305 (9/20/1991)]. This jagged line of data is the only one in the original, the various straight lines have been added by myself.

(I scanned this graph from July 1991issue)

Reilly's manipulative trick is to put a line arbitrarily through the wildly fluctuating curve from 1975 to 1990, neglecting the solar minimum of 1986, when the decline of ultraviolet radiation bot-tomed out and began to rise again. The ozone in the layer origi-nally arises by UV radiation disassociating diatomic oxygen into single molecules of oxygen, and these then latch onto unaffected 02 molecules to form ozone. When more UV radiation arrives from the sun, more ozone is produced. This was clear always, but the satellite measurements showing fluctuations of the solar "constant" with solar activity implied that the ozone concentration was dependent on the latter, and geophysicists outside the EPA have been regularly using this fact to evaluate the measurements. Further convincing evidence of the link between solar activity and the terrestrial atmosphere has now been provided by the Danish discovery. When the ozone concentration fluctuations are logically split up in time to correspond to the solar activity cycles, they clearly show a decreasing trend (-0.47% per year) only during the decreasing phase of solar activity, since this activity began to rise after the 1986 minimum, the ozone concentration has also exhibited a rising trend at the rate of +0.28% per year.

Reilly's trick is equivalent to claiming that traffic on the freeways is steadily decreasing and soon there will be no cars left on them at all by taking the traffic data from 5 p.m. to 7 a.m. During most of this time the traffic is indeed decreasing, and the mean will show an overall decrease not much affected by the morning rush hour which has only just started.