Good news on ozone, bad news on greenhouse gases | Ars Technica - 0 views
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James Linzel on 13 Sep 14" Good news on ozone, bad news on greenhouse gases The ozone layer is on track for recovery even as carbon emissions boom. by John Timmer - Sept 13 2014, 2:10am CST ShareTweet 42 The Montreal Protocol, created in response to the decline in the Earth's ozone layer, called for a world-wide phase out in the production of chemicals that were responsible for the ozone's decline. It is perhaps the greatest global environmental achievement to date. And, this week, the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations environmental Program announced it was working. Unfortunately, this week also saw the WMO release its annual greenhouse gas bulletin, and here the news was nowhere near as promising, as emissions returned to levels not seen since the 1980s. First, the good news. In the 2014 version of the Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion, the WMO finds that the atmospheric concentrations of most of the chemicals covered by the Montreal Protocol are in decline. The exceptions are hydrochlorofluorocarbons, which are used in refrigeration, and halon, used in fire suppression. The WMO also noted that there must be some unidentified source of carbon tetrachloride to explain its persistence in the atmosphere."