Climate Change Could Erode Ozone Layer Over U.S.
For the past 25 years, it seemed that we’d pretty much solved the ozone problem. In the 1970s and 80s, people around the world grew increasingly alarmed as research revealed that chemicals we were producing—such as CFCs, used in refrigeration— had started destroying the crucial ozone layer, high up in the atmopshere, that protects us from the sun’s harmful UV radiation. In response, world governments came together to sign the Montreal Protocol in 1987, which phased out the production of ozone-depleting chemicals. The concentration of these chemicals in the atmosphere leveled off within a decade.
Yesterday, though, Harvard scientists hit us with some bad news: It looks as if climate change could actually cause the depletion of the ozone layer to resume on a wide scale, with grim implications for the United States.
“If you were to ask me where this fits into the spectrum of things I worry about, right now it’s at the top of the list,” said professor James Anderson in a press release, discussing his team’s paper, published online in Science. “What this research does is connect, for the first time, climate change with ozone depletion, and ozone loss is directly tied to increases in skin cancer incidence, because more ultraviolet radiation is penetrating the atmosphere.”
The revelation comes from the researchers’ observation that warm-temperature summer storms can force moisture high up into the stratosphere, a layer of the atmosphere that sits about 6 miles above our heads. Typically, storm updrafts are halted at a boundary just below the stratosphere, but in a series of observation flights above the U.S., the team saw that storms with sufficient power injected water vapor into the stratosphere via convection currents.