When I saw the article in my RSS feed reader, I thought it was a joke from The Onion. No, it was from The Washington Post.
Before CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) became Al Gore’s environmental boogy-chemical, the environmental exaggeration artists were focused on chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). These chemicals were blamed for creating holes in the ozone layer. If you’re about my age (mid-to-late twenties) you probably heard a whole lot about this in elementary school. CFCs were emitted into the atmosphere by air conditioners, refrigerators, and all kinds of spray cans for hair spray, inhalers, etc. In 1987, the governments of the world signed the ‘Montreal Protocol’ and began to stringently limit CFCs.
Scientists developed an alternative called hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), which have since become the norm for the aforementioned air conditioners, refrigerators, and spray cans, and CFCs have essentially been eliminated. But, guess what! HFCs are a greenhouse gas, and now we’re finding out that they are 4,400 times worse than CO2. Congratulations, HFCs: you saved our ozone layer, but now you will turn the Earth into a boiling hot mass of molten magma.
Or, perhaps you won’t do much of anything. After all, the science behind CO2 being responsible for global warming (or ‘climate change’, which is the new, vaguer term) is shaky-at-best. That’s a rant for another day.