With Speed and Violence Fred Pearce - Global Commons Institute

Cambridge in 1984 to finish his paper titled "Large Losses of Total Ozone in
Antarctica." He posted it to Nature on Christmas Eve.
The editors didn't quite share Farman's sense of urgency. It took them
three months to accept his paper, and another two months to publish it.
When the paper finally appeared, NASA scientists were confused. They still
had no inkling of anything amiss over Antarctica. But they could hardly
ignore the findings of two Dobson meters, however ancient. They
re-examined the raw data from their satellite instruments and were shocked
to find that their satellites had seen the ozone hole forming and growing over
Antarctica all along, even before Farman had spotted it. But the computers
on the ground that were analyzing the streams of data had been
programmed to throw out any wildly abnormal readings. And the data
showing the ozone hole had certainly fitted that category. The episode, as
Farman was not slow to point out, was a salutary lesson for high-tech science.
It was also a triumph for the string-and-sealing-wax school, and for the
dogged collection of seemingly boring and useless data about the
environment.
Paul Crutzen—who had unraveled much of the complex chemistry of the
ozone layer—swiftly tied Farman's findings to specific chemical reactions
involving CFCs that took place only in the uniquely cold air over Antarctica
each spring. Below about -130°F, unique clouds form in the stratosphere
above Antarctica. These are called polar stratospheric clouds. It turned out
that the runaway reactions happened only on the surface of the frozen
particles in these clouds. The reactions required both the cold to create the
clouds and solar energy to fuel them. And there was a window of a few weeks
when both were supplied—after the sun had risen, but before the air warmed