OZONE HOLES -- ANOTHER FALSE ALARM? 

We have been hearing more and more about environmental degradation. We are either going to freeze, fry, lose the sun due to volcanic eruptions or a cosmic winter, or be burnt to death through ozone holes. Whoa, let's cool it a bit. In almost all these proposed, pretended, or "planned", scenarios, the most honest answer is "we really don't know".

During the past 18 months my two columns related to "global warming" have shown evidence, that: (a) if all forecasts were true, global warming would be more beneficial than disastrous and (b) it is all part of what may be a 6,000 year cycle .... what some climatologists called the "Climatic Epoch", an era 6,000 years ago when the planet was operating at maximum efficiency for plant life.

The latest "the-sky-is-falling" panic is over ozone holes. "SKIN CANCER UP 200 PERCENT IN AUSTRALIA" AND "BRITAIN TO SUFFER FROM OZONE DEPLETION" ran recent headlines. The latest report may offset that panic. In a recent issue of New Scientist magazine, Walter Komhyr and his colleagues of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Boulder, Colorado report "that sea surface temperatures in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean may affect levels of ozone over the Antarctic and elsewhere".

This report will shortly appear in The Canadian Journal of Physics. Komhyr and his colleagues state, "The implication is that there are other things going on besides chemistry". People not cloistered in the halls of science and academia generally believe that scientists are superhuman. That's the first myth. They also believe that scientists don't have the lusts (well, maybe not all) and foibles we all possess. Show me a unfunded science project and I'll find you the Donald Trump of the test tube set. In some cases, when a science researcher finds his funding pot drying up, there is a great trek towards the latest "doom" scenario, because, based on past results that is where the next great fountain of new funds will be directed. AIDS has saved hundreds of medical research departments from downsizing disasters. If you don't think some of the billions spent on alleged research each year is planned more on survival of the research department than on actually finding a solution, then you have never been inside Las Vegas. Science, like a crap game, is a gamble. We just don't know enough yet, and maybe never will for everything, to arrive at verifiable statements early in the search for a solution, to come up with the alarming statements heard so frequently lately.

Another factor has recently crept into the formula. A chance remark from a "scientist" is grabbed and "clutched" by an environmentalist or "believer" and propounded as gospel, which with media support (let's face it, disaster sells), becomes etched in the public consciousness, not with qualifiers and restrainers, but as established fact, when it's more like established fantasy.

The leading skill of the "Information Age" is to successfully sift "information" from "misinformation." Once you can do that you have knowledge.

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