Lovelock’s great mistake

Lovelock with his newly invented Electron Capture Detector — a device that was “at least a thousand times more sensitive than any other detector in existence at the time” — found ozone-depleting CFCs had dispersed across the globe.

Lovelock’s data, showing the dispersal of these chemicals around the globe, was an essential part of the evidence that led to this ban.

The predictions at present are that by 2065 the ozone layer in the mid-latitudes of the United States will be back to about what it was in 1980. If we’d never regulated CFCs, you wouldn’t have been able to go outside for much time at all.

By the year 2065, virtually two-thirds of the ozone layer would have been destroyed. UV radiation is used to sterilise things. By 2065, you’re probably starting to approach those levels of UV radiation.

So the answer is that the regulation was in fact a very smart thing to do, as opposed to have done nothing.

Ridiculous, once you consider he believed CFCs were once harmless.

“I made the biggest scientific mistake I think I’ve ever made in that paper, I said — “the presence of these compounds constitutes no conceivable hazard” — the reason I did this was that I was fed up of people screaming their heads off about extremely low levels of pesticides in everything — because the damn device [electron capture detector] is so sensitive, it’ll pick up amounts that aren’t the slightest bit harmful and I didn’t want people saying — oh there are halogenated hydrocarbons in the air we are all gonna die of cancer — which the greens would have done. But of course, I didn’t think what would happen to them in the stratosphere.”

James Lovelock