1 At the risk of sounding like a climate freak, I have to point out that we now have two arguments which contradict each other. One arguments says that there is no temperature increase, and the other one says that temperature increase is caused by ozone depletion rather than CO2 increase.

2 Bill, all of the warming we have witnessed occurred between 1980 and 1998, when it pretty much stopped. The Global Cooling crowd shifted to Global Warming at this point. They have refused to acknowledge that temperatures have stopped rising.

The point of this post is to illustrate that the Climate Change crowd wants  to have their cake and eat it too.

The purpose of this research is undoubtedly to suggest we can "fix" global warming just as we "fixed" ozone depletion. Note that they claim "half" of "arctic warming" is involved, thus maintaining the fiction that we have work left to do. Of course, the point is if they want to go here they have to admit their theory doesn't work.

There has been no "missing heat" found in the oceans, either, which is how they explain the "pause".

Nobody who understands this issue disagrees that there has been some warming. But those of us on the "denier" side say that natural variability and solar-related phenomenon as well as things like land use change are responsible and carbon dioxide plays at most a minor role. It is carbon dioxide as the primary driver that is in dispute.

So if this is true (and I don't know that it is) it is very damaging to the carbon dioxide argument.

As I pointed out, it is rather like the Medieval "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin" argument. At some point you have to say it's just plain silly.

3 ODS -- now lemme see, that's Ozone Derangement Syndrome, right? I remember when that's all the Left talked about. And as Tim pointed out, "we" actually did something about it. Now it's rare that you hear those folks yammering about holes in the Ozone Layer. They're too busy worrying about atmospheric CO2, which is something totally different and not fixable the way the ozone problem was fixed.

Regarding holes in the Ozone Layer, does anybody really know whether there were actually holes in the Ozone Layer back, say, a hundred or more years ago, before mankind started messing atmospheric ozone up? There is such an alarming tendency for the Gang Green to assume that everything began right at the time they started looking around.

4 Dana, as I recall there has been research done that suggests that very thing. The polar regions are susceptible to a weakened ozone - and mainly we're talking about Antarctica, not the arctic. But we've got no really good proxy data on that. 

I rather suspect it ties in with the Earth's weakening magnetic field more than with cfc's, but I have no proof. The ozone hole was most prominent when the Sun was at the Grand Maximum, then it weakened as the Sun weakened. Coincidence?  Maybe, but maybe not.

5 That's a good point. I've seen articles recently that say the Earth's magnetic poles have been flying around like break dancers on speed. I suppose the Warmiacs will blame that on AGW (why not; they're blaming everything else on it), but is this perhaps a chicken-vs-egg kind of thing? Or a correlation-without-causation thing, ultimately relating only to the ozone density fluctuations?

6 No doubt they'll try to argue the poles are moving because of atmospheric warming - I guess they'll say the increased air density from water vapor evaporation is making the whole planet wobble and this is making the poles wander.  Ridiculous, but so is the basic argument that we are all going to die because of one extra carbon dioxide molecule in every ten thousand of air.