ABSTRACT
A team of British scientists stunned the world with an article in Nature magazine that reported a remarkable 40-percent loss of stratospheric ozone over Antarctica between September and October 1984. Ozone depletion is a quintessentially global problem: chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) released mainly in northern industrial countries are destroying a protective layer of the atmosphere nearly everywhere–and doing so most dramatically in the remotest and supposedly unpolluted “upper” and “lower” corners of the world. As negotiators work to complete many details of the Kyoto Protocol by the end of 2000, it is becoming clear that climate change will be far more difficult to solve than ozone depletion was. The world community took a tentative first step toward confronting climate change at the June 1992 Earth Summit, when the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was finalized. Despite the encouraging decline in CFC production, the world is suffering through the period in which the ozone layer will be most severely damaged.
