Climate Change Impacts Linked to Ozone Depletion

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PHOTO: FOTOLIA/VALDEZRI
Climate-driven summer thunderstorms might inject more water into the stratosphere, which has the potential to damage the protective ozone layer over the United States and possibly other parts of the globe.

The following article is printed with permission from theInstitute for Governance & Sustainable Development.

“A warming world with violent storms holds many unpleasant surprises,” said Durwood Zaelke, President of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development (IGSD). “Recent research now suggests that this may include damage to the protective ozone shield, which protects us from harmful ultraviolet radiation that causes skin cancer, cataracts, suppresses the human immune system, and damages crops and ecosystems.”

“Protecting the stratospheric ozone layer is a job that the Montreal Protocol has done for the last 25 years, putting the ozone layer on a course of recovery by mid-century,” Zaelke continued.

The new challenge is the surprise finding in a recently published Harvard University study that increasing climate-driven summer thunderstorms might inject more water into the stratosphere, which has the potential to damage the protective ozone layer over the United States and possibly other parts of the globe. This study is one of the first to hypothesize that climate change could reduce stratospheric ozone over populated areas. If they prove correct, depletion of the ozone layer will increase if global warming leads to more such storms.

In the stratosphere when temperatures are very low, increasing water vapor releases chlorine residing in inactive forms, mimicking processes that cause the ‘ozone hole’ over Antarctica. While ozone depletion from storms in midlatitude regions like the U.S. has not been reported so far, the study concludes that if the intensity and frequency of the convective injecting storms were to increase as a result of climate change, increased risk of ozone depletion and associated increases in ultraviolet exposure could follow. To confirm and quantify the risk, more detailed modeling of storms and the response of ozone to water vapor injections in the stratosphere is needed.

  • Published on Aug 1, 2012
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