“World Avoided” Model Charts Climate Cost If We’d Ignored Ozone Hole

Michael Irving at the University of Exeter writes that it’s easy to feel hopeless in the face of climate change, but it’s not too late to do something about it – after all, we’ve stepped up to similar challenges before. New modeling shows just how much worse the situation would be if CFCs hadn’t been banned decades ago, with the ozone hole growing, raising temperatures and interrupting the ability of plants to sequester carbon. The ozone layer is an important part of the Earth’s atmosphere, absorbing the majority of the ultraviolet radiation from the Sun. But in the late…