AMERICA’s Republicans thumbed their noses at the vast majority of the world’s scientists last week by claiming that there is no proof that CFCs are destroying the Earth’s ozone layer. Without proof, they argued, there is no good reason why the US should rush to ban the manufacture of CFCs by the end of the year.

When the Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer was first signed in 1987, industrialised nations agreed to halve the manufacture of CFCs by 1998. But with the ozone holes at both poles growing larger each winter, the timetable was speeded up. In 1990, the protocol was amended to ban CFCs from 2000. In 1992, the deadline was brought forward again to January 1996. The Republicans want to revert to the deadline of 2000 to give industry more time to find alternatives.

At a hearing before the House of Representatives Science Committee last week, John Doolittle, a Republican from California, said that research implicating CFCs in the destruction of ozone is “very much open to debate”, and there is “no established consensus” on the role of CFCs. “We need science, not pseudoscience,” he said.

The Republicans embraced the views of a small minority of scientists who argue that the ozone-depleting effects of CFCs have not been proven. “I’m inclined to believe that we’re not giving Mother Nature enough credit for being able to replenish the ozone layer,” said Congressman Tom DeLay, the Republicans’ whip in the House of Representatives. He shrugged off a challenge to produce some peer-reviewed studies supporting this view. “I’m not going to get involved in mumbo jumbo,” he said.


Dana Rohrabacher, the Republican chairman of the hearing, said that the dominant scientific opinion about CFCs could be wrong. “What we’re interested in is which view is correct, not which has more people on its side.”

The Republicans, who have argued that scientific panels should guide federal regulations in health, safety and the environment, said that they distrust the process of peer review because it tends to shut out scientists who disagree with the prevailing view.

“There are many scientists who do not speak up. They don’t want to lose their research funds,” said one of the mavericks, Fred Singer of the Science and Environmental Policy Project in Fairfax, Virginia.

The mainstream scientists fought back. Robert Watson, a government official and co-chair of the scientific panel that advises the Montreal Protocol, said that laboratory experiments, computer models, and field measurements all support the conclusion that CFCs are destroying stratospheric ozone.

Daniel Albritton, director of the US government’s Aeronomy Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, and one of Watson’s co-chairs on the panel, said that delaying the phase out of CFCs until 2000 would result in the loss of 5 per cent more ozone.