ABSTRACT
The 1989 Montreal Protocol that banned chlorofluorocarbons is probably the best example of international cooperation to resolve a common problem.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
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This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Notes
1. See “Humanity healed the ozone hole. Can we do the same for climate change?” by Kyle Bagenstose, USA Today, September 25, 2022. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2022/09/25/ozone-hole-lessons-climate-change/8071417001/?gnt-cfr.
2. See “Restoration of the Ozone Layer is Back on Track, Scientists Say” by Henry Fountain, The New York Times, January 9, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/09/climate/ozone-hole-restoration-montreal-protocol.html.
3. The median concentration of lead in the blood of young children—defined as those between the ages of one and five years of age—dropped by 96 percent from 1976 to 2018, according to the EPA, with the greatest decline occurring after the elimination of leaded gasoline. See https://www.epa.gov/americaschildrenenvironment/biomonitoring-lead.
4. See “Susan Solomon: at the frontline of research on the ozone layer and its role in Earth’s climate” by Dawn Stover in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May 22, 2018. https://thebulletin.org/2018/05/susan-solomon-at-the-frontline-of-research-on-the-ozone-layer-and-its-role-in-earths-climate/.
5. See “Just 90 companies are accountable for more than 60 percent of greenhouse gases” by Dan Drollette Jr. in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, October 27, 2016. https://thebulletin.org/2016/10/just-90-companies-are-accountable-for-more-than-60-percent-of-greenhouse-gases/.
6. See “The climate optimist” by Amanda Schaffer, Technology Review, February 27, 2019. https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/02/27/137093/the-climate-optimist/.
7. See “How The Ozone Hole Can Help Us Communicate Climate Change” by Nina Joung, PBS/Rewire, April 15, 2019. https://www.pbs.org/wnet/peril-and-promise/2019/04/how-the-ozone-hole-can-help-us-communicate-climate-change/.
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Dan Drollette
Dan Drollette Jr. is the executive editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He is a science writer/editor and foreign correspondent who has filed stories from every continent except Antarctica. His stories have appeared in Scientific American, International Wildlife, MIT’s Technology Review, Natural History, Cosmos, Science, New Scientist, and the BBC Online, among others. He was a TEDx speaker to Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and held a Fulbright Postgraduate Traveling Fellowship to Australia—where he lived for a total of four years. For three years, he edited CERN’s on-line weekly magazine about high-energy subparticle physics, in Geneva, Switzerland, where his office was 100 yards from the injection point of the Large Hadron Collider.