453. The Ozone Racket, the Carbon Con, and Other Frauds

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This is a well-documented takedown of the most profitable and malignant scares of our age. The ozone hole is real and measurable, and carbon dioxide does trap heat. Those are not the lies. The lie is the manufactured panic and the fortune stolen from us. The case is made by Dr. Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace who quit when the group became a fundraising racket peddling junk science. His book, Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom, and his video lecture lay it out in slides. My earlier post gathers more of his sources. The whole con turns on the calendar: the stories used to scare you span 100 years or less, and the moment you widen the frame to geological time, they disappear.

If you read nothing else, scroll down to the three graphs. They make the case on their own.

Summary

● Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace who quit in disgust in the 1980s, argues in his 2021 book that almost every modern scare hinges on something invisible or far away, so you have to take it on faith.

● His cases run from polar bears and coral reefs to nuclear power, plastic, genetically modified food, and carbon dioxide. Every one is set where no ordinary person gets to walk outside and check it.

● The ozone hole fits the mold: a thinning of an invisible gas at the edge of space above a frozen continent almost no one visits.

● The chemistry is Nobel-grade and is measured every spring by satellites and balloons. Anyone who tells you the hole is painted on has handed the other side a free win.

● The rot is in the selling: predictions that ran miles past the data, and DuPont flipping from ridicule to crusade the moment it owned the patented replacement.

● Moore’s method beats blind disbelief. Test each claim against the evidence, because some scares are pure fraud and others are real problems dressed in fear and sold for profit.

Patrick Moore helped found Greenpeace in 1971 and sailed on its first voyage to protest American hydrogen-bomb tests off Alaska. He gave the group 15 years, then walked out in the mid-1980s when it stopped cleaning up pollution and began manufacturing panic for money. By his account, Greenpeace was pulling in more than 100 million dollars a year and had made fundraising its true product. The last straw was a 1986 vote by his fellow directors to campaign for a worldwide ban on chlorine, the element behind safe drinking water and most of our medicines. His 2021 book, Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom, is his tally of the scares the movement now feeds on.

The argument is short and hard to dodge. Almost every doom story of the past 40 years rests on something the ordinary person cannot see or reach: an invisible gas, a radioactive particle, a bear on distant ice, a reef under deep water. You never get to walk outside and point at the danger. So you are handed the verdict by activists, reporters, politicians, and funded scientists, each of whom has money or a career riding on the alarm. Fear built on the invisible and the far away is fear no one gets to test, and an untested fear inflates without limit.

Moore is no blanket denier, and neither is this essay. In each chapter, he acknowledges the real problem, then strips away the myth stacked on top. He wants observation over belief, the thing you check with your senses or an instrument, repeated until it holds. That is the standard to which the ozone scare is held here, and it is the standard that convicts the people who sold it.

The design behind the fear

Carbon dioxide is the perfect villain because you will never see it do a thing. It is invisible, odorless, silent, and untouchable, so nobody gets to stand at the edge of a field and see it commit a crime. Moore’s point is that this is a feature, not an accident. People can dispute a danger you can point at, but a danger nobody can see is likely a psychological operation or even a business.

Every scare in his book has that shape. The polar bear dies on ice you will never set foot on. The reef bleaches beneath water you will never dive into. The extra degree of warmth hides within a global average no thermometer in your yard will ever show you. Distance and invisibility do the heavy lifting, and the storyteller supplies the rest.

The trick works because the human mind treats a vivid story as evidence. Show a starving bear on melting ice, and the image becomes the proof, even when the bear count has climbed for decades. The image lands in the gut before the number reaches the head, and the number is buried in a report almost nobody opens. Fear travels first class, while the data waits at the gate.

Anyone who questions the story pays for it. Moore describes the standard treatment: the doubter is branded a denier, a shill, or a liar on the payroll of big oil, and if he holds a job, the campaign turns to getting him fired. That is not how confident science behaves. A field sure of its evidence answers questions; a field selling a product silences them. The punishment of dissent is itself a tell.

Eleven frauds, one formula

A USA Today headline once warned that Africa’s oldest baobab trees were dying because of climate change. Moore shows they were dying of old age and disease, and that is one scare down out of 11. He turns to the Great Barrier Reef, pronounced dead on schedule for 30 years, and points out that the most crowded, diverse reefs on Earth grow in the warmest water, a strange place for heat to be the killer.

He guts the polar-bear story with a head count that has climbed for nearly 50 years, and the headline that a million species face imminent extinction, which he traces to a modeling exercise, not to a single counted corpse. He takes apart the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, sold as a floating continent of plastic twice the size of Texas, and shows it to be thinly scattered debris, dressed up with photos lifted from the Japanese tsunami.

Nuclear radiation, the invisible terror of a generation, kills fewer people per unit of energy than almost any rival, including coal. Genetically modified food is said to carry something harmful that has no name, no formula, and no microscope to detect it, while the activists who fought vitamin-enriched Golden Rice helped keep poor children blind for want of it. The long war on DDT, sold as mercy, pulled the most effective weapon against malaria and let the disease climb again across the tropics.

He closes with forest fires he blames on stacked dead wood rather than warming, an ocean-acidification scare he calls a fabrication built on the same invisible gas, and a piece of Our Planet footage of walruses tumbling off a cliff, sold as climate death, which he says is better explained by polar bears crowding them over the edge. The formula never changes. Grant the true issue, strip away the myth, and follow the myth to whoever profits from the fear.

What ties the cases together is the method, not the verdict on any single page. Moore hands you a lens, and that lens is worth more than his score on any one chapter.

The hole at the edge of space

Here is a scare Moore left out of the book, one that fits his template better than almost anything in it. Ozone is a form of oxygen, with 3 atoms bound together instead of 2. A thin band of it, 10 to 30 miles up, absorbs most of the sun’s hardest ultraviolet light, the UV that burns skin and seeds cancers. The hole is not an empty void. It is a sharp seasonal thinning of that band over Antarctica, opening each southern spring and filling back in by summer.

Three scientists at the British Antarctic Survey discovered it in 1985. Joe Farman, Brian Gardiner, and Jonathan Shanklin had been monitoring a ground instrument, a Dobson spectrophotometer, at Halley Station for years, and their data showed that October ozone had dropped to about two-thirds of its earlier level. They published their findings in the journal Nature. Satellites then showed the thinning spreading across some 20 million square kilometers, an area larger than Antarctica itself.

Antarctica gets the worst of it for geographic reasons, not guilt. A ring of fast winds called the polar vortex seals off the continent’s air each winter, trapping the cold and the chemistry in a closed bowl until spring. The same hole never opens as deep over the Arctic, where scattered land and sea break up that wall of wind. The pattern is specific, repeatable, and exactly what the chemistry predicts, which is part of why it held up under scrutiny.

The chemistry

The mechanism behind the thinning is measured laboratory chemistry, not a computer guess. It pays to say so plainly before taking the story apart. Chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, are man-made gases once used in refrigerators, air conditioners, and spray cans, sold under DuPont’s brand name Freon. They are so stable that they drift in the air for decades and rise, intact, into the stratosphere.

When Freon arrived in the 1930s, it was hailed as a safety triumph, a nonflammable, nontoxic gas that replaced the poisonous and flammable refrigerants of the day and took a killer out of millions of kitchens. The chemical later cast as a destroyer of the sky was, in its first life, a true advance. The same molecule was hero and villain, depending on which decade was selling it.

Up there, the sun’s ultraviolet light finally breaks them apart, freeing a single chlorine atom. That one atom starts a chain reaction. It strips an oxygen atom from a passing ozone molecule, turning it into ordinary oxygen, and emerges the other side unchanged, ready to do it again thousands of times. One chlorine atom can destroy thousands of ozone molecules before it settles out.

Paul Crutzen worked out the ozone-destroying role of nitrogen gases in 1970, and Mario Molina and Sherwood Rowland showed the chlorine-from-CFCs version in 1974. The three shared the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this work. This is the part a careful skeptic concedes without a fight. You mix these chemicals in a lab, and chlorine destroys ozone, over and over, exactly as described. A story built on a lie falls apart at the chemistry. This one does not.

But Freon is heavier than air

Freon is about 4 times heavier than air, so how could it ever climb 15 miles to the stratosphere? A gas that pools on your garage floor has no business depleting ozone over the South Pole. It sounds like common sense, and many intelligent people have staked their entire case on it.

It is wrong. The lower atmosphere is not a still column where gases settle out by weight. It is a churning engine of wind and convection that stirs everything together far faster than any molecule can sink. If air sorted itself by weight, the ground would be a lake of carbon dioxide and argon, and you would suffocate in your chair. It does not, because the wind never stops. Heavy inert gases like argon and krypton are evenly distributed all the way up, right alongside the light ones.

This is not something you have to take on faith. CFCs have been sampled in the stratosphere thousands of times, by balloon, aircraft, and satellite, and there they are, exactly where the chemistry says they should be, breaking apart under hard ultraviolet and shedding their chlorine. The claim that they react only in a vacuum is the same error in a lab coat. The reaction proceeds in the open stratosphere, and instruments have watched chlorine rise as ozone falls.

The latest version of the objection claims the chlorine comes from the sea and volcanoes, not from Freon. At ground level, that is true, but it is beside the point. Sea salt and volcanic chlorine dissolve in water and rain out long before they reach the stratosphere. CFCs make the trip precisely because they do not dissolve or react on the way up. Count the chlorine measured in the stratosphere, and it matches the CFCs we put there, not the oceans we did not.

None of this makes the panic honest or the treaty clean. It only means that the skeptic who plants his flag on heavier-than-air has picked the one hill the other side takes in an afternoon. Give it up. The true scandal stands in daylight, and it keeps a balance sheet.

What the instruments show

The measurements hold up as well as the chemistry. By 1984, the ozone over Halley had fallen to two-thirds of its mid-century level. Independent teams confirmed the drop, and the thinning tracked the rise of chlorine in the stratosphere. The hole is seasonal because it requires the deep cold of the Antarctic winter, which builds icy clouds that convert stored chlorine into its ozone-killing form when the spring sun returns.

After the world phased out CFCs, the trend reversed. The Antarctic ozone hole has been slowly shrinking in both area and depth since about 2000. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) now expect ozone levels over Antarctica to return to 1980 levels around 2066, and sooner over the rest of the world. That is what a true problem looks like when it meets a true fix. Deny the measured hole, and you throw away the part of the story where the villains stand in plain sight.

The danger they buried

Here is the part the panic managed to bury: Freon is not harmless, and its real danger has nothing to do with the ozone layer. Heat it over a flame or on a red-hot surface, and it breaks down into hydrogen chloride, hydrogen fluoride, and phosgene, the poison gas that choked soldiers in World War I trenches. A refrigeration fire, or a torch swung too close to a charged line, can fill a room with it.

That is the hazard a firefighter or an air-conditioning tech faces, and it is measured, immediate, and local, the opposite of a statistic over Antarctica. It is also the danger that never sold a treaty, because you never build a global movement or a patent monopoly “to ventilate the room” or “keep the torch away.” A risk you see and manage is worthless to a fear merchant. An invisible one at the edge of space is priceless.

That is the tell of the whole racket. The dull, measured danger gets a line on a safety sheet. The remote, unverifiable one gets a treaty, a fortune, and 40 years of headlines. True dangers are ignored; fake ones are promoted. Every scare in this essay rests on that inversion.

The health scare that anchored it

Thinner ozone lets more ultraviolet radiation reach the ground, and more UV means more sunburn, more cataracts, and more skin cancer over a lifetime. That link is well documented and gave the ozone story its human hook, the reason a shopper in Ohio should care about a number measured over Antarctica. The sober version of the figure is modest. One United Nations estimate held that without the CFC ban, global skin-cancer cases would be about 14 percent higher by 2030, a few hundred extra deaths a year in a country the size of Britain.

The science on ultraviolet is substantial. More UV at the surface raises rates of cataracts, stresses some crops and the tiny ocean plants at the base of the food chain, and ages and burns skin. The Montreal Protocol, whatever its patent politics, spared the world some measure of all of that. Granting the benefit costs the skeptic nothing and earns him standing to attack the parts that were oversold.

The public heard of an impending epidemic of cancer and blindness, and of crops withering under a naked sun, a catastrophe on a deadline rather than a slow harm addressed by sunscreen and shade. The distance between the measured risk and the marketed one is the whole game. The harm was partly real. The apocalypse was the sales pitch.

Follow the patents

The rot in the ozone story is not the hole. It is who sold the fear, when, and what they were holding while they sold it. In 1975, when Molina and Rowland’s warning was fresh, DuPont’s chairman dismissed the ozone-depletion theory as “a science fiction tale, a load of rubbish, utter nonsense.” DuPont was the world’s largest CFC producer and fought the science hard, bankrolling an industry front, the tidy “Alliance for Responsible CFC Policy,” to slow any regulation.

Then the calendar turned. The original Freon patents had lapsed decades earlier, so there was no fortune left in the old chemical. The fortune lay in owning whatever the world would be forced to buy next. By the mid-1980s, DuPont held the commanding patent position on the replacement. In 1986, with products in hand, it reversed course, went public, and pushed for a global ban on the chemicals it had defended for a decade, promising that its new line would meet demand.

Read that sequence twice. The largest producer of the banned chemical ridiculed the science while it profited from the old product, then demanded the ban the moment it owned the new one. Its Freon director, Joseph Glass, said the quiet part out loud: with billions of dollars’ worth of CFCs about to be regulated out of existence, the replacement market held, in his phrase, “tremendous market potential.” The substitute, HFC-134a, became the only refrigerant authorized for new car air conditioners, and DuPont held the keys.

The 1985 Vienna Convention set the framework, the 1987 Montreal Protocol set the cuts, and a worldwide market for the patented substitutes opened, cleared of low-cost competition by treaty. The cycle did not stop there. The first replacements, the HCFCs, still ate ozone and were scheduled for phaseout too. The next ones, the HFCs, turned out to be strong greenhouse gases, so the 2016 Kigali Amendment set up their phase-down and, with it, the market for the generation after that. Each fix wrote the ticket for the next regulated shortage, and the same handful of chemical giants sold into every round.

The truth is worse than the hoax story, not softer. A hoax is a lie you disprove and move past. A captured market is a machine that keeps running, turning each new fear into the next patented cure, decade after decade, in daylight, with treaties signed and profits booked. You do not need an invented hole to be furious. You need only watch the money change costume.

The alarm that outran the evidence

The fear stretched well beyond the data, the other half of the true story. At a 1976 chemistry meeting, researchers projected a 13 percent ozone loss by the year 2000 and 80,000 additional skin-cancer cases a year in the United States alone, while DuPont’s men countered that the drop would be only 0.05 percent. The outcome fell between the two, but the round numbers that frightened the public were the high ones.

Both sides ran propaganda. The aerosol industry issued press releases branding the science as mere theory, and the big papers printed them. The activist side countered with catastrophe on a deadline. In 1987, the Reagan administration floated what it called a “Personal Protection Plan,” suggesting hats, sunglasses, and sunscreen in place of chemical controls. Critics did the arithmetic, totaling 8 billion dollars in lotion, and asked how a rancher was supposed to rub it on his cattle or a farmer on his corn.

Even now, the certainty keeps slipping. A 2025 study traced the first faint ozone loss to 1957 in the tropics, driven initially by carbon tetrachloride rather than CFCs. Other recent work links the largest holes of the past few years to the Hunga Tonga volcano, which injected water vapor into the stratosphere in 2022, and to smoke from Australia’s 2019 and 2020 wildfires, which alone destroyed about 1 percent of the ozone over the Southern Hemisphere. The core CFC story stands. The airtight certainty sold to the public was always thicker than the science beneath it.

Where the loud skeptics overreach

The temptation is to swing to the opposite pole, and a crowd online has done exactly that. The financial writer Steve Milloy, for one, has called the hole a flat hoax, argued that CFCs do not thin ozone in the open atmosphere, and cast the Montreal Protocol as a dry run for later climate treaties. The third point is a fair political read. The first two crash headfirst into the chemistry and the satellite record.

Moore’s position on ozone, argued in his talks rather than in this book, is defensible. The scare was oversold, and the natural, seasonal swings were larger than the public was ever told. That is a long way from claiming the hole was painted on. The strongest skeptic concedes the measured facts and puts his whole weight on fear and money, because that is the ground where the sellers are guilty as charged. Deny the hole, and you hand them the easy win, and with it the patent history and the market capture you should have nailed them on.

Comment: Look at what the ozone panic demonized. Chlorine. The same element Moore watched Greenpeace try to ban in 1986, the workhorse of clean water and half the medicine cabinet, recast as a destroyer of the sky. I have spent more than 1,000 hours on one chlorine compound, chlorine dioxide, and have watched the identical move up close: take a cheap, useful chlorine chemistry, wrap it in fear, and clear the field for something patented and profitable. The ozone story is the same play on a planetary stage.

The perfect villain, at full scale

Chlorine was the warm-up. The main event uses a gas more invisible than any refrigerant and a timescale more remote than any pole. Carbon dioxide is about 0.04 percent of the air, colorless and odorless, and the catastrophe pinned to it plays out over centuries no living person will see. Of every villain in Moore’s book, this trace gas wears the costume best.

His charge is that the alarm depends on a trick with the calendar. Show 40 years of readings, and a rising line looks like a crisis. Pull the camera back to the geological record, spanning hundreds of millions of years, and the crisis dissolves into noise. The scare needs the short window. The long view takes it apart.

Who funded the fear

Every scare in this catalog has had a paymaster, and the carbon scare has the richest of them all. In Rockefeller: Controlling the Game, Jacob Nordangård traces how one family’s foundations seeded and bankrolled the environmental movement throughout the 20th century, tying the survival of institutes, university departments, and advocacy groups to a single cause. He counts some 990 climate organizations in the network, each dependent on the alarm for its next check. When the paycheck rides on the emergency, the emergency never ends.

The paper trail starts early. The Rockefeller Foundation’s 1969 annual report already cast industrial man as a threat not to comfort but to life itself, the same note of doom the movement would sound for the next 50 years. The institutions came first; the crisis they were built to fight came second. A machine assembled before the monster arrives is the surest sign of a manufactured campaign.

This is the ozone lesson at the continental scale. There, one company owned both the disease and the cure. Here, a web of foundations, agencies, and treaties owns the fear itself, and every grant, conference, and headline pays someone somewhere in the web. Follow that money, and the unanimity stops looking like proof and starts looking like payroll. A consensus you are forbidden to question is a sales quota, not a finding.

The record in deep time

Moore’s slides do the demolition, and they need no expertise to read. Set carbon dioxide and temperature side by side over 500 million years, and the two lines wander apart as often as they converge. There are long ages of high carbon dioxide during deep cold and low carbon dioxide during warmth, the reverse of what the theory demands. The modern uptick that fills the evening news is a flyspeck at the right edge, lost until you zoom in far enough to throw away the context.

By the long measure, we live in an icehouse, not a furnace. Earth has spent most of its history far warmer than today, with no permanent ice at either pole and life in wild abundance. The temperature taught to us as an unprecedented emergency is, on the geological scale, near the cold end of the whole range.

The big swings have a known driver, and it is not a trace gas. The ice ages keep time with the Milankovitch cycles, the slow wobbles in Earth’s tilt and orbit that change how much sunlight reaches the poles on a beat near 100,000 years. That clock, not carbon dioxide, sets the rhythm of freeze and thaw. It ran long before the first smokestack and will run long after the last.

Carbon dioxide across 540 million years. The dashed line marks today; the air held far more for almost the entire record.

Temperature across the same 540 million years. The dashed line is today; the Earth spent most of the record warmer than now.

How can anyone read the air and the heat of a world that has been dead for hundreds of millions of years? Ice cores, the direct record of ancient air sealed in polar ice, reach only into the recent past. Below that depth, no air survives, so the deep numbers are pieced together from stone. Carbon dioxide is inferred from fossil soils, from the breathing pores on fossil leaves, and from the chemistry of old seashells. Temperature is read from those same shells, in the ratio of heavy to light oxygen atoms they contain, a ratio set by the warmth of the sea that grew them. The further back in time, the wider the uncertainty, which is one more reason to trust the long trend over any single point.

Which one moves first

Drill a 3-kilometer core from the Antarctic ice, and you read 800,000 years of trapped air, bubble by bubble. Across every cycle in that record, temperature turns first, and carbon dioxide follows by centuries. The ocean is the reason. A warming sea gives up its dissolved gas the way a soda goes flat in the sun, and a cooling sea drinks it back down.

The fair rejoinder is that the gas, once released, adds to the warming that freed it, a feedback riding on the orbital push. A careful skeptic grants that much. What the ice never shows, anywhere in 800,000 years, is carbon dioxide grabbing the wheel and driving the climate off a cliff by itself. The runaway the models promise has no rehearsal in the record.

The gas that feeds the world

Strip away the menace, and carbon dioxide is the gas that builds the living world. Every leaf is spun from it. Plants begin to starve below roughly 150 parts per million and grow best between 1,000 and 2,000, which is why greenhouse growers pump it in on purpose. The extra carbon dioxide from 200 years of fuel has already greened the planet: NASA satellites estimate the added leaf cover at an area twice the size of the continental United States, most of it new trees.

The frightening number points the other way. During the last ice age, the air thinned to about 180 parts per million, approaching the level at which plants suffocate, and the geological trend had been sliding toward that floor for ages. On this reading, burning fossil fuel did not poison the air. It reversed a drift toward carbon starvation and topped up the tank that all life draws on.

Call the currency of life a pollutant, and the word stops meaning anything. The oceans hold about 70 times more carbon than the air and trade it back and forth without pause; soils and plants hold more than the entire atmosphere; the crust holds a vast store of it, every ounce once alive. The sliver we have added is a rounding error against those reservoirs, and the fraction plants have seized is why the dry edges of the world are turning green.

Sea level tells the same slow story. It rose as the last ice age ended, then went nearly flat about 8,000 years ago and has barely changed since on the scale that matters. By that same measure, droughts sold as unheard of are ordinary; large stretches of the American West were drier 1,000 years ago than in any modern year.

Where the climate skeptics overreach

Carbon dioxide does absorb and re-radiate heat. That is lab physics, measured more than a century ago, as solid as the chlorine chemistry granted earlier. More of it in the air, with nothing else changing, nudges the system toward warming. A skeptic who says the gas does nothing is as wrong as the man who calls the ozone hole a hoax, and he loses the room the moment a physicist speaks.

Claiming the warming has stopped or that the ice is fine invites a one-line rebuttal, because the last few years have been hot and the long-term thermometer keeps climbing. The strong ground is the ground Moore holds: the deep-time record, the greening earth, the gas that feeds life, and the fortune spent to keep you afraid of it. None of that melts in a hot summer.

Granting all this costs the skeptic nothing. The climate moves; it always has, driven by the sun, the oceans, and the slow geometry of the orbit. The fraud is not the claim that it moves. The fraud is the claim that you are the dial, that the remedy is surrendering your money and your freedom to the people who built the scare, and that the science is settled. Settled science is a contradiction in terms. The phrase is the sound of a salesman closing a door.

The machine behind every invisible scare.

The bug that wired the world

The machine runs on nothing but computer code. The millennium bug lived out of sight, buried in billions of lines of software. In 1997, Newsweek published “The Day the World Shuts Down” and listed everything the bug threatened to take with it: banking, hospitals, air traffic, the power grid, and the military. You took the danger on faith, handed down by the same class of experts, officials, and vendors who stood to gain from the alarm.

In February 1998, the president signed Executive Order 13073 and established the President’s Council on Year 2000 Conversion. He appointed John Koskinen as the Y2K czar overseeing more than 30 federal agencies. The United Nations held conferences in December 1998 and June 1999, established an International Y2K Cooperation Center, and asked each country to name a national coordinator. At the second conference, Deputy Secretary-General Louise Frechette praised the drive to build “an electronic organization” across borders. A chain of command formed around a threat no one saw.

Then the clock struck midnight, and nothing broke. No blackout came, no plane fell, no hospital went dark. The verdict came quickly on national television: the bug had been “met and conquered.”

Follow the money, and the anticlimax makes sense. The United States government spent more than 8.5 billion dollars on the supposed fix, and the country spent about 100 billion. The global bill totaled about 600 billion dollars, more than the cost of any war in history. Business Week credited the scare with forcing companies and governments worldwide to replace their old hardware and software, and the NASDAQ rose 85.6 percent on the buying. The threat evaporated; the wiring stayed.

So did the machinery built to coordinate it. Koskinen oversaw a 50-billion-dollar Information Coordination Center that linked federal agencies, corporations, and American embassies into a single exchange. He boasted to USA Today, “Solving Y2K proved that I can run the world with four people.” A parallel order established the National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC), bringing the FBI, the Secret Service, the Department of Defense, and the intelligence agencies under one command. The United States and Russia formed a joint team to monitor the rollover from Peterson Air Force Base, the seed of a permanent warning center. No one took any of it apart when the sun came up on January 1.

The bug was the excuse; the wiring, the spending, and the centralized coordination were the product. It follows the old logic that a society needs a costly enemy to keep money moving and people in line. An unseen enemy works better than any human one. Y2K was the ozone panic and the carbon con in another costume: paint a danger no one can verify, spend a fortune fighting it, and keep whatever the fight builds.

Comment: Imagine how wealthy we would be and how many problems we could solve if we had none of these parasites sucking our blood.

How to read the next one

Three questions strip most of these stories down to their lies. First, do you get to see or reach the thing yourself, or are you taking someone’s word for it? Second, who profits if you believe it, and what are they selling on the far side of fear? Third, has anyone who doubts it been answered with evidence or with a slur? An invisible danger, a seller with a cure, and a slur where an answer belongs: that is the signature of a manufactured panic, whether or not a true problem lies beneath.

Run the ozone story through those three, and the verdict fits in a sentence. The danger was measured, not imagined; the cure was owned by the same house that sold the disease; and the doubters were called names long after the data had settled. Two marks of a scam and one mark of a fact, tangled together on purpose. That tangle is the product.

The lesson under the scares

The point was never to disbelieve everything out of sight. It is to test each claim against its evidence, because the invisible-and-remote catalog holds both frauds and true problems, and they do not announce which is which. The garbage patch was a photograph lifted from a tsunami. The ozone hole was a measured, Nobel-grade problem that was oversold and then monetized twice over. Same stagecraft, opposite verdicts.

That is why the lazy version of skepticism fails. Swallow every scare, and you are livestock. Reject every scare, and you are just as easy to steer, because when a true danger arrives, you will wave it off with the rest. The machinery is the psyop, not the molecule. The cure is not another reflex. It is your eyes on the data, one claim at a time.

H.L. Mencken pegged the machine a century ago. The aim of practical politics, he wrote, is to keep the public alarmed and clamoring to be led to safety by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. He was half right for our age. The hobgoblins do not have to be imaginary. They only have to be invisible or far away, and owned by someone who turns a profit while you are afraid of them.

A personal note. Patrick Moore is a hero of mine. When my platform was small and I had little to offer him, he was generous enough to sit for an interview. He has spent his career taking the kind of incoming fire that ends most people. He walked away from the movement he helped build the moment it chose fundraising over the truth, and he has paid for that honesty ever since. If this essay sends you anywhere, send yourself to his book and his talks.

Editing, editorial advice, and content credit: Jim Arnold of Liar’s World Substack.

Selected references

● Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom (Patrick Moore, 2021)

● Dr. Patrick Moore on climate change and geological time (video)

● How CFCs reach the stratosphere though heavier than air (Scientific American)

● The ozone hole discovery, British Antarctic Survey

● The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1995 (Crutzen, Molina, Rowland)

● Chlorofluorocarbon: the DuPont patent and phase-out history

● The Skeptics vs. the Ozone Hole (Jeffrey Masters)

● A monopoly like none other: refrigerant patents and the phase-out (Down To Earth)

● Freon thermal decomposition and toxic byproducts (safety data)

● Ozone layer recovery is on track (UNEP, 2023)

● The story behind the discovery of the ozone hole (UKRI)

● The ozone hole’s earliest cause wasn’t CFCs after all (2025 study)

● Study highlights need to keep an eye on the ozone hole (Otago)

● Rockefeller: Controlling the Game (Jacob Nordangard, 2024)

● Carbon dioxide fertilization is greening the Earth (NASA)

● The Petition Project: scientists dissenting from the carbon consensus

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