Janet Raloff in Science News points out the problems with an analogy that I've used myself. Well worth a read for showing what makes addressing climate change so overwhelming: On November 7, ozone and climate scientists met in Washington, D.C., to discuss whether the history of stratospheric ozone protection offered a useful case study about how to catalyze global action on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Their simple answer: No....Even with CFCs, it had been anything but a certainty in the mid 1980s that the public would take action, recalls Mario Molina, one of a trio of physical chemists who would win a Nobel Prize (a decade later) for identifying CFCs’ risk to ozone. But then the Antarctic ozone hole emerged.
It offered the most graphic confirmation imaginable that scientists’ had not overblown concerns about CFCs’ threat to the health of Earth’s ozone layer. Just two years after the 1985 discovery that an ozone hole was seasonally recurring in the stratosphere some 14 to 20 kilometers above Antarctica, nations around the world signed the Montreal Protocol ozone-protection treaty.
...Perhaps the biggest impediment to galvanizing public support for action on climate is the breadth of the contributors, Solomon and others argued at the meeting. With CFCs, only a few manufacturers and sectors of the economy were responsible for the offending pollutants. This meant a relatively small number of players could effect change by tweaking or substituting technologies. By contrast, global warming and its attendant changes stem from pollutant emissions contributed every day through myriad activities by virtually every human alive....
NASA image of the largest ozone hole ever, in 2000
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