The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : Flouting the Ozone Doomsayers, One Scientist Is Flying Close to the Sun

Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics feels like a very small fish swimming up a very swift stream. She is one of the world’s leading experts on the physics of the sun, and she’s now laying her impeccable scientific credentials on the line by taking a highly unpopular stand on a widely publicized question. The issue involves the ozone layer in the Earth’s stratosphere, which protects life on this planet from the sun’s cancer-causing ultraviolet radiation. Research has shown that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)--notably the Freon that is used to cool our buildings and refrigerate our food--destroys ozone.

Concern over the issue has been so intense that a 1987 treaty, the Montreal Protocol, will phase out the use of CFCs over the next few years--at a cost expected to run into the billions. Environmental leaders and many scientists have hailed the ban as proof that policy makers can be forced to make the right decisions, if the threat is great enough.

But debate over the need for the ban continues to rage: The most extreme opponents see the ozone threat as a myth generated by big government and greedy scientists, while others fervently insist destruction of ozone will doom life on this planet. Passions are intense on both sides.

So why would a scientist like Baliunas inject herself into the fray and take a position of vehement opposition to the ban, even to the point of telling the Arizona Legislature last month that its residents will be in no physical danger if the state refuses to abide by the ban?

She believes the ban resulted from blatant corruption of science, and that troubles her far more than the perceived threat of ozone depletion.

“I’ve been told by some people that what I am doing is evil,” she said, “because it’s a danger to humanity, yet when I look at the data I’m hard pressed to see exactly what the danger is.”

Her greatest concern, she said, is “working in a system that’s corrupt, that won’t look at all the facts.”

Baliunas concedes that synthetic chemicals are depleting the ozone, as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration claimed last December it had proved. But she insists that the impact is minor compared to natural fluctuations in the ozone layer.

And there is plenty of time to collect and weigh the evidence before ozone depletion becomes a public health hazard, if indeed it ever does.

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There is not enough space here--nor is there enough evidence anywhere--to resolve this debate. But Baliunas’ searing indictment of her fellow scientists should make anyone sit up and take note.

“I’ve been told by scientists that it doesn’t matter what the facts say because we are getting policy makers to do the right thing,” she said. That infuriates her, enough to take what she characterizes as a “big professional risk” that could result in ostracism from the scientific establishment.

Baliunas’ main criticisms:

* There is no significant effort to measure the level of ultraviolet radiation reaching the ground, and the few scattered attempts to do so have shown mysteriously that the radiation has decreased, not increased, when global levels of ozone have been depleted. “You would like to know exactly the level of ultraviolet coming in,” she says, and it is easy to measure it. “There’s no reason to guess. Just measure it.”

* The ozone layer is affected by many natural events, including volcanoes and seasonal weather patterns, that dwarf the effect of synthetic chemicals. “There’s a hundredfold difference in just seasonal swings compared to what the man-made depletion is.” The increased risk from ultraviolet radiation caused by synthetic chemicals over the next decade would be about the same for someone in Southern California as moving 20 miles closer to the Equator, she said.

* The only place where synthetic chemicals seem to be having a real effect is over Antarctica, and then only during October. “It’s very hard to find any major catastrophe pending there. Not many people live there,” she said. Even NASA’s research suggests that the problem is isolated over the South Pole. Extremely cold temperatures seem to be critical, which is why significant ozone depletion from manufactured chemicals has not been found anywhere else, even over the Arctic, NASA scientists concede.

Baliunas said the debate over ozone depletion is being driven by the “uncertainty principle.” The principle holds that we must not allow the use of any chemicals or human processes “unless we are certain it causes no harm.”

And such a principle is an offense to her professional ethics: “It happens to be an anti-scientific statement because in science you can never absolutely prove something. You can only get less and less uncertain.”

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There are many reputable scientists in the world who strongly disagree with Baliunas, and time may prove her wrong. But time, she says, is something we had plenty of. Instead of striving for a better understanding of the problem, she argues, we were stampeded into adopting a Draconian measure without knowing the real impact on public health.

Scientists who agree with her, she says, are reluctant to speak out because they don’t want to discourage policy makers from making tough decisions when the evidence says they should. But the evidence was unclear here, she contends. The uncertainty principle was in full bloom.

We may have erred on the safe side, but Baliunas insists it was bad science. And in her view that trade-off is not worthwhile.

Lee Dye, a former science writer for The Times, has covered a broad range of science subjects for more than two decades. He can be reached via e-mail at 72040.3515@compuserve.com.