Liberal Forum

Years ago while working on a defense system I had a front-row seat to witness a somewhat similar example of global mass hysteria. I can't get into any detail except to say this particular system relied on a facet of the ozone layer. One of the questions we couldn't answer was whether the ozone layer was continuous throughout the globe (or at least at potential geopolitical hot spots around the globe). It might surprise many the thickness of the ozone layer averages about 6 to 10 feet or thereabouts. A very thin layer of the atmosphere to say the least. So it wouldn't have surprised us to find patches around the Earth where there was no ozone whatsoever. But were these large areas over adversarial nations? Did the ozone have lots of little holes like polka-dots? We just didn't know and before we sunk a bunch of taxpayer money into the project we needed answers. Of course we didn't want to tip our hand we were interested. So the Defense Dept funneled some money into the NASA budget and hired them to take some scientific measurements (images) of the ozone. We came up with a cover story it was to study astronomical imaging interests and even had some advertising of the results included. When the images were made public scads of environmental whackos went nuts claiming, "the sky is falling! The world is coming to an end if we don't fix this! This must be man-made and our fault!"

Now there could have been a hole in the ozone since before the dinosaurs. We now know that it too follows a cyclic pattern related to solar flares. Yet all manner of global hysteria persisted for quite some time until the environmental wachos got distracted by "Global Warming"... or is it "Climate Change" now?