The Precautionary Principle and the Environment: A\nCase Study of an Immediate Global Response to the Molina and Rowland\nWarning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In\n1974, Mario J. Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland warned that chlorofluorocarbons\n(CFCs) could destroy the stratospheric ozone layer, which protects\nEarth against the harmful effects of ultraviolet radiation [Molina and Rowland Nature 1974, 249, 810]. In 1975, Ramanathan warned that CFCs are powerful greenhouse gases\n(GHGs) and would rival carbon dioxide (CO<sub>2</sub>) in causing\nclimate change if left unabated [Ramanathan Science 1975, 190, 50]. The 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances\nthat Deplete the Ozone Layer (Protocol), arguably the most successful\nglobal environmental treaty in history, was enacted in response to\nthese warnings. This Protocol has phased out almost 99% of the production\nand consumption of ozone depleting substances (ODSs). Other papers\nhave explored the “world avoided” by actions under the\nProtocol [Prather et al. Nature 1996, 381, 551; Newman et al. Atmos. Chem. Phys. 2009, 9, 2113; Morgenstern et al. Geophys. Res. Lett. 2008, 35, 1]. They concluded\nthat the ozone layer would have been highly depleted across the globe\nby the mid-21st century without the Protocol and that the Protocol\ncontributed significantly to reduce climate change. This paper explores\nwhat could have been achieved if the world had acted against the continued\nuse of ODSs, which were both ozone-depleting and greenhouse gases,\nimmediately after Molina and Rowland warned of stratospheric ozone\ndepletion and Ramanathan warned of climate forcing using chemicals\nand technology that were already globally available in the mid-1970s.\nWe show that such “precautionary principle” actions\nwould have reduced global ozone layer depletion, reduced the extent\nof the ozone hole, brought forward the dates for ozone layer recovery,\nand helped minimize climate change.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".