Resumen de Global Warming: Lessons from Ozone Depletion
My teaching and textbook1have always covered many physicsrelated social issues, including stratospheric ozone depletion and global warming. The ozone saga is an inspiring goodnews story thats instructive for solving the similar but bigger problem of global warming. Thus, as soon as students in my physics literacy course at the University of Arkansas have developed a conceptual understanding of energy and of electromagnetism, including the electromagnetic spectrum, I devote a lecture and a textbook section to ozone depletion and another lecture and section to global warming. Humankind came together in 1986 and quickly solved, to the extent that humans can solve it, ozone depletion. We could do the same with global warming, but we havent and as yet theres no sign that we will. The parallel between the ozone and global warming cases, and the difference in outcomes, are striking and instructive.
