Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
tentative green light vis-à-vis the atmosphere, Kellogg's cautionary and
equivocal SCEP report— along with his comments to the press— hardly
provided the plane's backers with a ringing environmental endorsement.
Some scientists worried that Kellogg and Singer had underestimated
the SST's impact. Kellogg and Singer agreed that the SST might cause some
ozone depletion and could potentially lower the temperature of the strato-
sphere, but they concluded that these changes would be insignificant com-
pared to natural atmospheric variations. Harold Johnston, a chemist at the
University of California, Berkeley, disagreed. He predicted a much greater
reduction in ozone due to supersonic flights than SCEP anticipated, if not
because of increased water vapor then because of the chemical reactions
between nitrogen oxides and the extra oxygen atom of ozone molecules. At
a Department of Commerce conference on the SST held in March of 1971
in Boulder, Colorado, Johnston publicly objected to SCEP's conservative
analysis of the nitrogen oxide problem.
39
An expert on ground-level ozone
chemistry, Johnston claimed that trace gases could significantly reduce the
ozone in the stratosphere— enough, he worried, to increase the risk of skin
cancer around the world, as McDonald had feared.
40
Though few scientists
at the Boulder conference made the jump to Johnston's extreme case of up
to a 50 percent reduction in ozone, his concerns raised eyebrows. When he
returned to Berkeley, he began writing up his research in a controversial
paper that would appear in
Science
in August of 1971.
41
The first story about the death of the SST, the story about mainstream
environmentalism and common sense, does a better job of explaining why
Congress killed the SST than does this second story. Johnston's results,
leaked to
New York Times
science writer Walter Sullivan in late May of
1971, appeared only after Congress had voted against the SST. But John-
ston's work nevertheless found an audience.
42
In Europe, the Anglo-French
Concorde was entering the construction phase, and further debates about
supersonic transports and their role in American air travel lurked on
the horizon. Now the earth's atmosphere— the new wrinkle in the SST
story— took center stage. Working with NASA, the Department of Trans-
portation created a four-year atmospheric-monitoring program designed
specifically (and belatedly) to study the atmospheric and climatic effects
of the SST. The Climate Impacts Assessment Program, or CIAP, vindi-
cated both McDonald and Johnston.
43
The assessment found that a fleet
of five hundred Boeing 2707 SSTs would in fact decrease ozone globally
