So when I was 11, I wrote a paper called “Ozone: The Good, The Bad, the Truth.”  I was very proud of this paper, and  I considered myself a young muckracker.  That was in 1992.   So then the ozone crisis was, really, more or less solved, and now we have this global warming problem, which is just a ton more complicated, but actually a whole lot more serious.  I think this article is right though: the problem is there’s no skin cancer.  With ozone, you had this clear problem that WOULD HAPPEN SOON.  With global warming, it’s a gradual process that’s much harder to pin down.  All of this makes me nervous.

Anyway, this always strikes me as a good precedent for negotiating a greenhouse-gas treaty—here we had scientists telling us that the world was in real danger if we continued emitting certain substances, so the world’s governments got together and acted swiftly. The aerosol and halocarbon industries bitched and moaned, sure—even sending out paid flacks to cast doubt on the science (the CEO of Dupont, the inventor and largest manufacturer of CFCs at the time, scoffed at the ozone discoveries as “a load of rubbish”). But once the treaty passed, companies got to work finding substitutes for CFCs, and did so in remarkably short order. The economy didn’t skip a beat. So if it worked with CFCs, why can’t it work with carbon-dioxide and manmade global warming?

Alas, it’s not a perfect analogy. I asked Riley Dunlap, an environmental sociologist at Oklahoma State University, about the parallels, and he added some smart caveats. The first is that DuPont, for all its early stubbornness, actually led the way in phasing out CFCs when pressed by environmentalists and Congress. The company had been researching alternatives over the past decade as a way of preparing for the expiration of its patents, and had easy substitutes to CFCs close at hand. In the current situation, it will likely prove trickier to shift away from fossil fuels—and oil and coal companies are a lot more resistant to regulation than Dupont ever was in the 1980s. Plus, of course, phasing out CFCs didn’t force anyone to make any lifestyle changes, the way curbing carbon-dioxide emissions might.

The other point, Dunlap notes, is that ozone depletion was a fairly easy issue for scientists and environmentalists to convey in a concrete way to the public. “Although we technically couldn’t see the hole, it was easy to portray with computer mapping. And then there was the looming threat of skin cancer,” Dunlap says. “So you could easily pinpoint the problem and highlight the dramatic effects.” Global warming’s not quite as simple or dramatic as “hole in sky = horrible sunburn.” Manmade climate change is a gradual process that will unfold over many years; it’s hard to tie this or that hurricane or drought explicitly to rises in CO2 levels. Climate scientists talk in terms of probabilities and risks and percentages—they’re correct to do so, but it’s not nearly as eye-catching. So while the ozone layer tale is heartening, there’s no question that climate change is a much bigger—and more daunting—challenge.