What are the worst long term effects of depleting ozone, in that case?
Ozone? Think about it. Why was life confined entirely to the ocean until the tiny critters in the sea had produced enough oxygen for there to be an ozone layer high in the atmosphere?
Life on the surface of the earth cannot survive the unfiltered radiation from the sun. We need an ozone layer, preferably without gaps or holes.
My real doubt comes in at carbon dioxide.
1. Carbon dioxide isn't a "nasty" gas of the kind that create smog or poisonous fumes.
2. Carbon dioxide is a great
boon to us because life as we know it wouldn't exist if the atmospheric temperature was at the level it would be without it. At -21C, and no sources of CO2 to reset the greenhouse effect going, earth would be permanently frozen. There wouldn't even be any snow - because that precipitates from water vapour in the atmosphere. Without CO2 there's nothing to set the water evaporation-precipitation cycle going.
Carbon dioxide prevents Earth from becoming an ice world
From my vantage point, and I've followed the issue since early high school, it looks like none of the major groups on either side of the fence have made very accurate predictions with their data. Which makes it difficult to trust their future predictions.
That's where you go wrong. Svante Arrhenius worked out the likely global temperature effects of a doubling of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. It took him aaages, he did the whole thing in pen and ink after all, but the calculations he demonstrated in 1896 have never been shown to be
wrong, he'd just left out some factors (which he didn't have any way of measuring anyway. We're still having trouble with calculating the pluses and minuses in the effects of clouds.) Of course, he was a Scandinavian who found cold conditions unpleasant. He thought the idea that increased burning of fossils would warm the globe was A Good Thing.
I don't know what "predictions" you're saying are wrong on the part of scientists. They've been pretty spot on in projections of temperature and sea level rise. Whenever I've seen reports that "they were wrong" it's been because the accuser has failed to use the right emissions scenarios to compare to the atmospheric or ocean temperature rise
and, adding insult to injury, they've made the comparison on a too short and/or cherry-picked time basis. Has to be a minimum of 30 years if we want to talk climate - I prefer 50 to 100 years myself. Unfortunately, the world of science doesn't dance to my tune.
They've been woefully wrong on the expected rate of loss of sea ice, glaciers and ice sheets as well as in rates of increase of extreme weather events. The observations of these things are running several
decades ahead of the projections made in the earlier IPCC reports.
And we should never, ever forget global warming's big bully brother. This one's always ready to remind us how much worse things can get, ocean acidification.