Help please, need to find a Rush Limbaugh lie.

RUSH FICTION:

"Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines spewed forth more than a thousand times the amount of
ozone-depleting chemicals in one eruption than all the fluorocarbons manufactured by
wicked, diabolical, and insensitive corporations in history. . . . Conclusion: mankind
can't possibly equal the output of even one eruption from Pinatubo, much less billion
years' worth, so how can we destroy ozone?" 4/

SCIENTIFIC FACT:

Limbaugh's numbers are completely off-base. Volcanoes emit two sorts of ozone-depleting
compounds. One is hydrochloric acid, but the amount of this chemical in the
stratosphere, measured before and after Pinatubo's eruption in 1991, was found to be
largely unchanged. 5/

The other ozone-depleting chemical emitted by Pinatubo, sulfur dioxide, is converted in
the stratosphere into tiny particles which, acting in combination with man-made
chlorofluorocarbons (CFC's), temporarily increased the rate of ozone depletion by several
percentage points during 1992 and 1993. 6/ Nevertheless, nearly all the particles
resulting from the Mt. Pinatubo eruption have already washed out of the atmosphere,
unlike CFC's, which remain in the stratosphere for as long as a century. 7/

Cumulatively speaking, Pinatubo's destructive effect on the ozone layer has been about
fifty times less than that of CFC's, rather than a thousand times greater, as Limbaugh
claims. Thus, his estimate is off by a factor of fifty thousand.

~

RUSH FICTION:

"It reminds me of the researchers who recently ventured into the forests of California.
Do you know what they found? No, not Algore. They found spotted owls. It seems the
place is teeming with spotted owls - even though they're supposed to be an endangered
species." 39/

SCIENTIFIC FACT:

Fewer than two thousand pairs of the Northern spotted owl are thought to survive in
California forests -- a number that could hardly be described as "teeming". 40/ Even
more importantly, at a meeting of experts called by the U.S. government in December 1993
at Fort Collins, Colorado, virtually every biologist who presented data concluded that
the total numbers of the owl are still in decline. Moreover, the population loss rate
appears to be accelerating. 41/

On the whole, Limbaugh dealt with this issue more honestly in his first book, The Way
Things Ought to Be, when he asserted, "If the owl can't adapt to the superiority of
humans, screw it. . . ." 42/