Cannabis harm worse than tobacco.

The impact of cannabis is worsened by how joints are smoked.

A single cannabis joint could damage the lungs as much as smoking up to five tobacco cigarettes one after another, scientists in New Zealand have said.

The research, published in the journal Thorax, found cannabis damaged the large airways in the lungs causing symptoms such as coughing and wheezing.

It also damaged the ability of the lungs to get oxygen to, and remove waste products from tissues.

Experts say the study confirms that the drug represents a serious health risk.


This research confirms that cannabis poses a serious health risk to the lungs, and smoking a joint can be more harmful to the lungs than smoking a cigarette
Dr Keith Prowse
British Lung Foundation

In the study researchers from the Medical Research Institute of New Zealand, Wakefield Hospital and the Wellington School of Medicine and Health Sciences, studied 339 volunteers.

They took CT scans of their lungs and tested their lung function through breathing tests to assess their lung damage.

Participants were divided into four groups - cannabis smokers, combined cannabis and tobacco smokers, tobacco smokers, and non-smokers, and gave them a questionnaire on their smoking habits.

Cannabis smokers were included if they had smoked at least one joint per day for at least five years, while tobacco smokers had to have smoked 20 cigarettes per day for one year.


Smoking a joint
One joint could cause as much damage as up to five cigarettes

Cannabis smokers reported symptoms such as wheezing, coughing, chest tightness and excessive phlegm production.

The drug also reduced the numbers of small, fine airways that transport oxygen and waste products to and from blood vessels in the lungs.

And it damaged the function of the large airways of the lungs, obstructing air flow and forcing the lungs to work harder, so contributing to symptoms such as coughing, and the development of bronchitis.

The extent of this large airway damage was directly related to the number of joints smoked - the more joints smoked, the more damage was seen.

However, in this study, people who smoked only cannabis were not found to suffer from emphysema, a serious and crippling lung disease which was previously thought to be linked to the drug.

Impact

The authors said: "The most important finding was that one joint of cannabis was similar to 2.5 to five tobacco cigarettes in terms of causing airflow obstruction.

They said the impact of cannabis was likely to be due to the way in which cannabis joints are smoked - joints do not usually have filters, and they reach higher temperatures with users inhaling more deeply and holding their breath for longer than cigarette smokers.

The British Lung Foundation welcomed the research, and Dr Keith Prowse, chairman of the foundation said: "This research confirms that cannabis poses a serious health risk to the lungs, and smoking a joint can be more harmful to the lungs than smoking a cigarette.

"It's important to remember, though, that tobacco continues to be more harmful overall because it is typically smoked in much higher quantities than cannabis."

The warnings come after recent research suggested cannabis smokers were 40% more likely than non-users to suffer psychotic illnesses such as schizophrenia.

Huge Chinese piracy ring tackled

Windows Vista in shop, AP

The pirates pumped out fake versions of Windows Vista
Pirated software worth $500m (£250m) has been seized as the FBI shuts down a world-spanning piracy outfit.

Before the raids the Chinese counterfeiting syndicate was thought to have sold and distributed software worth more than $2bn.

The FBI and China's Public Security Bureau arrested 25 people during the two-week operation against the pirates.

Despite recent crackdowns, industry figures suggest that 82% of the software used in China is counterfeit.

Piracy probe

The FBI said it had been building up a case against the piracy syndicate for years before staging the raids on the software production plants in China's Guangdong province.

During the raids, dubbed Operation Summer Solstice, the FBI seized more than 290,000 CDs with a claimed market value of $500m.

The gang was known to be producing pirated versions of 13 of Microsoft's most popular programs including Windows Vista, XP and Server as well as Office 2003 and 2007.

The syndicate sold versions of these programs in eight languages including Croatian and Dutch.

In a statement Microsoft said vital information that helped to track down the pirates came from its Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) scheme.

WGA forces users of some versions of Windows to validate their copy of the operating system with Microsoft when updating their software.

Microsoft said information gathered by WGA from more than 1,000 fake copies produced by the counterfeiters and sold around the world helped law enforcement agencies home in on the pirates. Fake software produced by the group was found in 27 countries.

"Countries around the world are expected to experience a significant decrease in the volume of counterfeit software as a direct result of this action," said Microsoft in its statement.

Kilimanjaro's ice set to linger

By Jonathan Amos Science reporter, BBC News, Vienna

Kilimanjaro: Ice fields at the equator are a huge tourist draw

A fresh assessment suggests the famous ice fields on Africa's tallest mountain will be around for decades yet.

Recent concerns that climate warming would rob Mount Kilimanjaro of all its glaciers within 20 years are overly pessimistic, say Austrian scientists.

Their weather station data and modelling work indicate the tropical ice should last well beyond 2040.

Precipitation and not temperature is the key to the white peak's future, the University of Innsbruck-led team says.

"About five years ago Kilimanjaro was being used as an icon for global warming. We know now that this was far too simplistic a view," said Thomas Moelg.

"We have done different kinds of modelling and we expect the plateau glaciers to be gone roughly within 30 or 40 years from now, but we have a certain expectation that the slope glaciers may last longer," added colleague Georg Kaser.

If one wants to be more precise, I would call it the 'evaporating glaciers of Kilimanjaro' Dr Thomas Moelg, University of Innsbruck

The group's assessment was presented here at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly meeting.

It acts as a counterpoint to the most doom-laden projections for the 5,895m-high (19,340ft) peak, which draws thousands of tourists intrigued by the idea of seeing ice just three degrees south of the equator.

Hanging on

The research team has been using three automated instrument stations on the top of the mountain to collect continuous data on temperature, pressure, solar radiation, humidity and wind.

The recording effort was in position late last year to witness heavy snowfall, which will have led to a slight increase in Kilimanjaro's overall ice volume.

Weather station (dot inside circle) data provides new insight

This glacier growth is only temporary, however. The mountain's ice is dependent on the pulses of moist air that sweep across from the Indian Ocean.

Since the late 1800s, these have become less frequent, and the regular snows that would maintain the ice fields are now a rare occurrence in what has become a much drier climate in East Africa.

Today, the total ice extent - on the slopes and on the plateau - is about 2.5 sq km, down from more than 12 sq km in the early 1900s.

Some scientists have drawn a fairly straight-line curve and forecast a rapid final retreat to a totally bare mountain.

But the Innsbruck team is more optimistic about the medium term having now put real field measurements into a comprehensive modelling programme.

"Glacier recession has been a feature on Kilimanjaro for more than 100 years, but this is the first time we really have a precise understanding of the physical processes that control the glacier-climate interaction on Africa's highest mountain," said Dr Moelg.

'No reservoir'

This work emphasises the significance of the lack of precipitation (250mm per year on the summit) versus temperature (a mean of -7C).

It indicates that glacier mass loss would be about four times higher if precipitation decreased by 20% than if air temperature on the mountain rose by 1C.

Furthermore, it suggests that two-thirds of the ice that is lost goes straight into the atmosphere through sublimation (the direct conversion of snow and ice to water vapour).

"In recent years many people have talked about 'the melting glaciers of Kilimanjaro'. If one wants to be more precise, I would call it the 'evaporating glaciers of Kilimanjaro'," said Dr Moelg.

This confirms the view that the African peak does not play an important role as a reservoir for water, unlike in the Andes and the Himalayas where some lowland cities and agricultural systems are dependent on summer melt high in the mountains.

"This is not a factor at all at Kilimanjaro and it never has been," said Professor Kaser.

"If you brought all the remaining ice down to the Amboseli National Park and melted it, the water would only cover the park to a depth of one or one-and-a-half millimetres. There is nothing in terms of water up there."

The Innsbruck research was conducted in collaboration with the University of Otago, New Zealand, and the University of Massachusetts, US.

The team stresses that the drying of the East African climate around Kilimanjaro may itself be a regional impact of global climate change.

Migrating birds suffer huge loss

By Rebecca Morelle BBC News science reporter

The birds that winter in Africa are most affected

Migratory birds have suffered a dramatic decline in numbers, according to a study.

Species that migrate thousands of miles from Africa to the UK have been the worst hit over the last 30 years.

The researchers say the cause of the decline remains a "mystery", but could be linked to climate change, habitat destruction or pesticide use.

Writing in the journal Biological Conservation, they warn the losses may indicate wider environmental damage.

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and BirdLife International study analysed population trends of European breeding birds, including non-migratory birds and those that migrate both short and long distances.

These birds have been slipping away from under our noses for 30 years, and we've never has really noticed it before Dr Paul Donald, RSPB

The data spanned three decades, from 1970 to 2000.

"We found that long distant migrants - the ones that go right across the Sahara, like the swallows, flycatchers and warblers - have shown a fairly consistent pattern of decline," said Dr Paul Donald, an author on the paper from the RSPB.

Those that winter in Africa, he said, seem to be the most affected.

The study also compared the long-distant migratory birds with closely related non-migratory birds, but again found in almost every case that the migratory birds faired worse.

The roller has suffered dramatic losses

Fifty-four percent of the 121 long-distant migratory birds studied suffered plummeting numbers or had even become extinct since 1970.

The roll-call of declining species is long.

"Some fairly iconic species have declined enormously in Europe. There is a very beautiful blue and purple bird called the roller - the population of that bird is crashing all over Eastern Europe," Dr Donald told the BBC News website.

"In the UK, other species that have declined enormously are spotted flycatchers, pied flycatchers, wheatears, wood warblers and tree pipits."

Changing climate

The exact reason for the birds' decline, according to the authors, is a "mystery". But several theories to explain the losses have been put forward, and will now be investigated.

One explanation is tied to the changing conditions in Africa, where the birds winter.

"We know that agriculture has spread; we know there has been a long-term drought in the Sahel; and we know huge amounts of pesticides are used to control locust outbreaks," said Dr Donald.

The wryneck no longer breeds in the UK

The swelling size of the Sahara may also be hampering the birds. Migrating birds face longer and longer non-stop flights across the desert.

Climate change has been highlighted as a potential culprit. Warmer springs in Europe are causing some insects to hatch earlier in the year, which means by the time the migratory birds arrive to breed and raise their young they may have missed their much-needed food-source.

"Migrants make up a high proportion of our species of birds, so this is a big conservation issue," said Dr Donald.

"But if you think that these are birds that cover vast areas of the Earth's land-surface - this consistent pattern of decline is indicative that there are some pretty severe environmental changes going on somewhere which might also have an impact on humans."

The authors conclude that urgent action is needed to uncover the cause of the decline.

"There is something about being a migrant that counts against them," said Dr Donald.

"These birds have been slipping away from under our noses for 30 years, and we've never has really noticed it before."

Peru 'must protect Amazon tribes'

By Dan Collyns BBC News, Lima

Illegal logging is harming isolated Amazonian tribespeople

Peru must act swiftly to protect isolated Amazonian tribes from illegal loggers, Latin America's top human rights body has ruled.

Indigenous leaders say the tribes have already suffered untold deaths from diseases contracted from outsiders.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights judged the risk to these isolated communities so great that it bypassed all the usual procedures.

Peru has been given two weeks to take steps to protect the isolated tribes.

If it fails to do so it could ultimately be subject to economic sanctions.

Profitable business

The pan-American human rights body says that although Peru has created reserves for the indigenous communities who live in voluntary isolation, it does nothing to protect them from gangs of illegal loggers who are chopping down the mahogany-rich forests in which they live.

Indigenous leaders say several loggers have been killed in confrontations with the tribes in the last few years.

But they fear many more of the jungle dwellers have died through enslavement, violence or from contracting illnesses from which they have no immunity.

The steady advance of logging has forced the isolated groups, among them the Mashco-Piro and Yora tribes, deeper into Peru's jungle frontier with Brazil and Bolivia.

The hugely profitable but illicit business sees most of the tropical hardwoods exported to the United States.

This has forced the Peruvian state to take notice.

The Democrat-controlled US Congress has said it cannot ratify a free trade agreement with Peru until makes certain changes, among them adopting and enforcing laws on logging mahogany.

Earlier this week, the Peruvian President Alan Garcia provoked criticism from environmentalists when he said the quantity of mahogany which left the country, legally or not, was insignificant.

To many human rights workers the president's statement confirmed their suspicion that there is little political will to tackle the illegal trade and the isolated people's reserves might not be worth the paper they are written on.

Dinosaur den diggers discovered

Impression: The adult would have been about 2m in length

The fossil remains of small dinosaurs that burrowed into the ground have been found by scientists in Montana, US.

The 95-million-year-old bones are from an adult and two juveniles and were unearthed in a chamber at the end of a 2.1m-long sediment-filled tunnel.

The researchers say the discovery is the first definitive evidence that some dinosaurs dug dens and cared for their young in such structures.

Details are reported in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

"Burrowing also represents a mechanism by which small dinosaurs may have exploited the extreme environments of polar latitudes, deserts and high mountain areas," Dr David Varricchio and colleagues tell the publication.

The team has been commended for its diligence

The Montana dinosaurs have not been seen by palaeontologists before and have been given the scientific name Oryctodromeus cubicularis, meaning "digging runner of the lair".

The team says the species' snout, shoulder girdle and pelvis have features one would expect to see in an animal that dug into the ground.

Judging from the preserved vertebrae, the adult would have been about 2.1m (6.8ft) from nose to tail, with the major part of that (about 1.2m; 3.9ft) being the tail itself. The estimated width of the animal fits neatly with the size of the tube it was digging (about 30cm;1ft in diameter).

What is left of the tunnel structure is sloping and has two sharp turns before ending in a chamber. The team says its architecture is similar to the dens of modern burrowers, such as the striped hyena, puffin and some rodents.

The dinosaur remains were covered in the coarse-grained sediment from an ancient flood; but Dr Varricchio, of Montana State University, said this did not explain the animals' deaths.

"The bones are disarticulated; they are not in life position," he told BBC News.

The scientists found the dinosaur fossils inside a den

"It's not like they were sitting in the burrow and a flooding event filled the chamber with sediment and they were entombed. They must have died, undergone decay and then the burrow was filled."

Commenting on the discovery, Professor Kevin Padian from the Museum of Palaeontology, University of California-Berkeley, said the Montana team should be commended for the detailed way in which it went about its work.

Many would have missed the significance of the tunnel, he said

"This discovery is first and foremost a testament to the value of keeping one's eyes open in the field and noticing everything, and it took a special group of scientists to realise the meaning of the discovery that they made," he added.

Professor Padian bemoaned the impact of commercial fossil hunting which, he claimed, sought to get specimens out of the ground as fast as possible, often destroying valuable scientific information in the process.

Montana is the scene of many great dinosaur discoveries

Whale fossil is found in vineyard

By Christian Fraser BBC News, Rome

Palaeontologists say the skeleton appears to be complete

The biggest whale fossil ever discovered in Italy has been found in one of the country's finest vineyards.

The five-million-year-old skeleton, 33ft (10m) in length, was dug up in the northern grape-growing area of Tuscany.

The vineyards of Castello Banfi, where the bones were uncovered, produce the famed Brunello de Montalcino wine, one of Italy's most prized.

The whale remains were discovered by a fossil hunter who was given special permission to poke around the vines.

Rich soil

The skeleton appears to be complete and, for the last month, palaeontologists from the University of Florence have been carefully digging around the terraces to extract it in one piece.

Millions of years ago, Tuscany was under water and Castello Banfi was the sea bed.

The vineyard owner, Cristina Mariani, is delighted.

"It reminds us "that this rich soil is composed of nutrients and minerals deposited millions of years ago," she says.

"It's that special earth that gives complexity to our wines."

So, if you are lucky enough to ever taste a Brunello, just savour it for that extra moment, and remember that beneath the old vines that produced it - there was an even bigger old whale.

Renewing a Call to Act Against Climate Change

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. — Some are born earnest, some achieve earnestness, and some have earnestness thrust upon them. Bill McKibben qualifies for inclusion in at least two of these wedges of humanity.

In 1989, at the age of 28, he achieved earnestness of a dour, frowning sort as one of the first laymen to warn of global warming in his book “The End of Nature.” In the ensuing 18 years, he said recently while cross-country skiing in the woods near his home, he felt caught in a bad dream, forever warning heedless people of a monster in their midst.

Now, when Mr. McKibben is 46, his role as the philosopher-impresario of the program of climate-change rallies called Step It Up, has thrust new earnestness upon him. This time with a smile.

Mr. McKibben’s title — scholar in residence at Middlebury College — seems far too passive to encompass his current frenetic pace. His online call for locally inspired, locally run demonstrations on April 14 has generated plans for a wave of small protests under the Step It Up banner — 870 and counting, in 49 states (not South Dakota) — to walk, jog, march, ski, swim, talk, sing, pray and party around the idea of cutting national emissions of heat-trapping gases 80 percent by 2050.

Skiers in Wyoming plan to descend a shrinking glacier. New Yorkers plan to form an unbroken human line (dress code: blue shirts) along what might be the new southern shoreline of Manhattan. A group of Dominican sisters and a Wisconsin environmental group are organizing a conference on Sisinawa Mound overlooking the Mississippi River.

“It’s a source of eternal pleasure for me to turn on my computer every morning and see what people have come up with the night before,” Mr. McKibben said. “Like: We’re going to scuba dive with a banner off the endangered coral reefs.” Or “I’m going to take my bar mitzvah and make it into a Step It Up rally.”

But Mr. McKibben also noted in a column on the environmental Web site Grist.org that popular momentum had lagged. “We don’t have a movement,” he wrote. “The largest rally yet held in the U.S. about global warming drew a thousand people. If we’re going to make the kind of change we need in the short time left us, we need something that looks like the civil rights movement, and we need it now. Changing light bulbs just isn’t enough.”

The rallies, organized online by a half-dozen Middlebury graduates (well, one is still finishing his thesis) hunched over laptops in an otherwise bare conference room in Burlington, could filter a kind of passion and fashion reminiscent of the 1960s through a YouTube lens.

All the scattered “actions,” as Mr. McKibben and Company are calling them, are to be photographed, with the results put up on the Web on the evening of April 14.

If one takes the social and political movements of the 20th century as a template, of course, the climate-change movement has been doing things completely out of order. Instead of the old sequence (call to arms, demonstrations, politicians take note, legislation is passed, businesses and communities come around, society internalizes the need for change), the big demonstrations are coming late in the game, long after the call to arms.

There will be other demonstrations. On Tuesday, environmental groups are busing people to Washington to buttonhole legislators on keeping oil and gas drilling out of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and on cutting emissions. On Friday, the Interfaith Walk for Climate Rescue will leave Northampton, Mass. Then, on April 9, Laurie David, a producer of the Academy Award-winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” and the singer Sheryl Crow will begin a 12-city college tour.

Why is all this happening now?

“I think it’s been too big for people to get their heads around,” Mr. McKibben said. “Those who wanted to do something did things at home — your car, your light bulb. Washington was blocked off for work for a long time. People worked really hard at local levels.”

He takes it as a given that the Bush administration’s strategy, working with Asian nations, particularly China, on a voluntary basis on alternative cleaner energy alternatives and setting goals for reducing the amount of heat-trapping gases emitted per unit of gross domestic product is not going to work.

Instead, Mr. McKibben said, “only with national and then international commitments are we going to get the scale of things we need done in the small window of time the scientists say we’re given.”

Van Jones, director the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, Calif., is one of relatively few black community organizers to find common cause with those calling for drastic cuts in emissions from the country’s tailpipes and smokestacks. Such changes could make poor peoples’ electrical bills go up. But Mr. Jones says climate change will hit the poor first and harder than any increase in their electricity.

“Two thousand seven is the year that global warming will become a marching issue; 2008 is the year it will become a voting issue,” Mr. Jones said. “McKibben is one of the main drivers in moving this thing from the cafes and blogs into the streets.”

Mr. McKibben’s proselytizing over the past two decades has not given him the kind of profile enjoyed by Al Gore, the movement’s American Idol. As a journalist and the son of one (his father worked for The Boston Globe), Mr. McKibben is more comfortable as a watcher than a climate preacher and more at home putting on his boots in his mud room than standing behind a lectern.

Mr. McKibben drives a mud-splattered 2003 Honda Civic hybrid to and from the home he and his wife, the writer Sue Halpern, built in Ripton on land once owned by the poet Robert Frost. They moved there and helped design the house — which won an award from a state conservation group for energy efficiency — because they wanted to send their only child, Sophie, 13, to a better school than the one she was headed for in upstate New York and because of a position at Middlebury College.

Mr. McKibben’s 10 books and frequent articles in places like The New York Review of Books have earned him the admiration of Steven Hayward, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research group. “I don’t think he’s played as large a role as he deserves to have played,” Mr. Hayward said. “Serious and thoughtful people take him seriously.”

Well, maybe not entirely. To his Middlebury acolytes, he is Billy the Kibbs. They admire his knowledge and passion but not his computer skills. They got to know him in the college’s dining halls. It was there last fall that Jon Warnow, 22, suggested the name Step It Up for the Internet-connected rallies. It was there that Will Bates, 23, started figuring out how to be the quartermaster for last summer’s five-day march across Vermont, which begat the idea of a series of nationwide actions.

“It’s fair to say we jumped into this without completely understanding where it would end up,” Mr. McKibben added, looking around the little conference room.

Later, on a ski trail near his home, he mused about the sense of dread and impotence that is no longer grafted onto his psyche. “It’s so different,” he said. In the last year, he said, “everything just changed.”

In a little more than three weeks, he hopes to have 870 pictures to prove it.

Push to Fix Ozone Layer and Slow Global Warming

HONG KONG, March 14 — An unusual coalition of industrial and developing countries began pushing Wednesday for stringent limits on the world’s most popular refrigerant for air-conditioners, as evidence mounts that the refrigerant harms the earth’s ozone layer and contributes to global warming.

Greg Baker/Associated Press

The use of HCFC’s is rising in China by as much as 35 percent a year, and the Chinese oppose any new curbs.

Related

The coalition is pitted against China, which has become the world’s leading manufacturer of air-conditioners that use the refrigerant, HCFC-22. Most window air-conditioners and air-conditioning systems in the United States use this refrigerant, as well.

International pressure has grown rapidly this winter for quick action. “We scientifically have proof: if we accelerate the phaseout of HCFC, we are going to make a great contribution to climate change,” said Romina Picolotti, the chief of Argentina’s environmental secretariat.

An accelerated phaseout of the refrigerant could speed up by five years the healing of the ozone layer of the atmosphere. It could also cut emissions of global-warming gases by the equivalent of at least one-sixth of the reductions called for under the Kyoto Protocol.

The United States joined Argentina, Brazil, Iceland, Mauritania and Norway on Wednesday in notifying the Ozone Secretariat of the United Nations Environment Program that they want to negotiate an accelerated phaseout of hydrochlorofluorocarbons, or HCFC’s, at an international conference in Montreal in September.

The conference is tied to the 20th anniversary of the signing of the Montreal Protocol, which has reduced emissions of most ozone-depleting gases but left a loophole for HCFC-22 production by developing countries. China has repeatedly said it will honor all current rules of the Montreal Protocol but does not want to add new ones.

Recent studies have shown that steeply rising production of HCFC-22 by China, India and other developing countries has slowed the healing of the ozone layer, which protects humans, animals and vegetation from the sun’s dangerous ultraviolet rays.

A report last week by five American and European scientists found that sharp cutbacks in emissions of ozone-depleting gases since 1987 have been far more effective in combating global warming than the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 agreement that was aimed directly at limiting climate change.

HCFC’s and other ozone-depleting gases are extremely powerful warming gases. Gram for gram, the ones used as refrigerants have thousands of times the global-warming effect of carbon dioxide. The ozone-depleting gases are released in far smaller quantities, though, than carbon dioxide, which is emitted when fossil fuels are burned by vehicle engines, power plants and other users.

The report by the European and American experts, published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that the Montreal Protocol had proved to be 5.5 times as effective as the Kyoto accord was intended to be in cutting emissions of global-warming gases. The Montreal agreement has been in force much longer and applies to developing and industrial nations alike, while the Kyoto Protocol has binding limits only for industrial nations.

The report has caught the attention of countries in the Pacific and Indian Oceans that fear that global warming will lead to a rise in sea levels and a significant loss of their limited land.

“As small island nations, our main concern is that whatever touches the climate has to be dealt with fairly quickly,” said Sateeaved Seebaluck, permanent secretary in the environment ministry of Mauritius, an island nation well east of Africa in the Indian Ocean.

Mr. Seebaluck said that a flurry of news reports about HCFC-22 this winter had been widely e-mailed among specialists and had led to greatly increased international interest in addressing the problem.

The Montreal Protocol currently allows developing countries to keep increasing their production of HCFC-22 until 2016, and then freezes production at that level until 2040, when it is supposed to be halted. But that schedule was devised in the early 1990s, when HCFC-22 was used mainly in industrial nations; developing countries were seen as too poor ever to afford much of the chemical.

The Kyoto Protocol then exempted HCFC-22 and other ozone-depleting substances from production and consumption limits on the grounds that the Montreal agreement had already addressed those matters.

Use of HCFC-22 has soared in the third world with the economic growth of China, India and other countries, along with the sharp drop in air-conditioner costs that has accompanied China’s growing skill in making them cheaply. Mr. Seebaluck said Mauritius’s use of HCFC-22 had risen more than 100-fold in the last six years because of a boom in hotel construction and the rapid expansion of the fishing industry, which uses a lot of refrigeration to preserve freshness.

The use in India and China, far larger markets, has been rising as much as 35 percent a year lately, with specialists predicting that similar growth could last through 2016.

Industrial nations are required to phase out HCFC-22 by 2020, but most are moving faster. The European Union phased it out in 2004. The United States will ban domestic production in 2010 and is considering whether to ban imports then, as well.