Like Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Weather Eye might of itself declare:
Sometimes lurk I as in a gossip's bowl,
In the very likeness of a roasted crab.
Today, for example, we have been gathering "the babbling gossip of the air", the very latest on the ozone layer. It is contained in Ozone Assessment 1998, published by the World Meteorological Organisation in Geneva, and runs to 350,000 words. Let me give you the Reader's Digest version. There is only a tiny amount of ozone in the atmosphere, and 90 per cent of it is to be found in a thin layer starting about 13 miles above the ground in a region called the stratosphere.
This "ozone layer" very usefully protects us from the harmful effects of the sun's ultraviolet radiation, but in recent years it has been gradually depleting. This has been most evident in the annual appearance of the Antarctic ozone hole, but the problem, albeit on a smaller scale, is global.
But some of the news from WMO is good. Thanks to international measures agreed in the Montreal Protocol in 1987, ozone-depleting compounds in the lower atmosphere peaked about 1994, and have been declining slowly since.
But there is a time-lag in the stratosphere; in this upper region of the atmosphere the concentration of these substances will not peak for another year or two, and after that the decrease will be very gradual, as the natural processes involved are slow.
As a result, "unambiguous detection of the recovery of the ozone layer may not be possible before, perhaps, another 20 years".
But what about the damage done so far? In the middle latitudes of the northern hemisphere, the total ozone content of the atmosphere has declined between 1979 and 1994 by 5 per cent in winter, and some 3 per cent in summer. Levels since 1994 have fluctuated, with no particular trend but at least a halt in the previously worrying decline.
In polar regions, the seasonal effect is more dramatic, with the lowest ozone values occurring in early spring. In the Arctic, ozone concentrations have been unusually low in six of the last nine springs because of unusually cold and protracted stratospheric winters; ozone levels declined to 75 per cent of normal values. In the southern springtime the Antarctic ozone hole also continues unabated, with ozone levels in September and October only half the values considered normal 25 years ago - before this controversy began.