That effect is at odds with the intent of a second treaty, drawn up in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997 by the same countries behind the Montreal pact. In fact, the volume of greenhouse gases created as a result of the Montreal agreement's phaseout of CFCs is two times to three times the amount of global-warming carbon dioxide the Kyoto agreement is supposed to eliminate.

This unintended consequence now haunts the nations that signed both U.N. treaties.

Switzerland first tried in 1990 to sound an alarm that the solution for plugging the ozone hole might contribute to another environmental problem. The reaction?

"Nothing, or almost," said Blaise Horisberger, the Swiss representative to U.N.-backed Montreal treaty. "We have been permanently raising this issue. It has been really difficult."

Horisberger, a biologist with the Swiss Agency for the Environment, Forests and Landscape, kept trying. Finally, the first formal, secret talks on the subject were held in Montreal last month.

"Saving the ozone layer by reducing CFCs and at the same time promoting alternatives was an urgent crisis in the early years of the Montreal Protocol," said Marco Gonzalez, the treaty's executive secretary, in Nairobi, Kenya. "Now there is always a need to find new substances which are safe, energy-efficient and also have minimal impact across a range of environmental issues."

The Montreal Protocol, which now has 189 member nations, is considered one of the most effective environmental treaties. Almost $2.1 billion has been spent through an affiliated fund to prod countries to stop making and using CFCs and other ozone-damaging chemicals in refrigerators, air conditioners, foams and other products.

Scientists blame CFCs for poking a huge, seasonal hole in the stratospheric ozone layer about 7 miles to 14 miles over Antarctica. Last year, the ozone hole peaked at about 10 million square miles, or the size of North America. That was below the 2003 record size of about 11 million square miles. Scientists expect the hole will not heal until 2065.

CFCs also are thinning the ozone layer over the Arctic and, to a lesser extent, globally. As the protective layer thins, more ultraviolet radiation gets through, increasing people's risk of skin cancer and cataracts and threatening more plants and animals with extinction.

Some of the replacement chemicals whose use has grown because of the Montreal treaty - hydrochloroflourocarbons, or HCFCs, and their byproducts, hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs - decompose faster than CFCs because they contain hydrogen.

But, like CFCs, they are considered potent greenhouse gases that harm the climate - up to 10,000 times worse than carbon dioxide emissions.

The Kyoto treaty's goal is to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, motor vehicles and other sources that burn fossil fuels by about 1 billion tons by 2012.

Use of HCFCs and HFCs is projected to add the equivalent of 2 billion to 3 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere by 2015, U.N. climate experts said in a recent report. The CFCs they replace also would have added that much.

"But now the question is, who's going to ensure that the replacements are not going to cause global warming?" said Alexander von Bismarck, campaigns director for the Environmental Investigation Agency, a nonprofit watchdog group in London and Washington. "It's shocking that so far nobody's taking responsibility."

"A massive opportunity to help stave off climate change is currently being cast aside," he said.

The U.N. report says the atmosphere could be spared the equivalent of 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions if countries used ammonia, hydrocarbons, carbon dioxide or other ozone-friendly chemicals, rather than HCFCs and HFCs, in foams and refrigerants. Such alternatives are more common in Europe.

"This potential of not using greenhouse gases is not fully used," said Horisberger, the Swiss official. "It's because of many reasons - technical, big commercial interests."

Industry is split over how to replace CFCs and HCFCs.

One of the biggest producers of fluorine-based refrigerants, Honeywell International Inc., says it is discontinuing its use of "the older technology, environmentally unfriendly CFC and HCFC refrigerants," and replacing those chlorine-containing chemicals with HFCs in retrofits and in new equipment.

Industry representatives cite safety and energy efficiency problems with the use of ammonia and hydrocarbons, which mainly involves propane gas.

"If there's a leak in a residential line, it can ignite - you have a potential bomb," said Stephen Yurek, general counsel for the Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration Institute. It represents North American makers of equipment for homes, businesses and transportation.

Manufacturers also say they could not meet U.S. energy efficiency requirements that took effect this year if they used those chemicals. "The technology just isn't there," Yurek said.

A 2002 study prepared for an industry coalition that encourages use of HCFCs and HFCs says the safety measures and higher energy bills required by some alternatives would cost U.S. consumers hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

"We're saying efficiency is just as important as the refrigerant being used," Yurek said. "If it's going to increase the amount of energy used to operate a piece of equipment, you're actually worse off because you're going to be pumping more CO2 (carbon dioxide) into the atmosphere."

The Montreal Protocol has been powered by a global fund run by the United Nations and the World Bank. On average, more than $150 million is spent a year to help developing nations comply with the treaty by phasing out CFCs.

The fund pays the costs for companies to switch from CFCs to HCFCs, HFCs and other chemicals commonly used in air conditioners, semiconductors, foams, fire extinguishers, hair spray, and roof and wall insulation. The biggest beneficiaries are companies in seven countries: China, India, Venezuela, Argentina, Mexico, Romania and
North Korea.

Meanwhile, consumers in the U.S. and elsewhere continue to snap up products that would cost more if HCFCs and HFCs were already eliminated. Under the Montreal treaty, industrial countries have until 2030 and developing countries until 2040 to quit using HCFCs and HFCs.

"It is true that there will be a significant growth over the next 10 years of HCFC production and consumption in the developing countries," said Lambert Kuijpers, a Dutch nuclear physicist and a lead author of the U.N. report. "This will also contribute to global warming in a so far unprecedented way, if it will occur as anticipated."

That is a touchy subject for supporters of the Montreal agreement. Few want to acknowledge anything could be wrong with a treaty that is on track to fix at least one major environmental problem.

"You have to put it into historical perspective. Hydrocarbon technology wasn't ready. ... It was still being tested in the early 1990s. And only gradually that technology became mature and became accepted," said Sheng Hsuo Lang, the fund's deputy chief officer. "In hindsight, you can say, 'Why didn't you wait?' Or you can take action right away."

The United States signed the Montreal Protocol, but has not ratified the Kyoto Treaty.

That's five years later than forecast in the last major scientific report, in 2002.

Scientists said Friday it would take until 2065, instead of 2050 as previously expected, for the ozone layer to recover and the hole over the Antarctic to close.

"The delayed recovery is a warning that we cannot take the ozone layer for granted and must maintain and accelerate our efforts to phase out harmful chemicals," said Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment Program Friday.

The ozone hole, a thinner-than-normal area in the upper stratosphere's radiation-absorbing gases, has been blamed for increased risks of skin cancer and cataracts in humans.

The hole may also harm crop yields and sea life, according to researchers.

Experts said they extended the projected recovery because chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, would continue to leak into the atmosphere from air conditioners, aerosol spray cans and other equipment for years to come.

The new assessment is in a summary of a report by 250 scientists to be issued next year on the effects of the 1987 Montreal Protocol, which committed signatory nations to ban the use of ozone-depleting products.

It was Brown's discovery of an icy rock bigger than Pluto that helped lead astronomers to rethink their definition of what a planet is. But Brown doesn't think his discovery - or even Pluto, which was spotted in 1930 - should qualify as true planets.

On his Web site, the California Institute of Technology astronomer muses about why Pluto has kept its title for so long: "I think that astronomers are as sentimental as the rest of the world and couldn't stomach removing Pluto. Probably they also couldn't stomach the criticism that would follow."

Last week, a high-ranking panel from the International Astronomical Union proposed that the solar system be expanded to 12 planets from the current nine, the first attempt at creating a scientific definition for planets.

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Under the proposed definition, an object is a planet if it is at least 500 miles in diameter, orbits the sun, and has a mass at least about one-12,000th that of Earth.

Pluto would keep its planethood while three other bodies would be added, including Pluto's moon Charon, the asteroid Ceres and Brown's object 2003 UB313, which he nicknamed Xena.

Brown said the proposal - that a planet is basically anything round orbiting the sun - is too broad and amounts to "No Ice Ball Left Behind," cheapening the solar system.

He worries that by the time his daughter, Lilah, now 13 months, is old enough to memorize the planets, there could be hundreds.

In scientific circles, Brown is a star known for his outspokenness. But vocal as he is, he is not a member of the professional astronomers' group and will be shut out of Thursday's vote on the proposal.

"I feel like an outsider. It's an odd situation," said the 41-year-old, who was named one of Time Magazine's 100 Influential People of 2006.

Still, he is the one whose discovery helped initiate the process.

"Mike deserves a lot of credit for bringing this question to the forefront," said Alan Boss, an astrophysicist at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C.

"We don't agree on how planets should be defined, but I certainly respect him very much," said Gibor Basri, a University of California, Berkeley astronomer who has known Brown since he was a graduate student. Basri belongs to the camp that believes Pluto is a true planet.

Brown grew up in Huntsville, Ala., nicknamed "Rocket City" because it is the home of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. As a kid, he would hear rocket test firings and knew early on that he wanted to be an astronomer.

He would nag his grandparents to take him to the U.S. Space & Rocket Center and even asked his mother for a subscription to Astronomy magazine for Christmas. As a teenager, Brown was glued to the Voyager missions to Jupiter and Saturn, but never imagined a career as a planet hunter.

"I loved the planets, but I never thought I wanted to go find a new one," he said. "For a long time, everyone thought Pluto was it. There's nothing further out there."

His perception changed while he was a Ph.D. student at Berkeley, where his colleagues made the first discoveries of icy objects besides Pluto in the Kuiper Belt, the region beyond Neptune containing thousands of comets and objects called planetary bodies.

Brown figured there must be something larger than Pluto in the frozen fringes of the solar system. He joined Caltech's faculty in 1997 and quickly gained a reputation as the man who had a knack for spotting objects with a telescope.

Brown spotted Xena last year after re-examining images taken in 2003. He noticed something strange - Xena was too big and too bright. He calculated its size from its brightness and had a eureka moment: Xena was larger than Pluto.

The first thing Brown did, he recalls, was phone his wife, who replied: "That's nice, honey. Can you pick up some milk on your way home?"

By Brown's own count, 14 of his discoveries besides Xena are in the running for planethood. That could make Brown the most prolific planet hunter.

But he supports an eight-planet solar system, although he wouldn't mind if Xena was added as the 10th planet.

"When people finally realize the number of planets is going to be much bigger, they'll shake their heads and say 'Astronomers are crazy.'" Brown said.

The Maritime and Coastguard Agency in Stornoway received dozens of calls on Friday night about a fireball falling from the sky.

Lifeboat crews in the Western Isles were alerted as emergency services prepared for a large scale disaster.

However, the cause of the fireball was linked to meteor shower Kappa Cygnid which peaked at the weekend.

A coastguard spokesman said: "We received numerous 999 calls with around 40 alone on Friday night.

"People were reporting seeing something like a plane going down with a tail of smoke behind it.

"It would have been a shooting star from meteor activity."

Five meteors

The spokesman added: "We discussed the situation with RAF Kinloss and other sources and concluded it was meteor activity.

"We got calls from all over such as Stoer on Skye and from Barra to Barvas."

Kappa Cygnid is active between 15-22 August.

Five meteors can be seen in an hour but it can also result in bright yellow-blue fireballs, according to the British Astronomical Association's website.

To the naked eye, this phenomenon looks like faint, greenish, blue sparks underneath your feet in the wet sand.

What her camera caught was a couple of blue dots. While that may seem ridiculously uninteresting to those first viewing the photo, it is indeed an accomplishment when you realize the creatures that cause this are microscopic, they flash their bioluminescence for less than a second and when you take in the other factors that make this photographically nearly impossible to capture.

The creatures are a form of phytoplankton called dinoflagellates - part of the family of microscopic plants that form the bottom of the food chain for marine life. This particular brand is bioluminescent, meaning they give off a glow when disturbed or bumped through internal chemistry processes, much in the same way a firefly does.

They tend to hit Oregon's beaches in warmer periods when nutrients can be more abundant and more sunlight can help "charge them up."

The luminescence of a single dinoflagellate lasts for 0.1 seconds, which is why photographing the phenomenon is so next to impossible. Larger organisms, such as jellyfish, can be luminescent for tens of seconds.

When Boothe tried photographing this, most shots came out with nothing or nearly nothing. She and two friends grabbed jars and poured wet sand that had the dinoflagellates into jars. They then tried shaking the jars. But the flashes happen too fast for a long exposure to catch - and a long exposure is what it would take to catch such a faint glow.

Still, she managed to capture these two blue dots. The area seen in the photo above is less than an inch in circumference. The photo was shot as the group was pouring the sand into the jar, not when they shook the jar. Boothe said the dinoflagellates sparked much more during the pouring process.

"Bioluminescence is the light produced by a chemical reaction that occurs in an organism," said Boothe. "It occurs at all depths in the ocean, but is most commonly observed at the surface. Bioluminescence is the only source of light in the deep ocean where sunlight does not penetrate."

Boothe said bioluminescence in sea creatures is blue for two reasons. One, blue/green light travels the farthest in water. "Its wavelength is between 440 to 479 nm, which is mid-range in the spectrum of colors," Boothe said. "And the second reason is that most organisms are sensitive to only blue light. They do not have the ability to absorb the longer or shorter wavelengths of other lights such as red."

To see the glowing sands, you must have a very dark beach with little or no light interference from lamps on land or the moon. They can appear in bays, like Nehalem Bay or Yaquina Bay. When you run your hand through the water it will manifest an eerie bluish glow.

In Newport, restaurant owner Bob Trusty loves to photograph the lush sunsets of Nye Beach, especially from the perch above the Nye Beach Turnaround where his Village Market & Deli sits.

One day - July 10 to be exact - he happened to catch a form of the much-revered "green flash" at sunset, a rare occurrence where a green blob appears at the upper edge of the sun just before it dips below the horizon. In Trusty's case, he caught a version of this oddity called the "green ray," where shafts of blue or green light come streaming out from the sun just before it goes away.
Interesting architecture in Nye Beach is conducive to intriguing photos at sunset

Trusty was filled with glee over the event. "That was one of the coolest things," he said. "I couldn't really believe I'd gotten it at first. It's really rare to be able to catch things like that. I was really, really lucky."

The phenomenon usually appears as a tiny tip of the sun appearing green just a few seconds before it's gone. The shape is sort of oblong, while flattened at the bottom. There are other types of green flashes that appear in other shapes, slightly longer periods or other colors such as red, violet or blue.

Trusty caught one of the more rare types, called the green ray, where shafts of darkly colored sunlight spring out from clouds or coastal fog. This is even more significant because the green ray is rarer than the other forms, and even rarer still are instances where this occurs while banks of clouds are in the way. Normally, forms of the green flashes only happen with clear and unobstructed views of the sunset.

According to one website created by Andrew Young of San Diego University, if you know what to look for, these phenomenon are not that rare at all, but it can be seen in "most sunsets," as Young put it.

This effect is the result of refraction in the atmosphere. In very simplified terms, longer bandwidths of light get knocked out by atmospheric conditions until you're left with just green - or whatever color is the result of this situation. Basically, the path between your eye and this portion of the sun are filled with just the right conditions to cut out these colors of the sunset.

This happens almost as often with sunrises as well. Mostly what is needed is a clear, long path between you and the sunset for this mirage to appear, such as a desert or body of water like the ocean.

In the meantime, Trusty and his Village Market & Deli have been getting some notoriety for the photographic catch. He'll soon be on the Oregon Coast Show.