Earth's climate is like an orchestra that has long been conducted by the wrong musician. Carbon dioxide was blamed as the main culprit of warming, but in fact, chlorofluorocarbons played first fiddle: gases once found in refrigerators and hairspray cans. They trap heat ten thousand times more effectively than CO₂.

In the 1990s, countries agreed to cut emissions of these gases to save the ozone layer. And then something strange happened: global warming paused from 2000 to 2015. Scientists debated why carbon dioxide-based models didn't predict this. The answer is simple: the pause coincided with the ban on chlorofluorocarbons.

New calculations, made without tuning parameters, accurately reproduced the temperature when chlorofluorocarbons were taken into account. This doesn't negate the role of CO₂, but it shows that we may have been watching the wrong conductor. The Montreal Protocol, which saved the ozone layer, has also turned out to be a powerful tool for stabilizing the climate.