Slashdot Mirror
Ozone Hole Will Heal, Say British Scientists
Therin writes: "According to the London Times, inside of 50 years the ozone hole will be healed, and it will shrink in a decade, without any further actions. Of course, a few volcanoes in there could mess up the timetable ..." The article seems a bit uncritical of claims like, "We now have the science of the ozone layer buttoned down," but it does sound like good news.
And the radioactivity due to the decommissioning of a tokamak power plant after it's useful life ~50 years + maintenance waste is much less than that from a nuclear fission power station (they're much bigger, and nearly all solid, whereas a tokamak is a big vacuum chamber)
Plus a 1.5 GW reactor would only use 350kg of fuel a year, compared to a coal power plants 100 million tons, and there is enough fuel on earth to supply electricity to the entire world (at current rate of increwase in demand) for 1 billion years, compared to 250 years for coal.
well, yeah.... not only do all the spray cans you can buy now NOT contain CFCs, CFCs never were the problem anyway. Don't buy into fear...
m l
See: Environmental Overkill, Dr. Dixie Lee Ray
See: http://www.acton.org/publicat/randl/92fall/ray.ht
Solar cells are the wrong way to go about it. Solar mirrors, where solar energy can be concentrated to drive a turbine, is much better.
Actually, predicting the future on a scale like this is *really* stupid
Is it really a prediction? For what i see it's just a scientific suggestion based on a matematical model. It may not be perfect but still worth. Hay, they use something similar to convince us to stop using CFC...
It's not stupid to "predict" what will happen in 10, 30 or 50 years. Of course it's in a long time in one life. But most of us will be still alive in that time. And it isn't a long time for humanity.
I'm sceptical too. The ozone "hole" (actually, thinning) was discovered in 1985, that doesn't mean it first occurred in 1985. Did Captain Scott look for it? Did Amundsen look for it? Did they - or anyone else before 1985 - have any means of measuring it? No, no, and no, I think. I believe ozone is formed by the action of sunlight on Oxygen, and some chemical reactions are involved which work more slowly, as most chemical reactions do, in lower temperatures. It's an equilibrium, so some natural process is also removing or degrading the ozone - it's pretty reactive stuff, after all. Now, what do you think would happen if you took a large closed volume of very cold air and kept it in the dark for four or five months? Might the ozone level in it not drop? What does this mean in relation to Antarctic winter conditions? Or is there some other, secret evidence that this is a new phenomenon? I wonder...
No sig is a good sig
Yeah, you seemed to get the gist of the comment better than the AC did. Of course, the other part about it being a dropoff and not a hole might be valid criticism, I just think this situation is better described as thinning of the ozone layer, but maybe that doesn't grab headlines as well. Rush has a lot of beliefs that I find ridiculous, but that doesn't mean a lot of people don't still agree with him. Maybe this problem is already fixing itself, but if not now we can concentrate on the volcanoes and not add to the problem ourselves.
Fusion is amazingly efficient in terms of mass of fuel used. The figures I saw at JET over the summer (I was doing some plasma imaging work there) were, for a 1.5 GW power station running for a year, Coal 100 million tons, Fusion 350 kg (0.35 tonnes).
Fusion power is the only source capable of supplying electricity to meet demands (projected from the current rate of increase in demands) for more than 250 years, which is when coal would run out. There's only enough easily accessible uranium for 20 years of operation, with fission supplying the entire world's demand, and most of that is located in politically unstable places (Siberia, Congo), although Canada has large reserves as well.
Not quite. Nuclear fusion stills produces nuclear waste, which is not exactly environmentally friendly. Instead of the fuel being radioactive(nuclear fission), the reactor and other components are made radioactive by the fusion process. The only real way to generate electicity is to simple passively collect it eg. wind turbines, solar cells etc
I hope this is true butit seems like no experts can agree what the hell is going on. See the links below: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_9 90000/990391.stm
and
http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/d177575.ht m
Yes, the earth will "adjust" to human intervention, exterminating that species and many others if that is what's necessary for it to "heal itself".
Fortunately, in the case of CFC usage, homo sapiens sapiens is proving itself to be a sufficiently intelligent species to correct its suicidal behavior before the earth "adjusts" too much.
It's worth pointing out that the London Times is part of the News International empire, which has been running a sustained campaign against agreement on climate change. This is by no means the first story they've published, claiming on very shaky grounds that there's no problem.
I think what this story is saying is that Rupert Murdoch thinks that sustained, co-ordinated action on global warming would hurt his profits. I don't think it says anything meaningful about the state of the planet, the ozone hole or anything else.
People think of the London Times as a respectable newspaper because it used to be a respectable newspaper. Frankly, that was a long time ago.
(Of course this doesn't mean the ozone hole isn't healing, just that I wouldn't trust the London Times to tell me the earth was round if RM thought there was profit to be made out of a belief in a flat one)
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
T.Hobbes:
...global warming concerns energy generation, and there's no technical solution today which might solve the problem...
...and because [fusion] can produce such large amounts of electricity...
The technical solution has been well in hand for decades in the form of nuclear fission.
The solution, as far as I'm concerned, is in nuclear fusion.
Nuclear fusion, if it is developed, will with high certainty be significantly more expensive than fission. This creates its own environmental problems.
[Fusion is] the only power source which has little to no environmental impact...
There are no known power sources with zero environmental impact so it can't have "little to no environmental impact". It also can't be the "only power source which has little" environmental impact since the consensus of energy scientists including solar power researchers is that fission is one such power source.
What? There are power sources that don't produce large amounts of electricity? A fusion power plant is just another steam or gas turbine power plant. A fusion power plant will produce the same amount of electricity as any other steam or gas turbine. The limits are in how hot your design and your metals and your bearings and your lubricants will let you get your steam or gas, how efficient and how big and how many turbines you have, and how much water you have access to to condense your steam or gas; not how dense your heat source is.
More on fission by John McCarthy, the inventor of the LISP programming language.
Wrong. The customary way of referring to The Time is as The Times. It is only in the US that the less literate are attempting to change that.
It seems that in the US, so many things are just inferior copies (i.e. Budwiesser) that they now need to clarify when someone is talking about the original.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
I can't stand people who appeal to mysticism to back up their asanine environmentalist agruments (you know, "mother earth" this, and "circle of life" that, "mankind's hubris will be punished", yadda yadda yadda).
And I'm sure the people who modded up the parent post up are nodding their heads right now. Well, newsflash, people, this is no better, it's worse than those sappy Greens. Yea, that's right, this is an appeal to mysticism, or at least, to fate, to fix the things that we fucked up. It's dishonest and cowardly.
"Give time and a little patience, the planet is more than adequate at adjusting itself back to its center"
How do you know that? And how long do you think it will take? Does the word "geological time scale" mean anything to you? Do you think it will fix itself while we keep making things worse? How do you think the people affected by ecological disaster feel about your reassurances?
See kids, the Greens want you think you have no power. They want you to think you're weak compared to Mother Nature, so you'll humble yourself like them, and then respect the environment out of dogmatic brainwashing. That's complete bullshit. We made Mother Nature her our bitch and now we're giving her a good smack around. We can destroy this planet if we want to, so eat that, tofu eaters!
With power comes responsibility. With awareness comes self evaluation. No freakin' animal has that. And right now, we're shitting in our living rooms because we're too fucking lazy to walk to the bathroom. We want to shirk the responsibility of cleaning up the mess, and we do it by corporate whitewashing and holding up the image of the "radical environmentalist" to scare people.
No, I'm not saying you should buy the chicken littles at face value. I'm asking you to give the people who say "don't worry, everything will be alright" the same sort of mocking skepticism. They don't know what the fuck they're talking about anymore than the Greens do. They've swallowed just as much propoganda, and a lot of them have been bought by commercial interests.
--
Bush's assertion: there ought to be limits to freedom
Humans are animals, and thus natural, just like everyone else. We change our environment to suit are needs, as most animals do;
This is an argument (and a very nice simple retort frankly) that I hear often, but in reality it does not hold water. What humans do is nothing like the symbiosis achieved by the rest of the world's organisms... in the natural world when something is created is becomes a resource for those who would exploit it. What you are arguing is very true in nature - the system adjusts to accept new variables. What humans are doing would probably elicit such a response from the natural world if we weren't destroying all natural space and doing this all in don't act the way humans do (sure they 'adapt' to their environment, and to some degree adapt the environment to themselves) but they do NOT create the overwhelming levels of everything we do (and I wont bother listing all the pollutants we release into the world). The changes you expect, the harmonizing of our existence by nature, will never take place because we are killing (very literally) all other life on the planet. We are doing this by reducing habitat and emitting vast arrays of pollutants. There will be no 'nature' left soon to harmonize our actions. If we all left the planet right now, and returned in 500 years do you think you wouldn't find dead-lakes (full of acid) in Canada? Would you eat animals from the tributary rivers in Sarnia, Ontario (insert your regional chemical industry town)? Would you find Manhattan Island an overgrown forest? I don't think so, we are actively building a world devoid of nature. We will be soon be responsible for a lifeless planet. Also, when we have finished killing all life excepting ourselves, rats, raccoons, cockroaches and pigeons, we will also be responsible to artificially reproduce the functions of the planet once handled by nature. (Oxygen generation, cooling, mulching refuse)
-OR-
We can stop polluting, push back sprawl, curb population growth and try and act responsibly with the planet. Tough choice eh?!?!?!?
and when we "create" chemicals and substances, the reality is we're just remixing what we already see. Who knows. Polyurthene may be a naturally growing tree on some other planet. But obviously not here, and would be irrelevant.
We are acting like no other animal (would, does or can) - and any argument that we are is technically inept and sophomoric. Most often used by people who are not willing to take responsibility for their actions and abate the arguments of 'tree huggers'. When was the last time you saw an anteater building a nuclear-power plant or a Deer pushing down trees with a bulldozer*?? Puhleeze.
*Excepting any hallucinogenic camping trips you may have had...
The truth is that we really can't destroy the enviroment, we can just change it enough to destroy ourselves and most of the enviromental activists will eventualy be shown to be as wrong about things as eveyone else is.
Example the Green-House gasses are Methane, Sulfur Oxides, Water Vapor and lastly Carbon dioxide and the majority of these gasses are released by naturaly processes that we have no control over.
Most Enviromental causes are thinly disguised anti-American, anti-technolgy plots that are almost terrorist organizations,
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Perhaps Gary would be a better choice.
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
Basically, the same way as the ceiling can get dusty.
They're carried up along with the air in updrafts at the centre of anticyclones, and then get spread about by the turbulence in the atmosphere.
Their extra weight would also cause them to slightly tend to collect at the poles, where the centrifugal force of the earth's rotation is less, but this is probably a small effect.
Your version may be more clear and intuitive for you, but it's certainly not for those of us in the UK. It's also wrong. While The Times was traditionally based in London, there are now 3 editorial centres, in London, Liverpool and Glasgow, and the paper itself is printed at various sites throughout the UK (and abroad, too).
On a similar note, though, even News International (publishers of The Times, and my former employer) resorted to calling The Sun "The London Sun" when posting notices around Hollywood trying to find Divine Brown.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Alright... i'm gonna go find all the spray-cans I can and blast away.... it'll heal.
-Andy
It was never the scientists but the Government who claimed that a lack of evidence of danger constituted a lack of danger. This is the same line that US "scientists" (i.e. vested interests and export lobby) are taking with US hormone treated beef exports... These people don't care whether you or your children get sick or die. You're helping them by blaming someone else. Besides, this is about the effects of pollution - of which the US is #1 producer in the world. But of course that doesn't matter, because the US is the richest nation in the world. But of course your Government is lying to you over these matters too. Aren't they? I mean, 250,000,000 people can't all think that they have a right to foul it up for everyone else in the world...could they?
Don't bother, he's not worth it...
Umm, Yeah it is a chain reaction, but if memory serves it is killed by the presence of other gasses in the air. For instance I think NO2 is a free radical killer - pollution from car engines depletes the levels of freons in the atmosphere. People have this idea that once the chain raction starts there's no stopping it, but it's simply not true. I mean this isn't even a new reaction: ozone is constantly depleted by[Marvel Moment!] Cosmic rays. What we'll have to wait and see is how long it takes before the levels of CFC's drops to a tolerable level, and I think that's going to be nigh on impossible to predict.
I thought it was thinning of the layer, not an actual hole. But this will give more ammo to people like Rush Limbaugh who think that humans can't actually damage significant portions of the ozone layer anyway and that it's all volcanoes' fault. Of course he also thinks the rainforest isn't worth protecting either. I wish he would visit LA sometime.
not to confuse it with the ny times, or the [insert you're own reasonably large city here] times, etc.
just like they call it the "new york times", except in ny... where it's just "the times"
this isn't a tough concept...
if one were somehow to collect all the radioactive particles expelled from a coal plant over the course of a year, it would be more massive than the amount of radioactive waste produced by a fission plant.
Not only that, but the fissionable energy of the radioactive particles in coal is greater than coal's hydrocarbon energy:
The Times used to be the paper of record here in the UK.
That is until it was bought by Rupert Murdoch. Now it is a tabloid in broadsheet format that uses three syllable words. It is the complementary daily to the "Sun" (all naked women and salacious stories) designed to push Murdoch's views.
A couple of years ago, I spent two months in the mediteranean through middle of August to October. I was out in the sun all day and built up an excellent tan. However, on getting back to Australia, the first weekend I spent half an hour outside without sunscreen and still got burnt to a crisp (and had my tan peel off to boot). That just proved to me that the sun is a lot more intense down here. However, I understand with what you're saying. I never get burnt on the parts of me like my arms and legs that spend a lot of time in the sun without sunscreen. So it would be easy for me to agree that sunscreens are stopping us from building up our natural defenses. However, when I look at my arms and leg's it's easy to see where I WILL get skin cancer first.
There was a discussion telling that this anti-CFC campaign was just some lobbying from the chemical industry: CFC's can be produced for cheap anywhere (like in 3rd world) and they wanted to sell more profitable replacements for it.
If it's true, it's sad.
____________________
Ni!
But what about this hole in my heart Mr. Scientific?
Thank you.
Well now Bush can feel free to drill the artic wildlife reserve in Haliburton's name. Isn't Dick Cheney feeling fine now! This is ridiculous and irresponsible. We are destroying the planet and we need to start doing something about it instead of being on denial.
To the best of my knowledge, without using fission, we're still 2 or 3 orders of magnitudes short of producing the amount of energy to start a fusion reaction, meaning any potential nuclear reactor must include fission reactions, even only to start up the fusion reactions. If there really is a design for a cold fusion reactor though, I'd love to see it. Of course, if we're just talking hot fusion, using a fission reaction to kickstart the fusion as outlined above, then the fission element would mean that it would still have all the drawbacks of a fission plant, though it would probably be more efficient. An improvement, but hardly "the solution."
As for rogue nations getting fission, I agree it's a risk, and I'm hardly proposing that we bankroll their projects. Most likely they would be unable to generate the capital necessary to build nuclear plants, so the problem solves itself. If they were somehow able to aquire the funds, they'd just build the damn bombs, they wouldn't muck around with power plants.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
The solution, as far as I'm concerned, is in nuclear fusion. It's the only power source which has litle to no environmental impact
Actually, fusion does produce radioactive waste. The fusion reactor vessel itself becomes dangerously radioactive due to activation by neutrons produced in fusion. It doesn't produce any _primary_ waste from its fuel, but you still have a few thousand tonnes of reactor to swap out every couple of decades.
There have been fuel combinations propsed that aren't supposed to produce neutron radiation, but these are much more difficult to ignite and produce much less energy. Thus, I suspect it'll be good old D-T or (when practical) D-D in any fusion plants that are actually built.
You would also have a heat pollution problem from any power plant that produces more energy than the Earth receives from the sun. There are ways of piping this heat back out of the ecosystem, but it's picky and costly enough that we probably won't bother until the earth starts warming again. Right now things like CO2-induced global warming mask the effect (and we haven't industrialized the planet yet).
Need to such CO2 out of the atmosphere: Here's just one low-tech solution that could sink billions of tonnes of CO2 into the ocean.
There's technical solutions for everything. The problem, of course, is how much it's gunna cost. Global warming is sooooo low on my list of worries for the future it isn't funny. We don't even have a decent computational model of the atmosphere to work from, and are decades from getting one - push for more money for that.
Something that pisses me off is that it's so easy to whine about global warming with a full stomach. There are lots of people in China, India, and Africa that haven't effectively gone through an industrial revolution and don't have that luxury. I'm not going to get high and mighty when they start burning billions of tonnes of coal to do what we did at the end of the 18th century.
..don't panic
I like the article, but I would have written it upside down. The important part is indeed that science can convince governments to take action. An impressive reduction of CFC`s is the nice outcome in this case. But while it is one positive evolution, it fails to mention that CFC`s are being replaced by even more toxic substitutes (which don`t temper with the ozone layer, but just us). Anyway, it`s a real good thing the model predicts healing, but we`ll have to stay put and watch if things are really going the right way, so don`t blow your cans just yet. Both Europe and America do have some more cleaning up to do.
It also suggests that the conference in The Hagues about global warning (which was just the extension of the Kyoto conference 2 years ago) should have been enough reason for America to stop playing tough guy and aknowledge that we do actually have a fuel problem. In the last 5 years, flooding of towns, shifting of land, hurricanes and cyclones, have been very frequent in the news. And while we might not have the numbers or the models to agree on the scientific part of things yet, I think everybody is fairly convinced that producing as much carbon dioxide as possible isn`t going to help. The only ones that benefit from that are the ones at the top, who don`t run a government, but thier own bank account. (and sometimes, the difference is slim, which makes those issues even more acute.)..
When I heard the news that after Kyoto also The Hagues had failed, I felt really sad. Maybe if we`d organise such a conference in Washington DC, right under the nose of your president (well.. let`s assume you have a president..), maybe that would make you guys open your eyes.. it IS hartwarming to see that the green party is starting to play a factor in national elections, and I hope it will grow in size and strength. At least that shwows evidence that some US citizens are also concerned with their environment, good family life, healthy food etc.. just like us europeans.. And now I`m going to stop cuz I sound like Bono/U2
With great power comes great electricity bills.
There is no "healthy" state for the earth, it is and always has been in a state of change. Those who worship a particular state of ecological balance are very misguided.
At no time in the past has our present ever existed. At no time in the future will our present ever become.
Things that humans create that will never have existed without us:
Shorelines inaccessible to animals - devastation of habitat
MASSIVE amounts of man created chemicals, fumes, particles in the Air, Water and Land.
Concrete Slabs that cover vast regions, interrupting water flow, water absorption in the land, and flooding
Destruction of natural habitat, rendering it inhospitable for all but humans.
Barrels of Nuclear Waste
Piles & Piles of Non-Biodegradable material stacking up everywhere.
Light pollution - creating an inhospitable environment for night-creatures in Human inhabited regions.
Killing animals with Cars needlessly
Genetically Engineered plants/animals causing unknown interaction with natural species
Oil spills where none would have ever occurred before (Mississippi River, Brazil)
Expansion of Desserts, Raising Sea Levels, Un-told changes in global weather & natural disaster (caused by the above)
Physical destruction of animals themselves because of our sheer vanity and stupidity (Dolphins caught in tuna nets, Manatees slaughtered by recreational vehicles in Florida, Ivory, Snake Skin boots, birds smashing into glass high-rise buildings, and various other a$$hole things we do to animals for no reason)
I dont think any of these things would have occured, especially not all at once and all by themselves"
The idea that environmentally aware people are acting in emotionally to preserve a "particular state" is silly - the vastly un-natural changes we are causing is not in tune with the natural ebb and flows of the planet that shift ever so slightly over millennia... there is NOTHING natural or inevitable about what we are doing to the planet. Your argument that it is is blind, stupid and ignorant.
equilibrium.
A given planetary equilibrium is not necessarily very comfortable.
Think of Venus.
It's called THE TIMES. That is it's name. The only people who call it The London Times are confused Americans. I thank you.
Ozone is quite simply, an ion of Oxygen formed when you expose O2 to high intensity electric fields (arc gaps, or a welder), from some industrial processes, and most importantly, Ozone is formed when the UV light that is much stronger in the upper atmosphere causes the same effect and creates O3. I always wondered why we couldn't get planes or something with huge ozone generators on them to repair the damage, or if that was even feasible. Maybe I'll do the math sometime.
Interesting factoid: One of the reasons that there's not much commercial supersonic flight is that they fly extremely high to lessen air drag. I was taking a course in astrophysics (intro) in my last year of university, and the prof asked us if we could guess why there were no liscences being issued - and it's because at that height, a lot of the oxygen you're burning IS ozone, and the jet exhaust breakdown components are also reactive. Fun stuff.
Another interesting factoid, where I'm from, Cape Breton Island, in Nova Scotia Canada, had a ozone hole open up right on the top of the island a few years back, I think it was one of the lowest latitudes that this was recorded at. Whoo! :)
..don't panic
Unless you're an admin, then you can kill it. Can just anyone kill a process under Linux?
Si vis pacem, para bellum
The only thing more annoying than a Libertarian is an (un|mis)informed Libertarian
I never understood why you couldn't just send a whole bunch of those Tyco HO Slot Racers up in the atmosphere. I had 'em in my basement, and you'd get woozy smelling all of the ozone they kicked out.
ps. I hear in Highlander 4 they all come back and there's some major plot change to include both the teenage mutant ninja turtles and the care bears on voyage to mars. kick ass.
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
The Times is The Times is The Times is The Times is the world-famous newspaper referred to in many great novels that has sadly declined in the last few decades but is still called The Times. OK?
Sir, are you mocking me? I'll have you know that making fools of the foolish is a time honoured tradition in rational discourse. It's like me pappy used to say: "Ignorance in defense of freedom is Miami Vice!"
--
Bush's assertion: there ought to be limits to freedom
I'm using netscape and the article works fine for me.
----------
Technoli
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Use konqueror
ash5g:
...solar cells...
The only real way to generate electicity is to simply passively collect it eg. wind turbines...
Wind turbines require large amounts of land, pollute visually and sonically, kill birds, require large amounts of hazardous construction and maintenance labor (as opposed to nuclear fission which is relatively hazard-free) need to be located in windy places, and in the most plausible scenarios require gas turbines for back-up power when the wind isn't blowing.
(Solar cells can't provide base-load power, so they wouldn't be competing with fission or fusion, but since you brought them up...)
Solar cells require large amounts of land, pollute visually, require large amounts of hazardous construction and maintenance labor, burn 3% of their lifetime output of energy as coal when they are manufactured, and produce large amounts of chemical waste in their manufacture and decommissioning, principally but not limited to cadmium sulfide which will kill 80 people eventually per large solar power plant operation year.
BTW the burning of coal in the manufacture of solar cells is the reason solar PV plants release more radiation than nuclear power plants; i.e. the burning of coal releases radiation. It's also the reason solar PV power plants present a nuclear proliferation danger.
I've always argued this point, and I'm glad to see one more argument to back me up. Given time, the earth gradually heals itself, and even adjusts to human intervention and polution.
Uh, the closing of the ozone hole would be an adjustment to the lessening of human pollution.
Going to a particularly politically-correct school (which I absolutely abhor , I hear ecological arguments all the time. Get a grip, people. Humans are not creating "artificial" changes in the way the earth operates. Humans are animals, and thus natural, just like everyone else.
Of course, these natural changes may end up killing off the human species, but that's a minor issue.
Polyurthene may be a naturally growing tree on some other planet.
The problem is, it isn't here.
I'll get a case of Aquanet for my spud-zooka.
Worse things have happened and will happen to the planet. ...highest extinction rate since the dinosaurs disappeared... (which is a well-known fact, btw).
Now compare this to its parent:
Yeah, worse things have happened. Twice, maybe three times. The fact that world war II was awful doesn't mean wars aren't bad.
Lets assume that you are correct in saying that the Earth has already corrected itself in the past, in response to past 'disturbances'. Does this then imply that it will always do so in the future, no matter what the nature and magnitude of the disturbance? No it does not. Does the fact that a sports team has won every game this season mean that it will continue to win? Again, no it does not. In both examples, the inputs that determine the result are very complex, and we can in no way definitively say that we can predict behavior based on past results. Earth has never been hit by a meteor big enough to destroy it, but if astronomers observe a meteor is on a path to hit us, should we conclude that it will not because none have in the past? Of course not.
I don't believe that an environmental scientist can definitively prove their point one way or another. I'm just saying that we have to look at more than past resilience of the earth.
Even if the Earth does correct itself, the way in which it does this could be that the environment becomes so inhospitable to human life that everyone dies off and stops producing harmful gases, resulting in a return to normalcy.
"A worst case fusion accident would not require evacuation of local populations and teh radioactive health risk of the waste from fusion would reduce to the same level as that from a coal fired power station, after only 100 years, very much quicker than that from fission."
Fo mo info, go to http://www.jet.efda.org
You seem to disagree. Do you have any evidence of our Destructive forces? Why do American and European destructive CFC's "destroy" the ozone over the South Pole? Why does it show a HUGE concentration of ozone just to one Side of the South Pole? It looks to me like the Ozone for some reason just isn't GETTING to the South Pole.
I really feel like the idea that we Humans are so powerful that we can ACCIDENTALLY destroy the earth is foolish. I'm not against being careful, or against being responsible for our actions.
***WARNING***
The following is very full of opinion and low on statistics. If you are easilly offended by honest to the point comments, read no further.
The problem is that people are just too big headed and arrogant as a whole. No matter what your world view is, you didn't create yourself. You aren't the reason that you came into existance, and you aren't powerful enough to do what has already happened. (Meaning Recreate another Continent, Planet, Solar System, Galaxy, Universe) Whether you believe in an all-powerful God, or a random chance over billions of years, you are rather Insignificant when it comes to most factors. The Earth, whether it be highly intelligently designed, or long in the coming, is not so easilly destroyed. It is a violent and rapidly changing place.
The bottom line is that while CFC's may be bad, and they may harm Ozone in general, our use of them most likely contributed little to nothing of the decline or proposed recovery of the ozone.
Elijah
>There is no "healthy" state for the earth, it is
>and always has been in a state of change. Those
>who worship a particular state of ecological
>balance are very misguided
This is one of the most ignorant comments I've seen posted, and it was moderated up as "insightful"? OK, change is the only constant, I'll agree. But look at the rate of change for just one second... temperatures have risen a least a degree Fahrenheit worldwide, the ozone hole now covers 11 MILLION square miles, extinction rates are at the highest level since the dinosaurs disappeared... and anyone who worships a particular state of ecological balance is "misguided?" Uh huh. Methinks you worship a certain green substance that is fun to roll up and smoke.
Anyone who ignores their responsibility to take care of what they've been given -- in this case a habitable planet that has evolved out of billions of years -- is lazy and misguided, but someone who does it while attempting to support themselves with scientific arguments is downright dangerous.
JAMWiki Java-based Wiki engine
interesting that a truthful post that shows the US in a bad light is moderated as a troll on this website...
Perhaps you meant nuclear fission? Since no fusion power plant has ever been designed, much less built, I don't see how it can be a solution. Assuming you meant fission, I agree that it's a wonderful alternative, and actually what many people don't realize is that if one were somehow to collect all the radioactive particles expelled from a coal plant over the course of a year, it would be more massive than the amount of radioactive waste produced by a fission plant. Unfortunately, since the fission waste is concentrated, it can't be dealt with quite as easily.
I don't agree, however, that there is only one solution. Solar, hydro, wind, geothermal, fuel cell and even natural gas are all environmentally friendly sources of power, and in the end who knows which will finally have a breakthrough which could make it competitive with fossil fuel? (sooner or later, something WILL become competitive with fossil fuel, if for no other reason than eventually fossil fuels will become scarce enough that prices are driven up naturally, in the same manner that OPEC artificially keeps prices up now)
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Yes, but whereas a few tens of millennia ago half of the population dying was just life, and at least the species as a whole survived, we could never tolerate this now. Sure our ability to adapt has grown substantially, but our standards for 'survival' have also risen exponentially.
This is my World Wide Web of Whatever
is there any evidence that the ozone hole hasn't been there since the beginning of time? The size of the ozone hole is seasonal. Ozone molecules once released from factories, cars, volcanos, etc. does not instinctively set a course for 15km above Antarticia.
The solution, as far as I'm concerned, is in nuclear fusion.
That sounds eerily like what was spouted back in the 1950's about the promises of nuclear technology. How about another element of a solution: cutting back on our gluttonous desire for energy? Surely one don't NEED to drive a SUV, or play golf in an artifically irrigated desert.
Wah!
I noticed a similar slip in The Times' article (it says "The United States has cut its annual ozone output from...". Can people be a bit clearer about whether they're talking about emissions of ozone or emissions of ozone-depleting chemicals such as CFCs?
This is my World Wide Web of Whatever
Groups of lions and tigers have been known to take too much and die. Many animals (rat/stoat) have hunted others to extinction. Wild horses mangle their habitat. Rabbits are another easy example of a creature expanding beyond it's means and being forced to take new areas, like a virus.
But then of course this doesn't mean shit.
The matrix was a 'musing kung-fu kick but they really needed to work on the dialog.
If anyone wants to do further reading try "King Solomon's Ring" by Konrad Z. Lorenz - a book about the nature of many species of animals. Human's may be more destructive because of their brain (and the power it weilds) but animals are much more mindlessly destructive and violent, as a whole, than people today - and they have no chance of changing without a few millions years worth of evolution.
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
Very true, oldest newspaper still running in the World, so I guess it deserves it.
Really? I've heard of other papers that are considered to be the oldest, such as the London Gazette, Berrow's Worcester Journal, and Lloyd's List. Guess it comes down to how you define a "newspaper"...
--
damn who cares anyway, its not a very good paper anymore. smart ppl read the Manchester Guardian instead
that dissenting opinions get (0, troll) by dumbass moderators
pezpunk
Internet killed the video star,
i could live a little longer in this prison
The roughly 4000ton CFC a year as written in Times is the use of CFC in the European Union. The production of CFC in the European Union is roughly 27000ton/year. About 8000ton are used for different exceptions as in medical sprays. The use of the remaining 17000ton is classified, perhaps protection of important export markets. It is the same with soft freons HCFC in the European Union. The use in the European Union except for exceptions will be stopped in 2002(?). There are no plans to reduce production HCFCs in the European Unions before 2008.
First we produce CFC's to eat the ozone.. everyone knows this (sic). Well ozone is produced by the conversion of O2 with the reaction to UV light. So we build a big hole in the ozone, UV passes thru hitting the 02, converting to ozone, we continue the process till we deplete all the O2, we as species die (ya.. we need 02) well the plants start producing 02 from the Co2, and again the uv turns it to ozone.. we are all dead but we have an ozone layer..
oh.. it seems ironic that just as the patient for CFC's ran out it suddenly became banded and a new chemical formula was devise to be used a coolant.. makes you think.....
Nobody has ever doubted that earth heals itself - but this doesn't mean we can do anything we like to it.
Earth can be compared with an animal in regards to healing itself - give it a light disease, and it will eventually recover.
Give it a huge disease (or many light diseases at the same time), and it won't.
The green view is nice AND necessary, though (like everything else) it can be overdone.
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
yeah, once we've all become fertilizer for future generations of stupider, simpler, and less destructive life forms.
we WILL kill ourselves, it's just a matter of when.
pezpunk
Internet killed the video star,
i could live a little longer in this prison
I have been trying to cut my emissions, but those taco bell chalupas are murder.
Well, all philosophy aside, if the ozone goes, the ultraviolet light will scorch your eyes and give you skin cancer.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
I think you're completely missing the point. Living in the Antarctic involves the use of enormous amounts of resources extracted from land in more hospitable areas of the planet. Food cannot be grown, and must be flown in. Heating is provided by gasoline, which is drilled from the ground elsewhere, and flown in. We are not adapting ourselves to the environment of the polar regions, we are simply using up our resources elsewhere in a very inefficient manner.
Of course, there's the Inuit who lived in the arctic quite sustainably and happily for many years before they were decimated by disease and cultural destruction. But they weren't concerned with Internet connections.
Wah!
of course it's entirely possible that the humans may wipe themselves out, and then arrogantly proclaim that they neglected to "save the planet"
hah.
pezpunk
Internet killed the video star,
i could live a little longer in this prison
There isn't complete agreement in the scientific community that the ozone hole is different than usual. It could just be part of a cycle of openings and closings. However, there is one thing to take into consideration - who is behind outlawing CFCs. Turns out it is DuPont. They are one of the biggest backers of the CFC ban. Interestingly enough, they started this when their patent on CFCs was about to expire, and, lo and behold, they patented the alternative as well. So, the whole CFC scare is based on DuPont wanting to keep a monopoly on the freeon market. See
n t. htm under the section "Campaign Against CFCs"
http://www.sweetliberty.org/issues/un/environme
and
http://www.junkscience.com/news/iccp.html
for more information
Engineering and the Ultimate
I've always been skeptical of the CFC/Ozone depletion argument ever since I read that about the time CFC's were being demonized the patents of CFC's were running out. Naturally, new safer replacements were developed with fresh new patents. I'm hoping for the sake of objective scientific debate this is not true because once big money gets into any argument, no matter how objective it seems, it becomes at least a little less objective. Even if it is true that the ozone layer is being damaged by something and that CFC patents were running out we may still have been affected by way of popular opinion in regards to how righteous this crusade to save the ozone is. I've read that a hole in the ozone layer had been detected before CFC's were even used. I'm not even sure if anybody has shown that the chemical processes that occur where CFC break down ozone are likely. I remember attenting a lecture at harvard where a ozone researcher was explaining the chemical reaction that was responsible and it seem rather odd. Scientist have a tendency to flock around a set of popular ideas and dont like to stray from the flock. This has happened many many times throughout history, even when there was evidence to prove them wrong.
Sneakemail is to spam filters what an ounce of prevention is to a pound of cure.
O3 is formed when O2 is split apart by UV. The free O atoms them combine with O2 to make O3 (which UV does not split apart). This results in an ozone layer being formed that keeps most UV out. Any thinning of the ozone layer immediately boosts the O3 formation process again. So DUH, of course the ozone layer will heal itself. Ozone is a good thing... except when *your car* produces too much of it and the gov't fails your smog test for that. Eh?
>>The solution, as far as I'm concerned, is in
>>nuclear fusion
>Perhaps you meant nuclear fission? Since no
>fusion power plant has ever been designed, much
>less built, I don't see how it can
>be a solution.
No, i'm pretty sure he meant what he said, his statement that fusion is the solution most likely comes from the current theories on nuclear fusion. Whether a powerplant has been designed has little to no relevence to that statement. The facts you mentioned are also likely to be the reason he did _not_ say fission, and decided to say fusion.
Hey, if I wanted that, I'd leave the computer screen behind! ;)
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
(Besides, I don't get any UV off an LCD, do I?)
~Tim
--
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
This isn't very well thought-out. It also demonstrates the shallow insight provided on those other issues mentioned.
Any discussion of these issues is subject to gross simplification. My posts included. You're missing my point that there are far bigger issues to deal with, like what will happen when India and China ramp up their industrial processes. If we cut our CO2 and other emissions by 50%, it won't mean jack squat if China is putting out 200% of what we are now in 5 years, which is quite rightly the case, and how can you argue against them doing that to improve the quality of their lives? We did it during our industrial revolutions.
Do you REALLY want to put your life in the hands of a group of humans playing the role of mother nature?
Look around you if you live in a city. We do it all the time, we do it right now, and as population and consumption grows, we will do it on an even larger and more grand scale. I suspect you'll start seeing arcologies a la SimCity in the industrialized world that are completely self sustaining as a result of pressures brought on by transportation costs. My point is that I look to history when I think about the future, and thus my view is quite bleak.
In case you need it spoonfed: Your suggestion that humans can survive no ozone by becoming nocturnal is ignorant of our position in the food chain / ecosystem. Will the rest of the animals we eat become nocturnal? Hmm.. No vegetation. It'd be nice not to have some oxygen once in a while.
I am not as ignorant as you might think. Again, gross oversimplifications abound in my arguements and yours. I look at it from the more pessimistic side, and more people should be thinking about how to deal with ecological disasters rather than (IMHO, hopelessly) trying to prevent them. Of course not every animal will become nocturnal. Most of the species that ever existed on this planet are exinct, too. The earth 2 million years ago was vastly different than it is now; The earth will always be changing, and it's foolish to think that things will always be as they are now based on growth and consumption patterns. It sucks, yes, but life's hard.
It is in our nature to destroy ourselves. That sums up my arguements in one sentence.
..don't panic
No, I haven't done my research. Have you? I'd like to look at some good hard evidence. Statistics and Satellite photography. Do you have any references to Scientific journals that back up your arguments? I don't want any links to activist groups' pages. Nor do I want any links to Political opinion.
Elijah
All generalizations are false.
--
I like to watch.
how long or how many times has it been like it is and we've (the human race) just not had the technology to know it. How many times have we been grazed by a comet and only in the past few decades been able to know it? What are the cycles of the Ozone Layer?
...I don't have enough faith to believe in the "big bang"...
Too many things to respond to, so a bulk response is in order. BTW, I'm currently studying stratospheric chemistry in my grad atmospheric chemistry class, so I'm fairly sure on what I'm talking about...
First, to a comment about methane being a bigger ozone destroyer than halogens... While it's possible, as OH radicals produced by the oxidation of methane are ozone destroying, only a small percentage of tropospheric methane makes it to the stratosphere, and most of that is converted to H2O, which photolyzes into OH radicals. Notice that this is a complicated process already, with many fairly slow reaction rates involved. So, methane can be important, but it's highly doubtful that it's truly as important. Also, there's the fact that the OH radicals tend to react very nicely with many other species, while the ClO and FO radicals are more strictly reactive with each other and ozone. The fact of the matter is that methane probably has significantly less effect than halogens on the ozone destruction.
My second comment is directed to all you global warming people. First of all, yes, global warming due to increasing CO2 is almost definitely true. HOWEVER, and I cannot stress this enough, the magnitude of such warming and it's consequences is VERY much in dispute. Truthfully, these global models are decent, but they're running off parameterizations, some of which are sub-optimal; often cannot take into account further feedbacks, like changes in plant growth, changes in cloud cover (and its friend, changes in albedo, or reflection of sunlight), and other natural feedbacks. The climate is so more significantly more complex than these models can take into account that believing the magnitudes and trying to figure out the ramifications of these predictions is truly like playing roulette with a wheel that has millions of spaces. Yes, the oceans will rise, but how much is another question. And even if it is 100m over the next 100 years, why can't humanity adapt to this small change? So, please, stop with your doomsday predictions. Doubling CO2 might cause some warming, but how much is tough to call. And the results might not be that bad. Remember that during the age of the dinosaurs, there were concentrations of CO2 that were about 5-10 times current levels, and life sure wasn't dead then.
Third, I would like to applaud those people who are making sense in other posts. Change really is the only constant in the atmosphere. Humans may change the atmosphere, but to what extent is a question that is hard to really tough to figure out. And even if we figure it out, can we really figure out all the intricacies? Trust me, there's little out there that's more difficult to predict than a fluid's behavior, especially when you add heterogenous chemistry, additional effects from outside it's internal system (oceans, solar, humans, etc.), the interactions of water in the system (clouds, storms, etc.), and God know what else. Let's also not forget that atmospheric science is a truly young science (first major advances in the 1920's...). Even some of these seemingly simple questions haven't even been extensively worked out. A large part of the field is still conjecture and hypothesis. (Let's also not forget that fluids are chaotic by simple nature.) And it'll probably stay that way until the chaos theorists and partial differential equation people give us some even more incredible tools than we currently have. It's amazing that some people take these climate models that predict on significantly worse resolutions and time frames as absolute truth while they don't necessarily believe a 5 day forecast off a model that's significantly better. Noodle that one a while before you pin your faith on models.
-Jellisky
Watch what you say. You can be sued for slandering cabbage.
We don't. You do if you think you do. I do if I think I do. It's a personal choice. Remember personal choice?
Do you think that some choices are too important to be left to us, and that they must be made for us by the enlightened (annointed?) elites?
That's only after the predicted nuclear winter, and the fallout from WW IV...
Actually, predicting the future on a scale like this is *really* stupid.
Will the real Bruce Perens Please Stand Up
After a few billion years i'm sure something else will apear... maybe spores or something like that...
What we need to try and do, is make sure we survive to be the ones that pass on earths "genes". To do that we need to be very smart and very carefull... because yes earth will survive... but we may not...
The ozone "hole" is really a "hole" in that there is a very steep gradient "edge" to it, this gradient in density is enormously steeper than the gradient inside the hole. Are you also going to claim that there is not such things as warm and cold fronts and that air temprature is uniformally distributed as well?
Although environmentalists may be too extreme at times, it always seems to me that when it gets to scientific arguments, the environmentalists seem to quote real science (plus a lot of extraneous emotion). When anti-environmentalists like you try to quote science it always seems to be pseudo-science and made-up facts. Sorry, but this does not help your position with people who used to be in the middle on this, like me (I used to think environmentalists were complete whackos).
Speaking as a self proclaimed intelgent Amerikan, thanx
Ozone is created by sunlight. Sunlight is abundant near the equator where light hits the atmosphere at higher angles and that's where most of the ozone is created. Ozone coverage above the pole depends on whether there are enough jet streams to get it from the equator to the poles. The ozone heretics claim that a well-known priodic weather phenomenon over the south pole creates a pocket of air that doesn't interact much with the rest of the atmosphere and that is the real reason for the hole. This pocket is occasionally broken up by atmospheric turbulence and fresh ozone gets to the pole.
:) )
This is mostly true. This is what's called the "polar vortex". It happens during the polar winter, and it's primary effect is partially that, but it also does more than that. What happens during the polar winter, is that being there is no sunlight here during that time, some other chemistry can occur. Essentially, there are a few ozone destroying compounds that normally react not only with ozone, but with each other. These compounds (including ClO, BrO, OH, NO2) combine with each other producing other, non-reactive compounds (for example, ClONO2) which require sunlight to break apart back into those reactive species. Thus, the addition of some more of these species may not affect fast ozone destruction, as it would make these "reservior" compounds.
During these polar vortex events, though, the winds around the poles tend to isolated the air over the poles. This gives the air inside a chance to become more homogenous, but more importantly, it allows the concentrations of those reservior species to increase without them being destroyed.
Also, because there is not much sunlight, the air temperatures become very cold, allowing for what little water vapor there is to form clouds. On these cloud particles, more chemistry occurs that helps convert some of the more unreactive reservior species (like ClONO2) into more reactive reservior species (like Cl2). The chemistry also tends to produce nitric acid on these particles which can then fall out of the stratosphere. This reduces your less reactive reservior species a bit more, and removes some of the possibly balancing NO2 from the system.
Thus, when the sun comes back up, there are plenty of these more reactive reservior species around, with little balancing NO2 to prevent these species' radicals from destroying ozone. Thus, there's a lot of ozone destruction during the beginning of the polar spring.
That's why most of the ozone hole plots from Antarctica you see are from October. It's the start of their spring then.
So, while the ozone movement is hindered by this vortex, the additional chemistry involved is also important.
Hope this helps your understanding. (BTW, I am an atmospheric science student who is just finishing up a grad course in atmospheric chemistry.
Two of which are no longer in print, and one of which isn't really a newspaper, in that you you can't buy it in a newsagent's shop, without ordering it or something. I think this is a useful definition of newspaper for the purpose of this post, and the post two levels up.
But it's title is "The Times" and should therefore be refered to as '"The Times", London' to avoid confusion, or perhaps "The [London] Times".
A rogue state or well funded terrorists could easily afford enough iron to bring on an ice age. That is assuming that this method of fertilizing the ocean works as plannned. Still, something like this holds alot of promise. The benefits of fertilizing the ocean would be a boon to fishermen. Unlike dumping raw sewage into the ocean iron won't have the negative affects of disease and killing the native life. At least if it is done in already dead zones.
"During the thousand milenninia or so that man has inhabited the planet, it has warmed and cooled, oceans have risen and fallen, mountain ranges have grown, continents have drifted apart and collided, ozone layers have thinned and thickened. The relatively minor changes that get everybody in a tizzy nowadays are nothing compared to what we have already survived. And we survived those changes with... well, with Stone Age technology. "
Methinks you exagerate a little. During the last 1,000,000 years, mountain ranges have continued to grow (or erode), continents have continued to collide, or continued to drift apart. At no time have any of these huge geological processes completed. To put it into perspective, the Atlantic Ocean grows at 6cm per year... extrapolating over this 1000 millennia, it has only grown 60km! The Atlantic has only existed for a minute period of time with respect to life on this planet (IIRC, I've seen Cambrian fossils at about 900 million years, and I believe they have found signs of life dating back even further). Humans have only been in existence for a short period of the Atlantic's life. Humans as we've known them have only existed for a short period of that time.
Temperature change is more dramatic on geological time scales. However, the planet is still recovering from the last ice age, with isostatic rebound lowering water levels in the Baltic, and tilting the UK so that Scotland rises and southern England sinks. An ice age only represents a small change in temperature. This occurs over a long period of time... we're making similar temperature changes in a few hundred years.
Sure, things have changed dramatically over long periods of time, but the rate that we're changing things could very well be too fast for other forms of life on the planet to evolve and adapt. The laws of our free societies aim to protect others from our actions. However, there are few laws in the environmental arena to do the same - the changes are relatively slow and often effect people thousands of miles away. I don't have any respect for selfish c**ts like George W. Bush who disbelieves in global warming and states that Americans have the right to protect their way of living. It's a dreadful shame that the recent environmental conference in Europe didn't succeed and get new legally binding agreements while Bill Clinton is still in the White House. As the rest of the world follows America's example, we will increase the rate of environmental change. Maybe you won't see the changes over your life time, but what gives you the selfish right to lay the foundations of ecological and environmental destruction for future generations?
Yeah, what about the cows? Cows passing methane sounds like another case
of the "mad cow disease". Is this nature's revenge on man?
Not long ago they threaned to hijack whole summit.
AC is AC
Simple fact: Humans (in industrialized nations mainly, and the U.S. primarily) are causing changes in the earth's climate. This is having a very significant effect on weather patterns and sea temperatures. We've made a damn big hole in the ozone layer and the temperature change is now killing off coral reefs. This is due to a 1 degree temperature increase over a short period of time. The temperature is expected to increase up to another 14 degrees in this century, a very dramatic increase for such a short period of geological time. This will likely cause extremely destructive weather patterns, along with melting ice caps and the resultant sea-level changes that will flood many lower areas of the world.
I could go on, but I've said enough to make my point. We, as people living in industrialized nations cannot simply deny our effect on this planet. We cannot just say that we believe that we can survive it, and to hell with those poorer people and nations that probably can't. They'll lose their land and their lives. This seems acceptable to those who claim that what we do doesn't matter. I guess they have to find some way to justify their position. Profits might be negatively impacted otherwise.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Yeah, and that was the important tidbit of information you were supposed to take from the article. The fact that the name of the paper might confuse it readers. But I guess if anyone would have actually went to the link, IT WAS THE FUCKING "THE TIMES" WEBSITE!!!!
>Worse things have happened and will happen to the planet.
Feeding the trolls... oh well, here's a simple analogy for you. I am going to die some day. Just because that is true does not mean it makes sense if I consume quantities of poisonous substances, thus expediting the process. Bad things have and will happen to the planet, but that is not justification for continuing things like global warming, ozone depletion, etc.
JAMWiki Java-based Wiki engine
Wow! That's two degrees per day!!
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
>No, I haven't done my research. Have you?
Yep, but more by accident than an active search. No it wasn't activist or political crap. Check out the guy who was awarded a Nobel prize for his ozone layer research, and read up on why it earned a Nobel prize. Can't remember his name, but that's a good enough start with today's IT at your fingertips, (though I get the impression there might be another prominent ozone scientist who won a Nobel but for a different field (not ozone related) of his work).
Anonymous coward's comments display a stunning
ignorance of atmospheric physics.
Yes, most CFCs are released in the northern
hemisphere. But their atmospheric lifetime is
much longer than the mixing time of the
lower atmosphere, so the concentration in
the southern hemisphere is only slightly
lower.
Given that, why is the hole in the south? Because of the lower temperature and presence
of ice crystals in the stratosphere there pulls
NOx out, deinhibiting the chlorine radicals.
(There are also some reactions of the chlorine
radicals themselves on the ice crystals, enhancing
their effectiveness at destroying ozone.)
This chemistry is well understood now.
The willful ignorance of the CFC apologists
reminds me of the idiocy of young-earth creationists. The intellectual content
is about the same.
i can see what you're saying, and agree with it mostly, but i think you're missig them a little. the 'natural state' for a human is as much to be aged and frail as to be young and sprightly but still old people are healed as far as they can be of their 'old age'; this is because this healing constitutes not a 'natural state'; it would be far more 'natural' to let ageing take it's course; but because old age is unpleasant, as with skincancer... so 'heal' is a acceptable word to use.
Going way back to my earlier post I'm still left wondering about 2 significant questions that I haven't yet seen answered.
First off, how can anyone make a prediction about an effect by only measuring the cause? I'd be feeling a lot different about this if they had said they've measured more ozone and less CFC's in that area. Some kind of cause and effect connection to what is being looked at.
The other point I've raised has to do with the mechanism for transportation. How the heck are chemicals from the northern hemisphere getting shoved to the south pole without the help of trade winds? Whenever I see this discussed it always seems to get lost in a lot of chemistry formulas explaining how CFC reacts with ozone, which isn't the point. How does it get close enough to that area of the world to get a reaction is what I'd honestly like to know.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
Mr. Slippery:
...but to build stable, safe, durable, non-Chernobyl-able reactors, since fallout tends not to respect national boundaries.
There are designs, they're just experimental.
A reactor is not a power plant.
(didn't Israel destroy what Iraq claimed was a fission power plant?)
Israel destroyed an Iraqi research reactor which was constructed (in secret) for the purpose of producing weapons materials.
[Fission is] only an alternative for nations we trust to not only not use the tech and fuels to enhance their nuclear weapons programs...
Nuclear power tech has nothing to do with nuclear bomb tech. Any nation with sufficient resources to embark on a bomb-building program can do so without any nuclear power plants, and if they had nuclear power plants it wouldn't help them. The bomb materials can be produced by reactors dedicated to that purpose. These reactors are far easier to build than power plants and would be the easiest route for obtaining bomb materials. Reactor tech is out there and any nation that has any hope of making bombs already has it.
First world countries shouldn't build good nuclear power plants, because if they do, third world countries will build bad ones? And if first world countries don't build nuclear power plants at all this will prevent third world countries from building bad ones?
Oh, and do you want your neighbor to bury nuclear waste near their border wth you?
It wouldn't matter if they did since high-level nuclear waste is rendered essentially non-toxic by being buried.
Keep in mind that in 500 years the dump may be forgotten...
In 500 years, high-level nuclear waste is less radioactive than the ore it was mined from.
Not to mention that digging uranium out of the ground is hardly enviromentally friendly.
Actually, it's quite environmentally friendly since so little of it is required to produce adequate amounts of power. And digging it out of the ground and running it through a reactor produces a net reduction in radiation -- radiation which people would otherwise be exposed to in the form of radioactive radon gas, a natural decay product of uranium, seeping out of the ground from natural uranium veins buried there.
Source
Are you saying that giving these people fusion technology is any better? Fusion bombs are a lot bigger than fission bombs (I realize that the by-products of fusion are useless in an H-Bomb, but the deuterium used in fusion is very useful. Having the technology to do something is half the battle.)
get a life
Physician, heal thyself.
--
Too much slotting of 'Highlander 2' maybe?
B-)
How the heck are chemicals from the northern hemisphere getting shoved to the south pole without the help of trade winds?
...how can anyone make a prediction about an effect by only measuring the cause?
Well, two main things here:
First, there are still enough poleward-directed winds set up by simple imbalances to give a significant transport, even across the equator. Storm systems can significantly change the basic state of the atmosphere and move materials poleward and equatorward even if the basic state would not allow them to.
Second, there's still diffusion going on. Granted diffusion is a slow process, but it's still important on longer time scales.
On average, it takes, on average, about one year for any parcel of air in the troposphere in one hemisphere to get to the other hemisphere. Also, in the stratosphere, diffusion is significantly more important than in the troposphere. So, these processes together will tend to mix the CFC's from the Northern Hemisphere to the entire globe.
That's a good question, and one that brings up a good point about most of these arguments, especially with the ideas of correlation and causation.
As it might be obvious, the two are not the same. Just because two fields are correlated does not imply that there is a causation between the two. For example, one could correlate the rise in the Dow Jones Industrial Average with the rise in global average temperature, with probably a surprising high correlation. But if you were to say that the two are therefore intimately related, you'd be laughed at. Thus the phrase "Correlation is NOT causation!".
To make the correlation into a causation, you need to explain the mechanisms that explain the correlation. So, in this case, the explanations are the chemistry which happen between CFC's and ozone (more importantly, between halogen radicals and ozone). I'm going to refrain from actually giving out the chemistry here, but assume that it is good chemistry and that it really works that way. Then there is some argument for causation.
Also, when you look at the chemistry and take a few other things into account, the causation becomes a little more apparent, but not without taking into account many other things. This problem is not a direct causation, but it's pretty close.
If you're interested in a little more of a detailed explanation of the chemistry and dynamics of ozone depletion, I might be able to point you in a good direction or answer some questions. Feel free to e-mail me. Trust me, the media tends to really dumb down the science, which is fine, but people then should have the full science available, and explained to them if they really want it. The moral here is that the media is only giving the tip of the iceberg on almost every scientific problem. There's so much more there in every case.
Hope that helps,
-Jellisky
But I don't understand the "nuclear proliferation danger". I doubt the coal exaust is really that much use for making nuclear weapons!
This article repeatedly renders Netscape inoperable. YMMV.
--
<offtopic>
not to confuse it with the ny times, or the [insert you're own reasonably large city here] times, etc.
What does it say on the masthead?
It says "The Times". Whether "The New York Times" is known by locals as "The Times" is irrelevant. If you need clarification as to which one, parenthesise it.
For a board that craves accuracy, you can't accept pedantry in one place but not in another.
This obviously is a tough concept.
</offtopic>
Bit like the concept of reducing output in the face of dire warnings. Whether the ozone hole will close up or not, it's pretty shameful of the developed world to be considering "buying" quota to force the third world into cleaner habits than we have.
--
"I do not speak for my employers, though they are controlled from my Teddy's huge pulsating brain."
The simple fact of the matter is that we don't have a great deal of data in either direction. We have only been paying attention for the past hundred years or so, and the best data is only from the past 50 years.
Drawing conclusions based on so little reliable data borders on religious zealotry, IMO. To Believe that we have any responsibility to, or indeed that we are even capable of, maintaining any kind of ecological status quo is arrogance of the first order.
We, and our effects, are simply not that important.
Nephs
Dont know how they managed it, but their site completely kills the page rendering in my netscape (linux, ns 4.73). After loading a blank screen, all sites are blank until I kill -9 netscape and restart.
Am I used to this type of thing with netscape for linux? Does the ozone layer have a big hole?
Sneakemail is to spam filters what an ounce of prevention is to a pound of cure.
--
hell ya brotha! seasons grit'ns to all!
well, you just suck
All generalizations are false. KABOOOOM!!
Now, if someone could let these people know, that'd be great-- I'm sure they'll be reassured no end!
Andrew
P.S. Let me nominate the whole global warming thing as the biggest display of wilful head-in-the-sandness in human history.
Ozon depletion is still somewhat skeptical. There is a newsgroup devoted to its discussion. Some argue that the ozone hole over Antartica is natural, something to do with the ice crystals. Others argue that the ozone hole and its relation to CFCs became a big media event around about the time that DuPont's patents were running out. That sort of makes sense, they hold the patents on the replacements.
I am not convinced by the paranoid, claiming conspiracy. I trust that NASA knows what it is doing, you can see images of the "hole" on there website(s).
Nuclear fission is not the energy we need to expand on. The U.S.A. has not effectively answered the question of radioactive waste disposal. Plus, what are the long term effects of all that gamma radiation?
Nuclear fusion may be part of the answer, but there is still radioactive waste in the form of reactor components. It would be a nice replacement for coal and oil powerplants, in my opinion.
I am from a northern state, with lots of wind, and I am still wondering why wind generators are not more prominent here. We seem to rely to heavily on coal. Of course the loss of our reliance on coal seriously impacts the jobs of many people, but I don't see why they couldn't learn the new task of maintaining solar powerplants.
Conclusion: Ozone depletion is real, we may not know the exact cause, but there seems to be a correlation with CFCs.
Renewable energy is something we need to expand on: wind and solar power.
British Scientists Full of Crap, Say American Researchers
History is re-written by the losers, at least by the Americans when they lose.
:)
Anyone know where the "inbred with bad dentistry" stereotype came from? The worst sets of teeth I ever saw in a 'developed' country were in America.
The same country that has the highest rate of inbreeding-related congenital deformities in the first world.
But of course statistical information, like history, is re-written by the losers...
grab your ankles bitch
It is true that nature can adapt, but it is far from clear that the rate at which natural processes can change to accomodate our fouling of the environment will be sufficient to sustain life. Take a trip down to the Ecology or Zoology department at your school and talk for an hour with someone who studies how the natural world works.
I am not sure where you got the idea that I disagree. My position is that I simply don't know and I am not really qualified to have a strong opinion either way.
What really bothers me is the attitude of the scientific establishment and the environmental lobby towards the dissidents. They have a valid opinion that needs to be investigated properly. Instead they are ridiculed, denied grants and instead of countering their claims their opponents often resort to personal attacks. "Everyone knows that the ozone hole is a result of CFCs" and anyone who says otherwise is therefore insane. But how come "everyone" knows that? From a sensationalist newspaper article quoting a controversial study it suddenly becomes Instant Truth - maybe because it fits the agenda of some very powerful organizations.
From my point of view, both sides are still theories that need more proof and deserve further efforts.
----
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
fuck you faggot master
the future of the ozone hole is strongly dependant on the future of our climate. and there are indications that the climate change will affect the ozone hole in a negative manner. we must not wait and do nothing.
Good 19th century thinking, when population was low & we (for the most part) did things on a scale that couldn't have significant impact on the earth (one exception being lead). These days people are frequently pouring stuff into the environment on global scales.
People don't seem to get the concept of "order of magnitude". This isn't 1850. If we're the major producer of a toxin, there's nothing magic about the earth that will make it just go away.
The ozone problem hasn't just gone away. It's decreased precisely because of the environmentalists you're whining about.
You got the point.
But I think some companies are happy to sell you a new frig. It sometimes goes something like this:
Science:Behold, we have a solution. A new type of refrigrant.
Buisness:Surely I will sell it. IF there is a market for it.
Consumer: Oh, it's so damn expensive and I already got a working one. And since I can't see it, it can't be bad. And anyway, even if the tree-huggers are true, what does it matter what I, a single person, do?
Likewise DTD, nuclear power, fossil fuel, a.s.o.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
Yes, the rock we call Earth will still be here no matter what we do, and it will almost certainly harbor some form of life no matter what we do. But we could destroy the current ecosystem, and we certainly could destroy ourselves. It's not so much the planet (which is safe from our actions), as the planet-as-we-know-and-need it (which isn't), that we have to protect.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
To a certain extent, science did, at least in the beginning. It went something like this:
Science: Behold! I give to you refrigeration! Not only can you make hot climates comfortable, you can store and ship foods and medicinces like never before! Imagine what this will do for vaccination efforts!
Mankind: Pretty cool. But this ammonia refrigerant! It's nasty stuff. Can you give us something non-toxic and non-reactive?
Science: Behold! I give you CFCs! They're inert and nontoxic and make a great refrigerant. A miracle of Modern Science! Use them to make plastics! Use them in spray cans! A thousand and one uses!
Mankind: Great!
Time passes...
Science: Um, about those CFCs...we goofed. Turns out they aren't so inert when they float up into the upper atmosphere and get exposed to UV light. Bad things start to happen.
Businessman-kind: Dude, I've got a billion-dollar spraycan business going here. You said this stuff was a wonder-chemical. I'm not cutting my profits because you changed your mind.
Science: Dude, we're talking about major environmental damage here. Skin cancer for everyone. Maybe the total destruction of the ecosystem.
Businessman-kind: Sez you. You don't know that for sure.
Science: The only way to know 100% for sure is to wait a few decades and see what happens, by which time we'd be too fscked to fix anything. We're as sure as we can be at this point in time.
Businessman-kind: Well, our scientists disagree.
Science: Your scientists either suck or are paid off.
Businessman-kind: You're a bunch of pinko commies! Commies! Commies! We own this planet and we'll fsck it up if we want! It's our property and you want to take it away! Commies! Wah! Wah! (aside: They might be able to convince the government. Better start making continency plans...maybe we can even rack up some patents on CFC-free refrigerants. There may yet be profits to be had!)
Exunt all.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
It's really nice to hear good news from time to time, especially on issues that really matter - like the environment. Media is so concerned with the negatives, just because they catch attention.
I'm a little segfault, short and stout.
Guess why we are shielded from UV. It's because O3 is hit by short waved em-radiation (UV) and transforms it into lower energetic light. It's a balanciated reaction. The problem is that CFCs among others do shift the balance to O2.
>What we'll have to wait and see is how long it takes before the levels of CFC's drops to a tolerable level, and I think that's going to be nigh on impossible to predict.
Hmm, maybe you should stay on a road and wait
till the mass-momentum passes a tolerable level.
Maybe take a look at Australia, they probably don't find a further reduction of the ozone layer tolerable.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
How come this is offtopic and yet every other post that has nothing to do with the main subject is OK ?
Netscape on Linux seems to have problems displaying this link for some users, but Konqueror seems to display it fine (hope you have it.)
Hee hee. Environmentalists get so touchy when you challenge their religion.
Main point of my comment was to note the use of the language, and the implications of using the word "heal". Another common misuse is the phrase "fragile ecosystem." As if it could break and then we wouldn't have an ecosystem. Of course, any change would "break" the ecosystem as it exists today. By the same token, since change is inevitable, it will inevitably "break" regardless of what mankind does. Of course, it's a continuous process, constantly "breaking" and adapting, and new balances are formed constantly.
While we're on the subject of misusing the language, the very term "ozone hole" is incorrect. There is no hole, there is no place on the globe where there isn't an ozone layer. What is observed is a polar region where it is (and always has been) thinner than at the equator, and that the characterisitics of that region are changing. But the "thickness" of that region changes gradually from the immediate polar area, where it is thinnest, to the equator where it is thicker. There are no edges to the "hole", no boundaries. To say that the "hole" is a certain size is an arbitrary declaration.
Without delving into the scientific discussion, I think one should learn to see these sorts of linguistic tricks, and learn to be wary of them. Often they are used to convince you of something, and changing the language is an insidious way to manipulate public opinion. Both nazism and communism promised "freedom," but they did so by perverting the meaning of the word.
>no we dont. no more than any other organism on this planet and I don't see them doing anything to save the rainforests.
First, they are doing all they can to save the rainforest. If you'd leave the rainforest all alone it would (hopefully) recover.
Secondly, you're suggesting that if I killed you, I'd be perfectly in my rights, since you're not capable of protecting yourself. I'd say no, since we are sentient beings.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
...like the o-zone!
A: Given the amount of energy required to mine and process uranium from the Earth's crust, nuclear fission is actually a less efficient form of power than traditional coal-fired power plants.
B: The energy expended in mining and processing (which is far more intensive for uranium than for any form of traditional fossil fuel) comes in the form of fossil fuels. This resurrects the problem of global warming, which you purported to solve. Furthermore, fission is not a sustainable model (ie. we can't do it indefinitely) due to the large input required in the form of fossil fuels, so neither environmental impact nor sustainability has been addressed.
C: Chernobyl
D: Three Mile Island
E: What were you saying about fission being "one such power source" that has "little environmental impact?"
F: The inventor of the LISP programming language does not qualify as a source. He is a programmer, not a scientist, not any qualified authority on energy or sustainability.
G: If you want to contend that an accident on the scale of or larger than Chernobyl will not occur, you're a moron. The fact of the matter is, it cannot be guaranteed that an accident or deliberate attack or earthquake or unforseen incident will not occur. Worst case scenario with solar or similar sources of power, power goes out. Worst case scenario with fission, power goes out and thousands die of massive radiation leak.
H: Remember that fission reactors are basically controlled A-bombs... even fusion is a better idea, given its far lower likelihood of massive explosions scattering radiation over FEMA's "ingestion area" of 7,500 square miles.
The question, then, is:
In light of the fact that other, cleaner and more sustainable sources of energy exist that lack even the remotest possibility of massive damage to the environment,
IS FISSION WORTH THE RISK?
---sig---
The United States has cut its annual ozone output from 306,000 ozone depletion potential tonnes (ODP tonnes) to 2,500. The 12 nations that were then members of the European Union have reduced their use from 301,000 to 4,300 ODP tonnes, while Japan has cut its output from 118,000 ODP tonnes to zero.
So earth has not "healed itself" - a concerted effort to repair the damage has been made and (according to these scientists) will likely succeed.
Some of the changes we make to our environment are causing us problems. If we want to get rid of these problems then we need to do something about it. If your drinking water makes you sick, you can calls this artifical or natural, it doesn't make any difference. The only thing which makes a difference is cleaning up the water supply.
So don't waste your time with debating the names of these problems, the real issue is how to fix them.
"nothing like the symbiosis achieved by the rest of the world's organism"
I see this time and time again stated as one of the bad things about humans. But this simply is *not* true. How the hell did it come to be a common (and incorrect) knowledge that all animals form a natural balance with their enviroment? Was it the line from the matrix?
If this were true why would one deviation of a genetic path win out over another? Wouldn't they form a balance?
What about forms of plants that overrun others? How is this a balance?
What about sharks, which will eat a place empty and then have to move on?
The simple fact is that there are *very* few balances in nature. People that keep saying that there are either don't want to admit this or haven't done much research on their own. They take something said somewhere and go with it because it supports their cause.
--- I do not moderate.
Just to show you how old this information is, one of the guys that discovered the "hole" checked the current data and saw that it was growing larger. So he checked the info from the 1500s when Anartica was found and compared it to the situation then.
It turned out that in the 1500s it was much bigger than it was when they got more recent results, but it was shrinking. I even think the scientist went so far as to state that the hole "repaired" itself over time.
What is sad about arguments for a better enviroment is that no one has stated exactly what is a "healthy" hole. Or even if their objective is to eliminate the hole. I think we should just accept the darn thing and get the "real" data on what is going on rather than the "doctored" stuff.
Once data from "both" sides starts looking the same, I'll make my decision about what is wrong and what isn't. Till then, I honestly don't know.
how many mod points were lost on that thread? was anyone keeping count?
Ok.. but who is to say global warming is bad.. maybe if we cause global warming it will hold off an ice-age that would have wiped out more people/animals/plants/whatever?..
But I don't understand the "nuclear proliferation danger". I doubt the coal exaust is really that much use for making nuclear weapons!
Coal-fired power plants collect large amounts of hazardous solid waste from their combustion of coal. This solid waste contains the fissionable metals necessary to produce nuclear weapons. From the article I linked:
snip
no we dont. no more than any other organism on this planet and I don't see them doing anything to save the rainforests.
Climate has always shifted but within a balance,
Yeah how about that ice age...that was pretty balanced.
To deny our responsibility for our effect on the earth is selfish.
Whats wrong with selfishness? It's pushed people to do amazing things whether it was for money or acknowledgemet.
If it wasn't for selfishness I wouldn't have this high paying job that I do nothing at except post to slashdot, because if I wasn't selfish I would have conceded to one of those poor unemployed bastards that was interviewing for the job as well.
Selfishness is a right given apon every person by being able to have free thought and free will. If you choose not to be selfish it's your own loss...and my gain.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
mod this: +1 Funny
Hammer of Truth
Not to mention that digging uranium out of the ground is hardly enviromentally friendly. (Yes, some claim enough could be cleanly and cheaply extracted from seawater, but AFAIK that's even farther from reality than practical fusion tech.)
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I'm really glad to hear that, and surprised to see that government INDEED cared about it and helped to reduce the CFC levels.
However, much more important environmental problem is the Greenhouse Effect & the global warming. It would cause terrible effects in the future, and it's even beggining now.
AFAIK, it won't be as easy as reducing the CFC levels is. It's mainly happening because of fossil fules usage, and it's pretty difficult to stop this and start using some other energy source. Maybe when the oil & coal in the world will be finished, world will also start some 'cooling effect'. I hope so. as I read not a long time ago, unlike what I thought, this effects start to affect earth already, and in the next decades we will really see the effects, thus even if the ozone hole won't be recovered, it'll be a minor problem for us.
but we can't curb our consumption and waste when our lives are on the line.
Sad indeed.
--
+&x
Going to a particularly politically-correct school (which I absolutely abhor, I hear ecological arguments all the time. Get a grip, people. Humans are not creating "artificial" changes in the way the earth operates. Humans are animals, and thus natural, just like everyone else. We change our environment to suit are needs, as most animals do; and when we "create" chemicals and substances, the reality is we're just remixing what we already see. Who knows. Polyurthene may be a naturally growing tree on some other planet.
My point is, the green view is nice, but I really don't think it's necessary. Given time and a little patience, the planet is more than adequate at adjusting itself back to its center.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
>>What we'll have to wait and see is how long it takes before the levels of CFC's drops to a tolerable level, and I think that's going to be nigh on impossible to predict.
> Hmm, maybe you should stay on a road and wait > till the mass-momentum passes a tolerable level.
>Maybe take a look at Australia, they probably don't find a further reduction of the ozone layer tolerable.
And your proposal to prevent further reduction of the ozone layer is... ? We've already reduced emissions of CFC's, there's not much more we can do but wait. It's not like we can send up a giant vacuum cleaner and suck up all the CFC's already up there.
A: Given the amount of energy required to mine and process uranium from the Earth's crust, nuclear fission is actually a less efficient form of power than traditional coal-fired power plants.
Dr. Helen Caldicott says this. (For those who don't know, she's a physician, founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility, author, public speaker, and anti-nuclear {both of them} activist.) She says she gets the data from a Friends of the Earth Study of which she says:
The fuel for nuclear power plants is extremely power-dense and therefore requires negligible amounts of power to mine, process, transport and subsequently re-bury after it is used. This is reflected in the cost of fuel which is, in 1987 dollars,
B: The energy expended in mining and processing (which is far more intensive for uranium than for any form of traditional fossil fuel) comes in the form of fossil fuels.
Pound for pound it may be more energy intensive, but not energy unit per energy unit. Again, this is why the fossil energy input is negligible and therefore the price of fuel (per energy unit -- not per pound) is so low.
C: Chernobyl
A power plant of a design called RBMK which is intended to blow up and hurt people when operator mistakes are made. We don't use these designs in the western world, though we had one at Hanford for quite a while. It was permanently decommisioned right after Chernobyl sent us its not very subtle warning.
D: Three Mile Island
An excellent power plant (considering it's age) designed to not hurt people when operator errors are made. Witness, operator errors were made and the ECCS (emergency core cooling system) operated as per its design. No one was injured and no one came close to being injured. Thanks to Three Mile Island, newer power plants are designed with an increased emphasis on providing critical and accurate information to the operator. This is among a myriad other improvements that have been made to an already, as was stated, excellent design.
E: What were you saying about fission being "one such power source" that has "little environmental impact?"
Nuclear fission has the least environmental impact kilowatt-hour for kilowatt-hour of any electricity generation technology in existence.
F: The inventor of the LISP programming language does not qualify as a source. He is a programmer, not a scientist, not any qualified authority on energy or sustainability.
I find he has an amusing writing style and he provides references for his words. Quoting a scientist in the field wouldn't be any better since he might be considered a maverick by his peers, unless he put forth a convincing argument that he was merely presenting the opinions of the overwhelming majority his peers -- as Bernard L. Cohen does, complete with survey statistics.
G: If you want to contend that an accident on the scale of or larger than Chernobyl will not occur, you're a moron.
An accident far larger than Chernobyl, killing 3,500 people outright, is predicted to happen once in every 100,000 meltdowns. This is according the Dr. Norman Rasmussen (of MIT) led Reactor Safety Study who's famous final report in 1975 was titled, "WASH-1400". The advanced reactors of today are many times safer than the old reactors assumed in the study. It should be noted that 3,500 people died in an air pollution episode in 1952 in London caused by coal-fired power plants.
The fact of the matter is, it cannot be guaranteed that an accident or deliberate attack or earthquake or unforseen incident will not occur.
Yes. We can't guarantee safety, but we can guarantee that nuclear fission is calculated to be the safest form of electrical power production. In other words, we can guarantee that the odds are with you when you choose nuclear power. In fact, it can be guaranteed that it is calculated to be safer than going without power, or even anything more than minimal energy conservation -- something which turns out to be surprisingly deadly, both for humans and the environment.
Nuclear disasters can happen, but their infrequency makes nuclear power by far the safe choice. Bernard L. Cohen, from p. 286 of The Nuclear Energy Option:
Worst case scenario with solar or similar sources of power, power goes out.
Solar in any of it's forms represents substantial risk to human life. Because its "fuel" is so diffuse, the plants must be massive and therefore require massive amounts of labor to build. Construction is highly hazardous labor. Maintenance labor is similarly massive and similarly hazardous. If we're talking about PV panels, there is hazard dealing with the chemicals in the factory, dealing with the hazardous waste from that and dealing with the hazardous waste from decommissioning. Cadmium sulfide is highly toxic and 60 people will die per solar power plant year of operation because of exposure to it.
Fusion is a worse idea because it costs substantially more. This makes it substantially more dangerous. Expensiveness of electricity is quite lethal.
IS FISSION WORTH THE RISK?
Absolutely.
At least that's what I always think when it looks like one of civilization's problems involving unpopular change of behaviour by humans is in the process of being solved/going away. I try to imagine what would happen if a major news organization would put this on the wires: "Global Warming Stopped - Greenhouse Effect Checked". Even if it's true - it could be, if emissions were stopped now, in fifty year's time or so - the public effect, I believe, would be terrible. The first reaction on a headline like that would be "Great! So I can forget about that..."
-- H. Wilker
The truth is often inconvenient. Who are we supposed to believe, the people who still think pollution comes with no consequences? NO The people who tell us to go live in the forest? NO The people who have changed their mind again and don't like living in the forest and say "who cares about the planet, it's inconvenient (who needs grandkids..." OR People who say technology needs to be applied with the brain engaged. Cautiously, Intelligently, YES G.
"Sometimes you've got to kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight" Bruce C0ckburn
As someone who lives close to this hole (Tasmania, Australia), I have noticed the change for myself. I hope they are right because I am sick of getting sunburnt in less than 1/2 hour. I have also noticed the effects on vegetation here. I know my comment is not scientific, but you just need to ask a few people around here & there's general consensus. I couldn't figure out what was going on until they finally published that there was a hole in the ozone layer. Why we feel the effects despite us not being directly under the hole beats me, but it is noticeable.
What was true is that the trace amounts of uranium and other elements, when multiplied by the huge quantaties of coal burned, and with the rather efficient method of spewing it into the atmosphere that we used to use, produced far more radiation than most plausable nuclear power plant accidents. Environmental activists are notoriously bad at weighing relative risks! Unfortunately it sounds to me that modern pollution-control may have cut the ash so much that this rather good argument is no longer true. That old radiation is now collected at the plant in the ash, where it is no longer threating people (or not any more than the spent fuel at a nuke plant, anyway).
From your description it sounds like nuke defenders, instead of giving up on this argument, have mutated it into something that, honestly, I find a little hard to buy.
To help those with a less than adequate education who would be totally confused if it was refered to as "The Times". It may be correct but we have to do our bit to help those that are intellectually challenged.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
I think that there is something very important not being said here. Global warming is still going to be a problem. Global warming is not caused by ozone depletion and will continue, predictions right now are of up to a 11 degree increase in the next 100 years.
A blog about stuff.
You are missing the point to a stunning extent. I can't belive that this got voted up.
Natural vs. Artificial is an arbitary distinction. If we had a massive nuclear war, you could argue that it is a product of nature just as we are. But the real point is that it *would kill us all*, people, cows, bengal tigers, redwood trees and the rest. We have a choice here.
> We change our environment to suit are needs
Sometimes. Sometimes we accidentally fuck up our enviroment through ignorance and short-sighted greed. Are you seriously suggesting that the ozone hole was a deliberate change?
Who gives a flying f--- if ozone holes are natural or not. The point is that they harm us in the long term and across the whole planet. We caused them and we can stop. The green view is one that puts *our own long term good* over short-term, local gains.
> I've always argued this point, and I'm glad to see one more argument to back me up.
And how does a new calculation on the duration of ozone holes back up your "argument" that we are a part of nature?
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Almost everything contains traces of elements like uranium. Is this coal dust really a better source than if the bad guys just dug up their own dirt, or if they processed the coal on purpose to extract uranium rather than burn it to produce electricity?
ORNL:
What was true is that the trace amounts of uranium and other elements, when multiplied by the huge quantaties of coal burned, and with the rather efficient method of spewing it into the atmosphere that we used to use, produced far more radiation than most plausable nuclear power plant accidents.... Unfortunately it sounds to me that modern pollution-control may have cut the ash so much that this rather good argument is no longer true.
When the particle precipitators (filters) we have been using since the sixties are working properly, they filter 99.5% of the fly ash. In other words, even when they work, they hardly work at all, so coal-fired power plants both collect lots of radioactive material as solid waste and release lots of radioactive material as aerial pollution.
Since no fusion power plant has ever been designed, much less built
Check out the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor at Princeton (decommissioned in 1997):
http://www.pppl.gov/projects/pages/tftr.html
-Bruce
no, it said "the London Times" implying that "London Times" is the title of the paper. In fact, the paper is called "The Times" (both capitalized). Nobody in the UK calls the paper "London Times". Anal and OT.... sorry
Ozone science is less theoretical than you seem to think. It's not just a case of "well, CFC's can cause it, so we'll stop using them and see it corresponds to a change in the hole" or any such useless garbage. (though a lot of people prefer to think that this is exactly what scientists do when they're studying environmental problems that said people don't want to take responsibility for :-)
I've long had a problem with understanding how northern hemisphere emmissions
could cause anything but a northern hemisphere problem.
The CFC's on their own don't do anywhere near as much damage as they do when they set up their reactive camp on the surface of an ice crystal. The atmosphere above Antartica has a lot more ice crystals high up in the atmosphere, and so the global pollution hits there first and hardest.
(Allready you can start to see that there are many seperately measurable elements, such that theoretical predictions can be made, reliably tested, and confirmed well beyond the vague guesses that the industrial lobby likes to pretend is the case).
See http://www.junkscience.com/news/iccp.html
:-)
for more information
Wake up man. "Junk Science" is a corporate front, mainly for disseminating propaganda. Its backers and funding reads like a "who's who" of the worst polluting and environmentally distructive industries. And its history gets a hell of a lot more sordid than that.
Don't be a sucker - always check your sources.
(It's not like Junk Science is even subtle propaganda - it's so flimsy and unbalanced that it only works on people who really want to believe it.)
And if it didn't instantly set your warning bells ringing, checking out the so-called citizens "group" that runs the site should have confirmed that you were dealing with something very dodgy.
I'm not putting forward an opinion on your patent conspiracy theory, I'm just saying that citing Junk Science to support your theory is like citing White Supremacy literature as supporting evidence for a theory that the Holocaust never happened
The customary way of referring to the Times when clarifying for people is The Times (of London), rather than the London Times.
Most Enviromental causes are thinly disguised anti-American, anti-technolgy plots that are almost terrorist organizations,
Correction: The industrial lobby in the USA is so powerful that it can portray even things like Kyoto as anti-American when they are so blatently not.
Can you believe it - Europe says "We want cuts of 12% for all developed nations" (eg including Europe), the USA says "F*ck off - that's enough that we'd have to convince people that efficient engines were Good and SUV's were Bad. Screw that, we'll just tell them that Europe was being anti-American! - you can't be much more anti-American than opposing gas-guzzling cars".
Seriously though, these causes are not anti-American - they require everyone to make changes, and the USA is copping a lot of flak for being so unwilling to do anything. While this does make it easier for interest groups to portray things as anit-American, the reality is that there is nothing of the sort - the only thing anti-American is the ill will that the USA generates by its own actions with it's repeated refusal to change even half as much as everyone else is already prepared to do.
Okay, so these folks have concluded that CFC's have gone down in this area. Got that part. Exactly where do they actually measure the actual effect that this is having on the thinning of the ozone layer? They state they measured what the theoritcal cause is of ozone thinning, but not the thinning itself!
It's my understanding that this hole, or thinning, has been down around Antarctica for quite a while now. Perhaps longer than what can be adequately explained by wide spread CFC usage. Even according to this article, the hole is continuing to expand.
So what happens if after all the major industrialized nations drastically reduce CFC output and this hole continues to grow? Then what?
I'm willing to admit up front, I'm no atmospheric expert. I've long had a problem with understanding how northern hemisphere emmissions could cause anything but a northern hemisphere problem. For that matter, how do you manage to get ground based CFC's that high up in the atmosphere considering their weight?
I do hope these guys are right on the money and that all these efforts will result in a more stable atmosphere. I would just feel a little better about it if the measurements reflected the effect, not what we believe to be the cause.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
Why does it show a HUGE concentration of ozone just to one Side of the South Pole? It looks to me like the
:-)
Ozone for some reason just isn't GETTING to the South Pole.
The bottom line is that while CFC's may be bad, and they may harm Ozone in general, our use of them most likely contributed little to nothing of the decline or proposed recovery of the ozone.
The bottom line is that you haven't read up on ozone research
That the hole is in the south pole rather than above developed areas precisely confirms that it is man made, because (this summary is oversimplified almost to the point of falsehood) it coincides exactly with the atmospheric conditions required for non-naturally occuring ozone depleting chemicals to shift into top gear and really get stuck into the ozone. And when those conditions change, the ozone hole changes with them, which poses something of a problem for the head-in-the-sand idea that non-manmade forces are the big players.
Fine. There was a certain shift in the winds this year down in Tasmania that led to lower readings of CFC's. Come back in 5 years and tell me that there has been a sustained reduction in the level's of CFC's measured and it might carry more weight. What concerns me more is that it seems that it has taken me less than 15 minutes this year to succumb to my first bout of sunburn down here in Australia. It seems to get easier and easier to get sunburnt at the start of summer each year. They should stop doing dubious press releases based upon marginal information like this one simply to justify their jobs. They should come back when they have actually measured greater levels of ozone for a few years (when I'm not getting burned so easy). Then I might be impressed.
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There are quite a lot of scientists who say that the ozone hole over antrarctica has nothing to do with CFC emissions. They claim that volcanos emit 600 times more ozone-killing chlorine into the atmosphere per year than the entire CFC production of mankind at its peak.
Ozone is created by sunlight. Sunlight is abundant near the equator where light hits the atmosphere at higher angles and that's where most of the ozone is created. Ozone coverage above the pole depends on whether there are enough jet streams to get it from the equator to the poles. The ozone heretics claim that a well-known priodic weather phenomenon over the south pole creates a pocket of air that doesn't interact much with the rest of the atmosphere and that is the real reason for the hole. This pocket is occasionally broken up by atmospheric turbulence and fresh ozone gets to the pole.
Even if the ozone heretics are correct and all the environmental scientists and world governments are deluded perhaps this is still a Good Thing: it's the first time that people realize that their actions have global consequences and that they can actually make a difference by changing their behaviour. If global warming is real (and there are enough scientists who claim it isnt...) people could point to the ozone example and show that "it worked".
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Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
What is sad about arguments for a better enviroment is that no one has stated exactly what is a "healthy" hole.
If, like me, you are currently living under it, a "healthy" hole, much like a "healthy" dose of gamma radiation, is one that is "as small as bloody possible!".
The sun is nasty here...
You know, this is the only positive news about the environment I can recall ever reading.
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Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
"The Times" is inspecific, regardless of its official nature, or who had it first.
Bzzzzzt.
"I'm going to have to stop you there, as you're already wrong and the rest of what you say is based on an already proven incorrect premise."
"The Times" is perfectly specific, if you want to confuse the issue by abbreviating other titles to one that has no other title, that's your look out.
You would be wrong, but that's your perogative.
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"I do not speak for my employers, though they are controlled from my Teddy's huge pulsating brain."
Ozone depleation is much easier to tackle than global warming; while ozone depleation is primarilty caused by a nonessential and easily replaced chemical, global warming concernes energy generation, and there's no technical solution today which might solve the problem, and without a technical solution political solutions become much more difficult to design and implement, as well as being disliked by a good number of people. The solution, as far as I'm concerned, is in nuclear fusion. It's the only power source which has litle to no environmental impact, and because it can produce such large amounts of electricity, it solves problems all the way down the chain - electrolisis to seperate hydrogen from water would become environmentally sound, making fuel cells workable, and so forth.
Why worry about volcanoes when in reality methane causes far more ozone depletion.
Surely overpopulation in the world leads to greater ozone depletion than the odd volcanoe ?
Its not just us humans either, the proliferation of cows for food production, significantly adds to the ozone depletion caused by methane.
Oh well just my Denari
Who else has got the hots for Katherine Harris? I know I certainly do!
Marks out of ten I'd give her one.
The name of the paper is "The Times". You can't rename a 200 year old publication just on a whim, it's pretty rude.
:)
If you're aiming for clarity, calling it "The Times" (London) would be less misleading.
Boring conversation anyway
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The harder you look the less you see. That's what we're up against.
Mind you, this story was in the Sunday Times, which is....less intellectualy rigorous than The Times. Hey - that puts this message on-topic!
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
Ahhhhh it's good to have a good laugh on monday morning thank you mr nice guy ! bad green hippies can't tell the truth huh ?
"human are animals..." "human are not creating artificial changes"... a good mix of verity (we surely are not other things than human) and counter-verity : do you know something about eco-system ? regulation ? homeostasis and stuff like that ?
surey earth can compensate the dagradation that we are making (i can speak hours and hours about them if oyu want) but this regulation can signify our death !!! regulation doesn't mean no changes and when earth is chaniging everthing can be erased see ? like dinosaurus for exemple...
aaaahhh thank you again...
ptitom
I agree with your hatred of "political correctness" (I go to an Ivy league school which will go unnamed, except to say that Ralph Nader *shudder* spoke here last night), and I agree that the planet tends to move towards some kind of equilibrium.
Unfortunately, the planet (and of course by "the planet" I am referring to all the myriad species which inhabit it) can only react so fast, and the balance that is eventually reached may or may not bear any resemblance to the equilibrium of 500 years ago, and may or may not be inhabitable to humans. Natural beings are perfectly capable of rendering their habitats uninhabitable, and it is a danger we humans run all the time. Bacteria do it all the time, by killing their hosts. "Natural" does not mean "bullet-proof." :)
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
> And I have no idea what you're on, let alone what you're "on about". Is that a valid construction in some English variant from another dimension? ;)
;-)
;-)
Yes, it's a contraction of "going on about". I don't know if it's a valid construction in any English variant, but it is valid [0] in English
Mike
[0] Valid meaning common usage. You'd be flayed for using it in a school essay though
Tales from behind the Lagom Curtain
They've been fighting over this for years now: Will it heal itself or won't it?
I must have heard it for about O 3 times now...
- if you love something, set it free; if it doesn't come back, hunt it down and kill it
Memorandum - all posters in the future will now refer to any newspaper as The Paper and link this to the actual story to avoid any further confusion and pissing off the British.
IANAM( meteorologist (?)) but although this sounds like promising news Im not convinced. If you are an expert please correct this post. Couldnt the result of the closing of the ozone hold be simple osmosis? This is a hypothetical explanation of something that I probably dont understand, but here goes:
If the planet is covered w/ a 1m layer of ozone, except for a 10% area that is the hole at the poles - what we are experiencing right now is simple osmosis. Sure the rate of ozone depletion has been abated by the efforts of the worlds Big Polluters (cited in artcle), but is new ozone being created to replace what has been lost? Will the result of our efforts be a world with a 80cm ozone layer vs a 100cm ozone layer? Also, the article dosnt say but what 'creates' ozone? (thought it had to do with upper atmosphere & lightning) Also, will the resulting 80cm ozone layer not result in a weakening of the overall ozone protection and thus an actual increase in UV illness worldwide? Am I completely off base?
Can anyone explain the mechanism by which cloroflourocarbons (heaver than air gasses blamed for Ozone depletion) rise through the lower atmosphere, the stratosphere, the layers of upper atmosphere to finally reach the ozonosphere, then stay up there long enough to cause the harm they are blamed for?
psxndc
"I realize that in Britain you have "wit" while we Americans just have coarse rancor..." -John Stewart to Posh Spice on why she doesn't think he is funny
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
Futhermore, the Times is printed in Wapping... hey, weren't we talking about ozone?
Don't bother, he's not worth it...
We and anything we do is a "nature" too. Spotted owl or a sequoia or a slime are no more "nature" than your computer or a coal burning electric plant.
So, we are not "anti-nature," we are only destroying and replacing one set of natural forms with another set, just as those forms being replaced did to the forms which preceded them. Otherwise universe would have still been a cloud of hydrogen gas, or quark plasma, etc.