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.
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.
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
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:
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.
Cheers,
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.
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.