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.
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,
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.
Professor O'Neill's point was that ozone levels are being "reduced by concerted action," not by the earth correcting itself. I agree that the earth does act the way you describe to some extent, for example, in response to the growing ozone hole the number of instances of skin cancer has increased, how ever deaths due to skin cancer clearly has not adjusted the amount of polution produced to the effect the the ozone hole is being closed, nor has anything else the earth has done.
As the article states, global cooperation has been by far the greatest factor in helping fix the problem. From 1987 to the present the United States, the 12 nations that were then members of the European Union, and Japan have cut their annual output of ozone depletion potential tonnes (ODP tonnes) from 725,000 to 6,800. Thats over a 99% reduction among major nations.
While the earth is certianly resilient, the total apathy you suggest would clearly lead to a more rapid destruction of the world we live in.
- John McDowell
Black holes are where god divided by zero
Ah, but you miss the real point, which is the curious use of the word "heal." "Healing" implies a return to some sort of normal state, such as when a wound heals, and one's body regains its health. But the planet's environment has no such "normal" state. To what state will the environment "heal"? To the way it was in 1960? Or 1776? Or 1492? or 1066? Or 4004BC?
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.
Furthermore, as time passes and technoloigy advances, our ability to adapt to change grows exponentially. Man now lives in more different environments than virtually any other creature. We live in polar cold, in sweltering tropical heat, in deserts and in forests and on Himalayan mountains. And most of those places have running water and Internet connections. If we were not so able to adapt ourselves to the environment, then we would never have survived as long as we have.
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. Change is the only constant. We will better insure our future if we accept the inevitablity of change and adapt to it rather than try to stop it.
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.