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Ozone Hole Getting Smaller
snark42 writes "According to Reuters and some other sources the hole in the ozone layer shrank 20% this year to a mere 9 million square miles. Of course scientists caution this would have to continue for at least a couple more years to be a trend or anything to get excited about."
20 years from now, we'll have discovered there's a natural grow/shrink cycle we never knew about...
While this is good news, I hope it isn't seen by governments as an excuse to ease their environmental burdens in favour of bowing to economic/corporate pressures, and, I really hope it isn't seen as yet another excuse by the US government to duck out for even longer on signing the Kyoto Accords.
I realize the above accords don't directly affect the ozone layer, but, ask anyone on the street - the hole in the Ozone layer and the "Greenhouse Effect" are the same thing right? Maybe the hole lets more heat in or something...
It is a sad state of affairs when one feels so cynical, that the first thing that occurs when a hint of good news comes along, is, how will those in power exploit this?
Of course scientists caution this would have to continue for at least a couple more years to be a trend or anything to get excited about.
Move along, nothing to see here.
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This may be a stupid question *but*...
Why can't we 'reseed' the ozone layer? We can make ozone in a lab, so why don't we get some high flying aircraft and strap some ozone filled bottles to the fuselage and start spraying? It'd be like dusting crops only a lot different.
Although, it is good news that the hole is smaller.
Reporting this suggests everything will be OK in 5 years - 20% in a year - just 80% to go hey!!
... certainly 20 years, actually I never claimed.' 'THANK you very much its 8:59 time for traffic'
Of course this could be nothing to do with anything - and simply be an anomoly, a measuring error, a rogue reading, or true. Until everyone has a basic degree of scientific understanding this kind of news will hit the headlines and be presented as a Good Thing. Which is isn't - its neither good not bad.
A bit like the medical researcher on the radio every few weeks being introduced as talking about a 'newfound cure for cancer' and saying 'this is certainly an exciting development' being asked 'so when will it actually be used to cure cancer' and having to say 'well... possibly never,
International accords have acted to reduce the amount of CFCs being released into the atmosphere. These are the pollutants that affect the chemical ozone cycle. So a decreases in them would permit ozone to stick around. People in Antarctica do get sunburnt very easily, as do people in new zealand and chile when the hole is over their region. Chile has many school programs preventing children from going outside during hole episodes.
It exempts most, if not all, of mainland china from it's rules. Please tell me how exempting the fastest growing, most poluting economy on the face of the planet will make one bit of difference.
Interesting how Freon became dangerous right after DuPont's patent on it expired. There is nothing new under the Sun.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
It's because it's an election year. Once the year is over, the promises of more ozone will be broken.
Yes, and we're part of the cycle. We stopped making CFCs 10-20 years ago when we proved they destroy ozone, and now the hole is getting smaller. How much more correlation do you need, after laboratory and in the wild, to stop denying the science that is saving your life right now?
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Because ozone is created by the interaction of O2 and UV radiation. It's not some finite mass of rare elements. It's O3. The reason it's "coming back" is that human activity has a negligible effect upon it. The "hole" is a cyclical phenomenon more closely related to solar activity than anything else.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
The Earth is fairly resillient, much more so than we humans are. The Earth will survive just about anything we do to it, but we are at risk. The argument that there are no (or minimal) dangers ignores the fact that skin cancer exists. It ignores the fact that there is a hole in the ozone. The Montreal Protocol has been a major step forward to eliminating/minimizing those chemicals that we know deplete the Ozone layer.
The other thing that may contribute to the Ozone layer growing back would be global warming, as the ozone depletion effect requires very cold temperatures to do the spectacular damage it has done to the pole. (see Univeristy of Cambridge.)
Some interesting facts:
InnerWeb
Freud might say that Intelligent Design is religion's ID.
uhzzz.....do a little research please ozone is created when UV light from the sun strikes O2 (oxygen you breathe) and forms 2 O3 (ozone) from 3 O2. Magical isn't it?
-- Checking emails and kicking cheats `till the day I die.
Generally, it takes Aqua-net approximately 15 years to escape the earth's atmosphere. The residual Aqua-net from 1980's groups like the Cure and Poisen , as well as teenage girls, who are now fat 30-somethings, has escaped the stratosphere. So long as fashion trends to not revert to high bangs and glam-band hair... we will survive.
We plan to allow the UV/ozone/oxygen balance to reach equilibrium by not destroying it any more with pollution. That means letting volcanic CFCs consume the excess ozone that might otherwise poison us or something else in our energy/food chain. We evolved to live in a balanced environment that flucuates within a window kept stable by overlapping natural cycles. When we change that balance, that environment, too quickly, by boosting one of the cycles to the detriment of another, we are no longer as fit to survive in the new environment. In related news, we also plan to allow various species to reproduce before hunting them to extinction, so we can continue to eat them.
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And where did you get the idea that China is the worlds largest polluter - "common knowledge" is that it is the US by a long golden chalk.
I stand corrected, I was just wandering around trying to find a reference to to worlds worst polluter and had great difficulty finding it. This material just isn't that commonly available - people not interested in it?
After great effort, I found this which contains the phrase "China is the second-biggest producer of greenhouse gases, after the United States".
This is also worth a read - containing the line:
Furthermore, the U.S. for over 20 to 25 percent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions, for just 4 to 5 percent of the world's population.
I strongly agree with jeffehobbs above though, progress is progress with or without the US, China (which I didn't realize to my own discredit) and India (apparently).
Ok, on to the next conspiracy...
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
This was in the news at least 2 or 3 years ago (here on Slashdot, I believe). Sounds like a trend to me.
If he had signed the Kyoto Treaty, how much bigger would the ozone be now? I shudder to think about it...
Four more years!
It's OK! I'm a limo driver!
... russia only approved the Kyoto Protocol just yesterday!
This is my sig. There are thousands more, but this one is mine.
".... mankind has been very lucky and that things could have been truly catastrophic, with an "ozone hole" occurring everywhere, if industry, instead of chlorine, would have produced similarly large quantities of bromine-containing compounds...."
s /koopmans_crutzen_2003.html/
http://www.iiasa.ac.at/Admin/INF/lectures/Koopman
Simple chemistry, unknown at the time industry chose to use chlorine, marginally cheaper, over bromine, in freons etc.
Bromine in those applications would've wiped the upper ozone layer worldwide.
Oh, and the 'skeptics' (Hogan)? -- note the dates on those pages being proffered and the elevation of the effects described. That parrot's dead.
Highlander II already said this in 1991.
So, lemmie get this straight:
The hole gets 2% bigger, scientists freak out, instantly blaming pollution and saying we need to change. Then, when the hole shrinks by 20%, "scientists caution this would have to continue for at least a couple more years to be a trend or anything to get excited about."
Is it just me, or does it seem these scientists are protraying the facts in such a way to continue their funding?
Aside from the expense of making the attempt (can you imagine the size of the water sprays you'd need to cool volcanic steam emissions and keep them from getting into the stratosphere?), it just isn't that important. Volcanic emissions of sulfur aerosols fall out of the atmosphere within months, and their impact is quite limited; free halogens liberated from halocarbons have residence times measured in years, if not decades.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
- As the IR opacity of the atmosphere goes up, the depth of the troposphere (the part where heat is transferred by convection instead of radiation) increases. This cuts into the size of the stratosphere and decreases the amount of air in it, and thus the ozone it can hold.
- As the IR opacity of the troposphere increases, the stratosphere cools and conditions become more favorable for the formation of the ice crystals which are the most damaging catalysts for the destruction of ozone.
HTH. HAND.Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Could this have something to do with the increasing collapse of ice shelves in the Antarctic? Perhaps there is some relationship between the Ozone hole beginning to shrink and the collapse of the Larsen B Ice Shelf, which both coincidentally happened in 2002. Maybe the collapse and accellerated glacier movements triggered some environmental chain reaction that affected the Ozone hole, but in a superficial way that temporarily masks a continued climate change.
Of course, you could always go back to using sulfur dioxide or ammonia as the working fluid in your refrigerator (yeah, right); CFC's were used because they didn't kill people when they leaked. Some European hardware, not being constrained by ill-considered safety regulations as we are in the USA, uses isobutane to this very day.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
C'mon, he's right. The reaction to a 20% increase would have been a resounding condemnation of all human industrial processes plus a descrying of all nations that haven't signed on to Kyoto, etc.
Maybe what it all means is that we still have very little understanding of our environment and that any statements to the contrary are really politically motivated.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
I lived in China for a while. The Hong Kong/Guanzhou area makes LA seem like the swiss alps. They have just as many cars, and worse environmental standards. And massive, unregulated factories.
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"Of course scientists caution this would have to continue for at least a couple more years to be a trend or anything to get excited about."
Of course if the ozone hole got BIGGER by even 5%, we'd hear about it and feel guilty, wouldnt we? Where is the front page story about the fact that something GOOD is happening? We need more news like this to be exposed. Frankly I think that the global warming naysayers are correct, and anyone who thinks it's anything more than a global climate change (In fact its getting COLDER Where I live) is just out to get big industries, imho.
Of course scientists caution this would have to continue for at least a couple more years to be a trend or anything to get excited about.
Isn't it funny that when there is good news about the climate, "scientists" tells us that we shouldn't "get excited about it," yet when there is apparently bad news, these same scientists demands that we must act "before it's too late."