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Sun Storms Deplete Ozone, Too
An anonymous reader writes "Turns out the sun itself zaps the ozone that protects us from the sun. LiveScience is reporting that the record-setting string of solar storms around Halloween in 2003 (including an X28 flare) set off a cascade of events that depleted the ozone layer over the Arctic in early 2004. In a nutshell, more nitrogen was created, and an unusually strong vortex of high-speed winds aloft brought the nitrogen down, where it contributed to cutting ozone by 60 percent over the polar region. In January, the a European scientist warned residents of the far north to basically stay out of the sun. While chlorofluorocarbons are still blamed for ozone depletion, scientists said this study shows they don't properly account for the sun's impact."
Do not look at record-setting solar storms with remaining good eye.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
man has yearned to destroy the sun.
I'm done using their Java. Here I come Microsoft.
There is only one solution...
Nuke the sun.
Let us now see how long it takes for someone, either on a slashdot thread, in the public discourse, or on talk radio, to take the jump that "multiple factors exist in the depletion of ozone" immediately leads to the conclusion "claims human interference are a significant detrimental factor in the depletion of the ozone are false"
You have to hand it to chlorofluorocarbons... All those years in the pokey and they never fingered their co-conspirator - the sun.
I'm a big tall mofo.
You would find an article in the latest Scientific American interesting:
How Did Humans First Alter Global Climate?. It's a controversial theory how humans have been altering the global climate for thousands of years, since the invention of clear-cutting forests for agricultural purposes. I found it a very interesting read, especially the theory presented by the author (here comes a troll modding for even parroting this theory) that early humans have actually caused us to avoid an ice age because of their global warming activities.
I'm a big tall mofo.
...this means in any minute now we'll get one of those charming "See? We don't need to worry about things in the environment being damaged by man-made processes, because it happens by itself anyway!" posts. Well, before that happens, I'd like to pose a question. Namely, if things have the potential to break, and if nature can break things on its own...how does that justify anyone making it break worse than it would just by itself? Using this logic, it would be okay if a factory artificially generated tornados all the time because, hey, it happens in nature.
Save the galaxy!
In our next story, the drafters of the Kyoto Protocol have revised the agreement so that solar storms count toward each country's polution limits.
Testing to see if something depletes ozone can be done in a lab. It's really not speculation to say that CFCs destroy ozone.
With winters getting warmer every year, it's only a matter of time before we are up to our necks in industrially poisoned ocean.
It's interesting, though, that with all the talk from liberal groups like the Sierra Club about how industry is the culprit, that we come to find out that it might be the SUN ITSELF that's depleting the ozone layer! In the wake of the recent CBS debacle, maybe it's time we started viewing such activists with a more suspicious eye.
Maybe it's time we stopped looking for more problems on earth, and start looking to controlling threats from outer space -- threats like solar storms and asteroids. With our current level of intercelestial preparedness, it would take only one oversized meteor or a solar storm to fry this intergalactic backwater we call earth to a crisp. We need to step up efforts to expand orbital missile defense and lunar and martian defense outposts or we'll have only ourselves to blame when some freak cosmic event destroys life as we know it.
A Proud Member of the Reality Oriented Community.
Such is the way of the world. And please be able to take care of the joke.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
If you missed the Aurora Show this fall, you missed something special. The Aurora were intense and visible in most urban places. (Including me in Minneapolis)
For information on when flares and aurora are possible, see the following pages:
aurora alert- http://www.xs4all.nl/~carlkop/auralert.html/
for more of a daily "this is cool stuff in space" see
SpaceWeather.com http://spaceweather.com/
Fun Stuff.
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
Recent events have showed us that we MUST cause a regime change for the Solarians. No longer must they live under the titanical rule of Sunddam Hydrogen.
This evil dictator has created weapons of mass destruction, and has used them against nearby planets. A few years ago, we had them open their weapon factories to us so we could be sure they destroyed them all. But it has now come to our attention that they have weapons that could destroy the entire world.
We can NOT stand by and let them do this. We must unite and attack them before they can destroy us. Anyone who is not with us, is with them. There is no other choice.
The Earth must attack Sol.
Would you kindly mod me +1 insightful?
Wow....massive environmental changes can be caused by...OTHER ENVIRONMENTAL changes!
This has been my biggest gripe with environmental groups. Almost none of them take into account the fact that the Earth has radically "re-organized" itself (for lack of a better word) several times BEFORE man ever came along, and we don't yet understand how or why. We've had several radical changes in global temperature, sea levels, atmosphere composition, etc, most before man ever walked the Earth.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Indeed, the sun is in fact about half of the cause for ozone depletion involving CFCs. That's because that when CFCs drift up into the stratosphere photons, in their selfish and inexorable rush toward the earth, smack into them and bust off the chlorine . For shame, Mr. Sun. So, rather than eliminate the CFCs and thus the chlorine that breakz ozone down into 02 and free oxygen, we would do just as well to put up a Mr. Burns-style sun blocker. Now that would stop global warming. I gotta say, though, I'm really not willing to make the implied trade, I think I'd miss the aerosol hair spray a little less than food.
High in the atmosphere, some oxygen (O2) molecules absorbed energy from the Sun's ultraviolet (UV) rays and split to form single oxygen atoms. These atoms combined with remaining oxygen (O2) to form ozone (O3) molecules, which are very effective at absorbing UV rays. The thin layer of ozone that surrounds Earth acts as a shield, protecting the planet from irradiation by UV light...Ozone is produced naturally in the stratosphere when highly energetic solar radiation strikes molecules of oxygen, O2, and cause the two oxygen atoms to split apart in a process called photolysis.
Linkage
So, yeah, the sun is the bad guy, but really, the sun is the good guy, too. =)
Ah, the old "sometimes true = always true" argument.
Nobody, including the guy you're responding to, denied that CFC's deplete ozone. The question is, to what degree are CFC's responsible for the measured ozone depletion we've seen over the past 20 years or so.
Nothing in a complex system is black and white. The whole point of this article, and the poster you replied to, is that this is a good example of why it's overly simplistic to link CFC's to ozone depletion and to believe that, therefore, reducing CFC emissions will necessarily have a significant impact on the rate of ozone depletion.
More evidence is always good. Jumping to conclusions is generally bad. Black-and-white answers to questions raised by complex systems are generally flawed. Simple as that.
Cheers
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
... why I don't believe the "Global Warming is being caused by greedy corporations" spiel..
And what does Global Warming have to do with ozone-layer depletion?
These are two completely seperate phenomena.
quite simply, it's because most people (scientists included) quite simply don't have enough information to say for a FACT that THIS or THAT is causing ozone depletion
Wrong. CFCs do cause ozone depletion. That is established. The mechanisms of how CFCs catalyze the degradation of ozone into oxygen are fully understood. It is something you can easily reproduce in a laboratory. This has been done many times. A Nobel prize was awarded for this. They don't give out Nobels for things which aren't considered to be well-established.
You are confusing this issue with global warming, which is far more controversial, and something which is far less easy to know with certainty.
As for the quote:
"While chlorofluorocarbons are still blamed for ozone depletion, scientists said this study shows they don't properly account for the sun's impact."
It is also correct. But what they are saying is that the extent of ozone destruction due to CFCs wasn't correct before, since they didn't take this factor into consideration. It does not mean that CFCs don't destroy ozone. They do. And it's no theory.
CFC's are incredibly heavy. In order to reach the ozone layer, the CFC's have to be super-heated.
The ozone cover of our atmosphere is a dynamic process meaning that ozone is formed and destroyed at a constant rate as we speak. True that solar flares cause it to be destroyed but such phenomenon does not happen too often. In the time span between two such events the ozone can re-create itself. On the other hand, destruction of ozone by human made CFC's, freons, etc are spontaneous and hence causes permenant depletion.
Fact: the article was about the ozone layer, not the greenhouse effect, and the two are largely unrelated (other than tropospheric ozone levels contributing to the greenhouse effect, but that was not what the article was about). The parent post is offtopic, not insightful.
and yet we had a melanoma incidence rate of 1 in 150,000 in the 1930's and it's around 1 in 75 now. Yeah, it's all part of natural world and nothing to do with the rate of industrialization.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
It's ok that the Earth radically re-organized itself in the distant past before humans came along.
It's not ok from a human standpoint for the Earth to radically re-organize itself now.
Really, we should do everything in our power to keep the Earth rather like it has been for the last 10000 years.
Think for a second... Has anyone PROVEN that there has EVER been an "ozone hole" ANYWHERE but at the poles? Like right over ANY of the industrialized nations that emit CFCs?
Not to my knowledge or in any scholarly tract I have ever seen.
It took until NOW for someone to think, "Hmmm... maybe the sun has something to do with the ozone layer..."
The idea that a dynamic world affecting power source could create AND destroy isn't new. Witness the ring of fire in the Pacific Ocean. Subduction destroys, magma release renews.
One wonders how any could miss the fact that the known ozone depletion spots happen to coincide with the planet's magnetic poles and thus where loads of solar charged particle radiation ends up, having to pass through the same ozone that the sun itself created.
This isn't a troll. This is simple exasperation at the endless "human kind is responsible for all ills that plague the world". I'm sure superstitious islanders of the nineteenth century who survived Krakatoa agreed with that, but it ain't necessarily so.
There seems to be some obsession among some people with the idea that everything should always remain as it is right now despite the fact that our own science proves to us that the world was different in multiple different ways over vast periods of time before we were ever a kink in the dna and logically will be short of our intelligent intervention and massive effort.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
The following are facts:
CFCs, when subjected to UV, destroy ozone.
CFCs are present at ozone-layer altitudes. This has been detected by (among others) the NASA ER-2 high-altitude aircraft.
Not to mention the fact that the ozone layer has recovered since CFCs were banned.
This is not something which is up for any kind of real debate, unless you want to revert to pseudoscience. This is not the global-warming issue. This is something substantially different and far simpler and less speculative.
This "theory" has got a few problems. First of all we know without a doubt that for the last number of decades the major source of solar radiation - the Solar Energetic Particle events (SEPs) - are quite modest. This is known from ice core samples. I've seen the reports of the data myself and it's quite conclusive. In a nutshell our current space age has occurred during a very quiet, very benign time. To attribute solar sources to any current trends is ozone depletion is simply disregarding the data. While solar events certainly do effect the ozone to attribute any such current depletion is FUD.
"Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations"
It claims: The ozone layer has recovered since CFCs were banned.
My point is we don't really know. Nobody has been watching the thing long enough to understand it's habbits. Have we been monitoring it for a full solar cycle (only with ground level UV tests if that). It could all just be noise. Ozone holes could be normal, or they could be much worse then previously realized. You do realize most stratospheric ozone is produced by UV hitting O2? You'd kind of expect holes during six months of darkness.
Further you realize CFCs were banned globally in what 1995? Refrigerants are still leaking.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
more nitrogen was created
Somebody please explain to the poster how elements work.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
.. is the "we ain't screwing the planet" lobby starting to sound like the tobacco lobby in the late 70's / early 80's ?
"There's no definitive proof that smoking causes lung cancer..." Remember that one?
Hmmm.
We ain't going to Mars until we fix what we've done to this planet!
Stevo
Forget the truth. Science is fact.
The reason the ozone holes form above the poles and not directly above the CFC source regions is due to the very cold atmospheric conditions at the poles.
Source
It should serve as a lesson to you that your actions can have effects beyond your backyard.
Most scientists I know recognise that there are "natural" components to phenomena such as the ozone holes (eg volcanic aerosoles) and global warming. The concern is that human activities may exacerbate the effects and that the rate of change may be much faster than would otherwise be the case.
If you ever wonder what affect humanity's actions have on the world and our society, look at the ruined land due to salinity in Australia.
What is the inverse of the Matrix?
The sun/cosmic rays create ozone at contant rate X. The sun/atmospheric reactions destroy ozone at rate Y. The rates will also have a factor proportional to the amount of ozone.
If you don't understand what the above implies, read it again.
HINT: You get a steady state solution. A type of a balance where the ozone layer will tend to average out to a certain value over a period of time.
What CFC do is increase the rate of destruction of ozone. That will decrease the amount of ozone over a period of time. The ozone will never dissapear, but you might just need a SPF 75 sun screen to be in the sun for more than 10 minutes.
Also, if you don't understand, the result gives more detail into what rate X and Y might actually be. That's all!
The "theory" about CFCs destroying ozone is a fact. It's been shown and reproduced over and over again the lab experiments. Saying otherwise is like saying that atoms don't exist.
In January, the a European scientist warned residents of the far north to basically stay out of the sun.
In January, residents of the far north have no choice but to stay out of the sun.
No wonder no one took him seriously.
In January, a European scientist warned residents of the far north to basically stay out of the sun. Um..hello? There is no sunlight in the far, far north during the month of January, just ask anyone in Barrow, Alaska. It would be nice to have even dangerous sunlight to avoid.
Some things about the article seriously bother me, like "creating nitrogen" and "nitrogen gas is known to destroy ozone". If the most common gas in our atmosphere destroys ozone then why does it exist at all? Nitrogen (not as a gas) is important in the depletion process but not as the article implies...
Before anyone claims that humans are no longer the cause for the ozone hole, please realize the depletion was caused because of CFCs. Ozone is depleted as a result of many things, CFC is one of the key components and is a non-natural factor. The increased UV and polar vortices that were a result of the solar activity along with a colder winter increased the depletion, but, it would never have happened at above natural levels without CFCs.
Please read: A simple explanation that I posted a while back and a more complete explanation on how the ozone hole is formed.
These chemical processes are extremely well known: We know that CFCs are the cause, we know that there are a lot of them near the ozone layer, we know they are man made. Therefore, we know we are the cause. All that these researchers found out is that these conditions will speed up the process, not that they are the cause of the process.
It is unfortunate that even with the CFC ban it will take 100-200 years for the ozone hole to repair itself to pre-industrial era levels...
Patrik
----------
Just your ordinary BOFH
http://killertux.org
It appears large amounts of discussion here are happening with people not understanding anything at hand. I will attempt to clarify some things to the best of my ability. Please excuse me if this is not as great as it could be, as my source here is my memory augmented by google.
The atmosphere is a very complex thing in both composition and behavior. For purposes of this slashdot discussion, though, about the only important thing about its behavior is that different gases exist in different compositions in different parts of the atmosphere, and these different gases block and reflect different frequencies of radiation. (Most of these gases exist in a cycle, where they are emitted out of the earth, usually by volcanic sources, then slowly fall out of the atmosphere, and are subducted back into the earth, where they're eventually re-emitted.) There are two specific important aspects to this. The first is a layer of ozone which blocks certain higher frequencies of incoming radiation from the sun. The second is a layer of "greenhouse gases" which block a lower frequency. This lower frequency of radiation is not so much important coming from the sun; however, it is important because when radiation hits the earth, it is absorbed and re-emitted as "longwave radiation"-- and this radiation has a frequency such that it is partially blocked by the greenhouse gases, keeping it inside the earth. All of this is very convenient for the forms of life currently common on earth, since the higher frequencies the ozone keeps out are harmful to this life and the lower frequencies the greenhouse gases keep in provide useful heat, keeping the earth from just being a big ball of ice like mars is. Perhaps if the atmosphere were different, life would have evolved differently and less or more heat, or more high-frequency radiation, would not be a bother. But it is the forms of life that live on earth right now we care about, specifically humans.
The ozone layer is the important thing as far as this article goes. The problem is that the ozone layer has been depleting in recent years, starting around World War II, and accelerating in the 60s and 70s. In recent decades the problem has become so bad that the ozone layer actually is developing holes in it, around the north and south poles, mainly the south. This depletion has corresponded with increased levels of chlorofluorocarbons in the atmosphere. Chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, come from a number of sources. For example volcanoes put out CFCs in great quantity every time they erupt. When placed in the vicinity of certain gases-- specifically the gases found in the ozone layer of the atmosphere-- these CFCs catalyze chemical reactions which destroy ozone, converting it to oxygen. An individual CFC molecule, when it gets into the ozone layer, will thus cause this process pretty much continuously, until like all gases it falls out of the atmosphere. There isn't particularly any question about this, as these processes are easily experimentally reproduced. The other thing that isn't particularly a question is that the increased CFC levels from WWII on were a result of human industrial processes. CFC outputs by human industry after its first uses dwarfed the natural sources of same, leading to a continuous and steady increase in cfc levels far beyond what atmospheric processes are accustomed to. By 1987 it became clear that this human CFC output was having a negative impact on the ozone layer, leading to the adopting of the Montreal Protocol, a treaty which drastically reduced human CFC output with the goal of eliminating human CFC production entirely worldwide by 2010. The impact on CFC levels of the montreal protocol was dramatic and immediate; you can see here yourself that as soon as the significant human CFC sources stopped at the end of the 80s, the steady increase in CFC levels flattened out and became constant. (I am afraid this graph comes from a
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Greenhouse gases (linked to global warming) and CFCs (linked to ozone depletion) are not related. Please see my other post in this thread.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
CFCs work by turning O and O3 into O2s. Like all chlorine. You know, that stuff that gets released in massive amounts every time a volcano goes off.
You ever notice that they'll claim 'CFCs have been detected in the ozone layer', but never tell you how much, or what percentage they are versa other chlorine?
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
It is not a fact they are in the earth's ozone layer in an amount that has anything to do with the possible variation in the ozone layer. It's entirely possible that's due to varying sun activity or some other process we don't know about.
And I don't know about volcanos putting CO2 into the atmosphere. I do know that volcanos put amazing amount of HCl into the air, but normally have 99% of it is flushed down with water ejected at the same time. (Which, of course, causes rather a lot of problems to those the acid rain hits.)
However, we have no assurances that will always happen, or has always happened. We know very little about how that works.
All we know is that, after volcanoes, even those that reach the stratosphere, erupt, spewing HCl into the air, the stratosphere does not have more HCl in it, because the HCl, the two times we've managed to watch a volcano that large, was brought back by water. Nothing at all says a volcano can't turn all the water into HCl before going off.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
All we have is 2 decades of data which is like sampling 1 person on this planet and assuming their opinion represents everybody. In summary we know nothing, and claiming that the hole's current growth is being solely caused by Industrialisation is nothing but FUD.
(1) Arbitrarily assign to your opponent an easily defeated argument.
(2) Defeat this argument.
Quick, and easy!
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
No, seriously. The thing about science is that everything has to be proven, and everything _can_ be wrong or superceded by a better theory.
It means that yes, you're _supposed_ to question everything, be it the theory of relativity, or gravity, or global warming theories. That's what science is all about. Trying to see if you can improve the existing understanding of the world, instead of joining the lemming parrade.
The moment you've found absolute truths, evidence be damned, that's no longer science. That's _religion_.
It doesn't matter if it's about Christ, or lung cancer, or global warming. The moment you have your absolute truth and don't need no stinkin' scientists telling you about experimental evidence, or worse yet start accusing them of hidden agendas or being the enemy... congrats, you've reinvented the Inquisition. What lies that-a-way is not science, it's not environmentalism, it's religion.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I consider myself a tree-hugger. That said, the whole ozone thing is a scam by scientists who see bad news as a way to obtain research grants and funding and - dare I say - notoriety masquerading as prestige.
Consider:
1) 90% of industrialization and associated emissions is in the northern hemisphere
2) The coriolis effect keeps the earth's northern and southern airstreams seperate (very little mixing)
So why is the ozone hole over Antarctica? Why not the North Pole seeing as this is the hemisphere supposedly cursed by industry? Use Occams' Razor - it ain't our fault...
Regards...
Alas, I wouldn't trust measurements from thermometers located in urban areas, though. Scientists discovered that when you keep "official" thermometers in urban areas they tend to skew higher due to urban development in the last 100 years or so.
Measurements done at "official" thermometers done at rural locations actually show very little (if any) increase in local temperatures in the last 100 years.
The best, most conservative evidence of the day says that human impact on global warming is negligible, and that, therefore, we really don't need to do anything at all.
Now, of course, you aren't interested in the best, most conservative evidence, because you are all for doing something, anything right now, immediately before we all suffer catastrophic apocalypse.
So much for taking the best, most conservative evidence.
Global warming is nothing more than the latest tool of the ever with us tyrants to put themselves in power and tell you how to live your life.
Remember, the tyranny that makes you feel morally superior is the tyranny you embrace, and the modern green movement is all about moral superiority.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.