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Ozone Layer Improving Faster Than Expected
SpaceAdmiral writes "Since the implementation of the Montreal Protocol, which limited ozone-destroying gasses like CFCs, the Earth's ozone layer has been recovering. However, new studies show that the ozone in the lower stratosphere is actually recovering faster than the Montreal Protocol alone can explain." From the article: "It's a complicated question. CFCs are not the only things that can influence the ozone layer; sunspots, volcanoes and weather also play a role. Ultraviolet rays from sunspots boost the ozone layer, while sulfurous gases emitted by some volcanoes can weaken it. Cold air in the stratosphere can either weaken or boost the ozone layer, depending on altitude and latitude. These processes and others are laid out in a review just published in the May 4th issue of Nature: 'The search for signs of recovery of the ozone layer' by Elizabeth Westhead and Signe Andersen."
This brought to you by the same people who INSIST global warming is man-made and it's time to kill our economy by placing unnecessary restrictions on it.
The world can take a lot more than we small humans are dishing out to it. The oceans alone can absorb 100 times more CO2 than we have ever pumped into the atmosphere without taking a blink. This is just more proof of nature's resilience. Don't bow to the environmentalist hype machine.
We're playing with chemicals, eating toxic foods, messing with nature's balance, wasting or restoring ozone layer beyond our comprehension, using electronics that cause tumors and other illnesses... and in this mess somewhere, the bare truth shines:
we know shit
Look - the chance of everything changing EXACTLY as predicted (by anyone) is almost nil. so headlines will always read:
XXXX is going BETTER/WORSE than predicted.
Really - nothing to see here - please keep moving
Well, the ozone layer is not "recovering" because it was never damaged in the first place. Like they say in TFA, the stratospheric ozone status is influenced by large scale factors such as sun light, atmosphere temperature and chemicals introduced by volcanoes.
Ozone is chiefly created in the hot and well lit tropical atmosphere, from where it conveyed natural up to the poles. Ozone is a very unstable chemical which is rapidly eliminated.
The place where the famous "ozone hole" is observed is on top of Antartica, during the winter, when the atmosphere, cold (it's basically night during 6 months), is isolated from the rest of the world by the Antartica vortex. The ozone is then naturally depleted until spring breaks, which will open atmospheric circulation again and fill the "hole" in a few weeks at most.
The "ozone hole" is therefore a perfectly natural phenomenon, and no amount of Montreal-like measures will change that. No wonder those predictions show completely wrong, which is in essence the really important message of the article.
Maybe we can go back to using CFCs now than the hysteria is over, for CFCs are really a chemical wonder, stable and with unmatched thermodynamic properties.
-- javaDragon is an instance of JavaDragon.
but this is how science progresses. Wherever you see a scientist take a stand saying, "hmm, that's odd, I wonder why that happened" there's a chance that real discovery and a real increase in our understanding can happen.
People who trot out wildly extrapolated results from global warming simulations ("OMG NY will under water by 2100!") sound to me like the same people who predicted city-sized computers back in the 50s because there was no way their simulations could have predicted microelectronics.
Climate is a complex system with many variables, human output being only one of them. Frankly, I've always held the greens would have a much better case if they focused on quality-of-life improvements brought about by cleaner air than by trying to create artificial energy regulations in the name of global warming (which *is* happening, but it doesn't necessarily follow that humans are the sole factor).
But hey, there's a reason green and left politics go together-- sticking it to big industry is a good way of sticking it to the Man.
Go somewhere random
Still, I wonder what part that effort played into the alleged healing of the ozone layer. I'm still personally debating wether I believe all the enviro-nuts out there. At face value, doing whatever we can to preserve the ozone sounds like something we should all be focused on.
Has there been any *real* proof that the ozone layer is being harmed by humans?
E.
That's because HP printers have Ozone Emissions. Thanks HP for saving the World.
My city: Barcelona.
I think it's time to put aside all the tinfoil hats.
This protocol is going to kill us all, with an oZone layer global cooling will occur We Must stop this atrocity against the world as soon as possible
maybe people are farting less :)
that geeks have lost their only excuse for not using deodorant ?
Funny thing isnt it? I remember when I was growing up in the 90's ( Im 21 ) the main thing as far as saving the Earth was concerned was stopping the Ozone hole from getting bigger. The whole global warming was supposedly from the Ozone hole being as large as it was at the current point in time. If the hole has been recovering since then why are scientists blaming mankind for the current increase in temperatures.
Global warming is a natural cycle, seeing as how in the 90's global warming was being blamed on the Ozone hole being as large as it was.
My two cents.
Sometimes, eco-freaks are just plain wrong. I guess they must be smoking some bad granola.....
-----
Why do people get offended when I give them my opinion after they ask for it?
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
The people in the southern reaches of the southern hemisphere do not think it is a hoax: the incidence of skin cancer mushroomed in southern Chile as the hole in the ozone increased. Not the end of the world, but a real and ongoing health hazard.
You say it like you are proud, butI suppose most sociopaths tend to think *they* are the righteous ones.
You are a worthless sack of pig shit, and should be spat upon by everyone.
If the hole has been recovering since then why are scientists blaming mankind for the current increase in temperatures.
Because the ozone hole and global warming are two totally separate phenomena. They are both caused by pollution, but different kinds of pollution-- in simple terms, the ozone hole is caused by CFCs, global warming is caused by greenhouse gases. In the 80s, we stopped using CFCs, and since CFCs take a few decades to fall out of the atmosphere, now that a few decades have passed the ozone hole is starting to get better. In the 80s we did not stop our emission of greenhouse gases (such as carbon dioxide), so global climate change / global warming is still getting worse.
Of course, carbon dioxide takes longer to fall out of the atmosphere than CFCs, so even if we entirely ceased carbon dioxide emissions tomorrow (which we probably couldn't even if we really wanted to without bringing civilization to its knees) we shouldn't expect to see things returning to normal for maybe a couple hundreds of years. But at least we could stop making things worse.
Repairing the ozone hole is not helping global warming for the same reason that if your computer's power supply is on fire, you cannot fix this by reinstalling Windows. If you thought that repairing the ozone hole would stop global warming, it is because you are confused.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I'm a sociopath because I would protect the beaty that belongs to everyone from those who would destroy it for profit? I think you're confused.
Apparently the fumes given off by photocopiers are Ozone. I'm doing my bit for the enviroment by copying documents at work unnessecarily.
My boss says it's a waste of time and money though. He doesn't give a shit about the enviroment I guess.
Nobody has ever satisfactorily explained how stratospheric ozone is any more effective at absorbing UV radiation than the ozone that exists in the troposphere. There is 1000x more ozone in the atmosphere of an average-sized city than supposedly exists in the stratosphere.
Nobody has ever satisfactorily explained why ozone-destroying chemicals would "migrate" to the poles and create holes there.
Nobody has ever satisfactorily explained how periodic holes in the ozone at the poles threaten anyone other than those who live at extreme latitudes.
Nobody has ever satisfactorily explained why the holes are periodic, if they're supposedly caused by human activity. This article the first attempt I've seen to correlate a reduction in the size of ozone holes with a reduction in pollutants, and it conveniently ignores the fact that the holes have inexplicably shrunk and grown several times since they were detected.
Why don't you just protect your own beaty and leave everyone else's alone?
I'm sorry, I must have got something wrong...
How exactly does this differ from our current situation?
Smog excluded, this is what every room with a smoker present looks like to me.
Ignore this signature. By order.
You don't live in the southern hemisphere, do you? I used to live in southern Brazil, now I'm living in Spain. In the first few days I was here I could already tell the sun burns much, but much less here than there (and I had thermometers both there and here, so I say it's not the temperature). Reports were saying that the ozone layer where I used to live were already 27% thinner than what it should be. I couldn't go to the beach without a 50 FPS sunscreen. You say "bullshit", but I say "skin cancer risk".
So say we all
The best lecture on global warming I've ever read is this:
s _quote04.html
http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speeche
If you are going to do something, it is best to know what it takes to screw up your endeavor before approaching sucess.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
I'm a rabid environmentalist
The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem.
Although decisions about balancing conservation with economic benefits have already been made democratically you choose to elevate your own opinions above the collective opinion of others. As a result of your self granted position of superiority you then choose to break the law and endanger the lives of employees of the timber and construction industry who are (after all) only trying to provide for themselves and their dependents.
And you think the GP is confused - geez . . .
The point is that most of the CFC was produced in those handful of western nations. These handful of western nations is responsible for the biggest junk of consumption and for an even bigger junk of production. Hence what they decide to do affects the world significantly. What Mexico does is important too - but much less so. Fact is that the CFC emissions dropped dramatically. There is no need whatsoever to bring it down to zero.
Now seriously, don't let anyone ignore one of the sentences in the article:
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Thanks NASA, I'm confused now. Lets not slap the public with too much cold hard science at once. A diagram of the earth wearing sunglasses might help me understand how that can help it prevent skin cancer and other maladies. My two year can think of a better opener -- "I've got new shoes" seems to be slightly more informative.
"Do the chickens have large talons?"
"Boy I didn't understand a word you just said."
Autonomous Retard -- Is your camp safe? UnsafeCamp.com
Can this guy ever get a break? He just released a movie called An Inconvenient Truth telling us that the sky was falling. Now we learn its staying right where it has always been all along even with Chimpy McHaliburton in charge. My God, the next thing you will read is that the ice is getting thicker in Antarctica and Greenland.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Must be the better methods of detecting skin cancer and the wider access to medical services over time. If more people are being examined, more conditions will be found.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Well, I'm so glad you're a "rabid environmentalist". Too bad you're incredibly stupid as well. Do you realize that spiking trees only causes more of them to be cut down to replace the spiked ones (the spiked logs are rolled off and discarded -- wasting wood), the production of more steel saw blades to replace the ruined ones (causing more mining and energy usage) and the artifical increase of all wood products?
All this, just to satisfy some inner glee you have at causing a short and wasteful disturbance in the production line.
Don't hold back. Tell us how you really feel....
Waste of a perfectly good human carcass if ya ask me.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Funny you mention that. I never heard an answer for that very simple question posed in some scientific magazine waay back in the 80s. If CFCs are responsible for that 'hole' and more than 90% of it (and pretty much any industrially used chemical) are used in the northern hemisphere, why then is the hole x times larger at the south pole? IMO, the 'ozone hole' might just be the biggest pile of bullshit in the history of science.
I agree that the logic is lacking. Brewer-Dobson and other circulation patterns don't allow much mixing of atmospheric gases between the northern and southern hemispheres. And the isolation of the polar stratospheric clouds within the polar vortex during the winter (when the hole appears) only makes the argument harder to swallow: it seems that ozone in the antarctic stratosphere is more sensitive to local conditions than to anything in the US and Europe.
Add to that the acknowledged lack of an ability to project ozone depletion, and you simply cannot claim that "the ozone hole is the result of CFCs from industrialization":
It sounds more than a little like the global warming fiasco to me.
Sorry man, but what you mean is: nobody has satisfactorily explained these things to you, personally. You got to read up on these things if you want to understand them. Each and every one of these effects has been discussed at length in scientific and popular literature.
Since we have reduced CFC's in the past 20 years one would assume it would do something.
You know... We don't use CFC in our hair spray, styrofoam, air conditioners, and so on anymore.
Considering we've cut back so much... Wouldn't you think that would explain the ozone recovering?
That are we have more pirates these days.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
It was just a natural cycle all along.
Man is not nearly as important to this universe as he would like to believe
I have been trying to filter through the conflicting reports over the years to decide what I believe about the condition of the ozone layer. It seems that there are several contributors to the condition and we don't have a good handle on their interactions or significance of contribution to the depletion or recovery of the ozone. If I understand correctly this article would have me believe that if I make a personal sacrifice to "help" the ozone layer it may contribute but my failure to make that sacrifice may be outweighed by some naturally occurring phenomenon that keeps the environment in balance...
If real science can't explain how the hole in the ozone is repairing faster than predicted then junk science doesn't have a chance with "global warming". (i'm sorry, it's "climate change" now)
Another article also notes that the city (can't remember which) with the highest level of skin cancer is exactly the same distance from the south pole as Washington DC is from the north pole. Last I recall, the ozone hole didn't extend over DC.
Promoting the attemtped murder of hard working men is hardly a righteous position. Modern logging industry is no less damaging than your average farming. The fact that you are proud of your position shows how psychotic you have become.
There are many far more important issues in the world that you CAN impact without resorting to mutilating hard working people.
Why don't you try contributing to the world, rather than trying to destroy it? Perhaps if you disagree with logging... ultimately the use of wood as fuel and building materials... then maybe you should work towards finding an alternative building material or fuel which will reduce the demand for wood?? Or lobby for changes to building practices to use less wood? (or click the paper-reduction act in your next hard core game of Sim-City!)
The fact is that wood is a very economical, renewable source of building material, fuel, paper and a lot else. Most of the paper sold in the US today comes from Lumber Farming... fully renewable.
Get your facts straight and get a life. Stop promoting violence against hard working men.
No you're a sociopath because you gleefully engage in activities that can kill people.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
So yeah, the planet is ridiculously big, and it's unimaginably old. But there are a lot of us, and we are going to town on that atmosphere.
First the ozone hole over Antarctica. Is just idiotic. Sure it's there, but here's why. Ozone is produced by sunlight striking oxygen in the stratosphere, it splits and forms a heavy bluish gas O3 Ozone. Ozone is destroyed by UV radiation striking O3 in the stratosphere, breaking it back into single O, which then instantly forms into a combination of O2 and O3. Ozone is like the froth of water at the beach, it's always going to be there. You have to completely remove the water, or remove the beach to get rid of it. And just like the beach the amount of froth depends on the waves coming in, they change on a cycle with the tide. Well the sunlight striking the earth changes too. It's a 100 and some odd year cycle. The peak of that cycle was 1995. right around the time scientists noticed the thinning and holes. As we move away from 1995 the thinning will continue to go away, the holes fill in, and the planet cool until 100 years from now it will be global cooling not global warming on everyone's lips. Most of the ozone is produced over the equator, because it receives more consistant sunlight. So the Ozone that is produced is warm. Antarctica is a huge deep massive sheet of ice. It produces a very cold air above and around it. (Sailors discribe it as an instantanious wall, warm one second then get out the parka the next when sailing to Antarctica.) It's dark 6 months or so of the year because it's above the antarctic circle. Cold air displaces warm air. That's why a hot air balloon can float. The cold air of antarctica displaces the warm ozone out of the area. Since it's dark for the 'winter' months, no ozone is produced because no sunlight hits the area. Scientists have repeatedly stated, that the hole seems to fill in around October. (antarctic spring) and reform in March or April (the onset of winter). The hole isn't going anywhere, it's exists only because of the cold air. The north pole does not contain anywhere near as much ice, so does not experience the wall of cold that antarctica gets, so it is only thinning there during the winter months when it's dark.
It's all Bush's fault!
It's been pretty well demonstrated that the damage to the ozone layer was helping to keep the earth cool. If it repairs itself, global warming will happen even faster! Quick! Everyone back to air conditioners that actually work and armpit spray! Hurry! Hurry!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The original poster made it more clear, we know shit.
How much more CO2 is in the atmosphere since the industrial revolution? 1/10th of a percent on the high side? So if every single molecule of CO2 captures twice as many photons as the ones that are naturally in the atmosphere, how much more eneregy stays and warms the planet? Is that within an order of magnitude of "global warming?" I'll leave the math as a excercise.
Read, we know shit, there are other forces at work also and we aren't factoring them in correctly.
From TFA:
Indeed, the 2005 ozone hole was one of the biggest ever, spanning 24 million sq km in area, nearly the size of North America.
I guess your theory is wrong.
post hoc, ergo propter hoc , e.g. a logical fallacy, i.e. not necessarily causitive.
I'm cool like a fool in a swimming p-p-pfft-pool
Try 25%. And that figure's from the Bush DOE. I'll leave how that impacts your argument as an exercise.
Just like the internet, Al Gore will take credit for this one.
Try 25%. And that figure's from the Bush DOE. I'll leave how that impacts your argument as an exercise.
So its pirates then?
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
You are assuming the north pole and the south pole are the same, they aren't, AT ALL. Your post just makes you look stupid. The ozone hole is in the south pole.
From the article:
"While the ozone hole over Antarctica continues to open wide, the ozone layer around the rest of the planet seems to be on the mend."
OK, so the ozone hole over Antarctica "continues to open wide", and you're telling me that the ozoner layer is improving? WTF? O.o
Arguments like this always sound sensible to the uniformed and uneducated, but they are totally lacking in any predictive powers. The problem with your argument is that you fail to quantify any of your statements. Yes, sunlight produces ozone from diatomic oxygen, but at a rate that is dependent upon the solar flux and oxygen concentration. That rate can be measured in the lab. CFC's catalyze the destruction of ozone. The rate at which this occurs can also be measured in the lab. Going through all of the reaction processes, you can build up a set of coupled differential equations describing the change in the concentrations of the various molecular species with time. Your hand wavy description of your theory describes nothing. If you want to contradict the atmospheric chemists, then show where the chemical reaction rates are wrong, or show where they are missing a reaction pathway. That would be a convincing argument. This drivel is just a rationalization for ignoring the science. Why is the ozone hole important when the cold, long antarctic night indicates that we should expect the ozone concentration to decrease? Because it forms a natural experiment. Since sunlight mediates the production of ozone, removing that production term from the set of reaction pathways allows you to study the combination of terms which remove ozone from the atmosphere. What is important is the rate at which the ozone hole forms. It provides a sensitive test on the reaction pathways which remove ozone from the atmosphere. There are natural as well as anthropogenic source terms to the reaction pathways which affect the ozone concentration. Many of the natural terms are produced randomly, such as sulfuric acid production from volcanos. Long term predictions of these effects must use average values for these random terms. As a result they will sometimes be high and sometimes low. There is nothing surprising about the difference between the predictions and the current measurements. You would expect them to disagree somewhat. The issue is whether the divergence from the model predictions is larger than the expected variations due to the historic values of the natural source terms. The next step would be to inventory the actual production rates for the natural contributions and see if they differ from the average values used by the models in such a way as to account for the differences. Don't be surprised if they do. They chemistry is pretty fundamental and well understood.
Yes, there are, but who gets to decide what they are?
Science gets a special place in making those decisions. If it says, "The sky is going to fall if you don't do this, no matter what it costs", they (we, actually; I'm a scientist) merit special attention. People stopped using CFCs on scientists' say-so, for an ozone hole most people never noticed.
That means that they have to be right. Scientists get that pass because they're so often right. When they're wrong, especially on big stuff, it chips away at that special voice scientists have.
You're right that there are things more important than money. But we have to agree on what those are; no individual gets to say, "The ozone hole is the most important thing in the world and you have to spend your money to fix it!" The same applies to any other issue: global warming, fisheries management, logging, etc.
You may spend your money any way you like, but when you start reaching into somebody else's pocket to solve problems you'd better be damn sure you're right.
Ozone hole comes from CFCs.
Greenhouse effect comes from CO2 and H2O emissions.
The ozone hole thing was kind of crappy science anyway, when the sensors were created to look at the ozone layer, the hole was already there. There's no evidence it wasn't supposed to be there. And my understanding is it shrunk in Winter 2004-2005 versus Winter 2003-2004.
Plus, the angle the light hits the atmosphere there at the pole is so low that the UV is filtered out anyway, without the need for a thick UV layer (think of how at sunset when you view the sun at a low angle through more atmosphere the blue/violet is filtered out and so the sky turns orange).
The greenhouse effect is something different. The total scope of it is perhaps a bit up in the air too, but knocks against the ozone situation do not undermine the greenhouse effect.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
when was the last time you went to a lecture on the ozone hole?
I went to one last year where all those questions were addressed.
http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.asp
Q: What did the comedian say to the crowd?
A: If I knew, this joke would be funny.
Perhaps this is just the result of a self-maintaining O2/O3 cycle, in response to our destruction of upper O3.
Oxygen can be broken by UV, but splitting it mixes a lot of free O atoms with the existing O2, encouraging Ozone production. Ozone blocks UV, and Ozone lifts itself slowly to our upper atmosphere, protecting the Oxygen (and us) below. So long as there's sufficient Oxygen available to feed this process, you can view this as a self-maintaining cycle, where depleted Ozone will be (slowly) responded to by increased Ozone production in the lower atmosphere, because O2 there is now being struck by more UV. That Ozone will rise and eventually protect the lower O2, and so presumably Ozone production would drop off again as the balance is restored.
So, perhaps the increase in lower stratospheric Ozone is perfectly explained by this self-balancing nature of sunlight, O2, and O3. The zone with increased production is exactly the zone you'd expect in this balance to increase production after a depletion in the upper atmosphere: the layer directly below, rich with O2. This could be tested for in part by testing for a recent reduction in O2 in the same area, in line with the increase in O3.
Other explanations include our increased O3 production (pollution) making its way gradually into the lower stratosphere. It's possible both of these are combining to cause this, as most natural events tend to be the result of many contributing factors.
Unfortunately the world seems all about money and those who NEED power/control over others. And the whole notion of "ozone layer" size is another example of spinning for monetary/control purposes.
The notion of "CFCs/Hole In The Ozone" issue has as much merit as another notion "must drink 8 glasses of water a day to be healthy - and coffee and soup doesn't count" - nonsense.
The two above notions are simply that - notions! Neither has been proven to be true via the scientific method. Which is what science is all about - scientific research carried out via the scientific method.
So this means I can take off the sunscreen and glasses now?
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
The whole CFC thing was a farce and a fraud! The promised research to 'prove' that a heavier than air particle was going from the northern hemisphere to the southern one (against all prevailing winds) was never proven. The research to show that all those CFC's were up there (And were manmade) was never proven.
/. buy it because their cool high school teacher or college prof told them it was so, but never presented the facts.
/. always gets marked flame or troll.
All those researchers just quietly went elsewhere because the data didn't support their theories unless they faked it (not unlike all the global warming researchers who have all been show to be faking their research and results).
Oh yeah, gotta love junk science. Gotta love even more how the kids here on
If you think global warming is man made or man controlled, you're an asshole with no understanding of science and not too much intelligence to boot. Go get an education and stop being such a tool.
Anon because the non PC truth on
I'm really fucking tired of this canard being spouted by people with no understanding of the issue. So let's get it straight, shall we: the issue is that YES we are causing global warming. The evidence is on the table. If you are qualified as a climate scientist and NOT in the pay of a major oil company, you may rebut. Otherwise, shut your pie-hole. You know nothing.
The other part of your statement, regarding killing the economy, is utter horse malarkey. The only reason it is uttered is to cause confusion and fear. The stance of 95% of the people who are worried about global warming is that we should be improving our energy efficiency as a matter of national policy. I have yet to see anyone credibly address how using fuel more efficiently can cause harm to our economy. I have yet to see anyone credibly address how using cleaner fuels could cause harm to our economy. I have yet to see anyone credibly address how it would cost our economy to invest in renewables. There are a number of easily-demonstrated examples where energy efficiency and CO2 reduction is easily attained, but of course that's at the expense of the retirement packages of charming individuals like this so of course we can't be doing THAT here!
The only people who are benefiting from our inefficient energy economy are a handful of undeservedly wealthy robber barons whose sum total contribution to our society isn't worth a fart in the wind. The rest of us won't miss them if they're cut loose and forced back into actually working for a living. They benefit because of the unique circumstances of having gotten into the business on the ground floor, and believe for some unknown reason that it's their right and privledge to always control the spigots of our energy flow. They are wrong.
My book, podcast
Mad parent -1 pseudoscience?
There's too many statments in that post that should have been qualified with "probably".
This is a problem with popular understanding of both sides of any politicised science debate.
Feel stupid yet? You may want to learn what a catalyst is. Especially the bit about how they don't get used up in reactions.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
Spotted owls in K-Mart signs, instead of old growth forest trees?
Nobody has ever satisfactorily explained how periodic holes in the ozone at the poles threaten anyone other than those who live at extreme latitudes.
Oh well that's all right then isn't it? Just as long as the holes didn't get too big, and we didn't live too far away from the Equator, we'd be fine!
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Some of those things are real!
>Some of the doom scenarios I've heard throughout my life, most in the past 10 years.
>We will run out of oil by 1990
So they jumped the gun a little. Let's see are oil prices and demand going up or down?
My real worry isn't energy. Once oil isn't cheap, that means no cheap plastics, which means no cheap stuff.
>We will run out of food by 1990
that one's new to me
>Nuclear Holocost
You don't think that was dangerous? You don't think it was possible?
>SARS
Point taken. I don't know what the big deal is supposed to be.
>Bird Flu
This HAS HAPPENED before. Check out the flu of 1918, it killed more people than the first world war.
>Ozone Depletion
Try reading the article. Ozone recovery is mostly because people stopped using CFCs. The other effect is much smaller.
>Global Warming
I'll give you this one is shakier. But a few years ago, the right wingers were all saying there is no evidence it existed. Now they say there is no evidence its caused by people.
My A/C isn't working in my car, so I scheduled a conversion from R-12 to R-134a for next week. I found a shop that did R-12 repair, but since everything is going R-134a I figured I might as well just bite the bullet and do the conversion. Any chance of R-12 making a comeback? Should I cancel the conversion and just stick to R-12?
Not using linebreaks is bad science!
Ack...my eyes!
(ironically the captcha says "retard")
Once upon a time, Billy wanted a pet tarantula.
His parents thought it was A-OK for Billy to have whatever he wanted, and didn't have much concern for the World-At-Large, or for whatever shiny thing struck Billy's fancy.
Billy's Tarantula was exciting for about a month. During that time, it was a spectacle all his friends oohed and ahhed over. They talked about how hairy it was, what it would be like to be the same size as it, how they would ride it, and the wretched giddily when it molted.
Then Billy saw a show about a Moose. He let the tarantula go outside.
--This is the view from the selfish human perspective. Earth creatures slower or dumber than humans are free to do with what the humans please. Who cares what remains of them after a generation or two.
Neon fish loose in the wild?
Crafted strains of corn contaminating traditionally (painstakingly) *bred* varieties? (See: Transgenic Maize)
Reproduction is a crucial part of the genetic information exchange equation. See: Mule If you go messing around with the normality of reproduction, you get all kinds of unpredictable results The Nazis messed around with all of this before.. (Godwin!)Spell cheek you've failed me four the last thyme!
The melamona incidence rates in Australia and New Zealand are around four times higher than those found in Canada, the UK and the US. (from Cancer Council Australia).
Along with Australia, New Zealand has the highest skin cancer rates in the world. New Zealand also has the highest melanoma mortality rate in the OECD. (from Cancer Society NZ)
Pasty white english tourists coming from northern hemisphere winter with no tan and no sunscreen get sunburnt in 15 minutes in the midday sun of our summers.
Are you seriously suggesting that the US isn't as good at looking for and diagnosing skin cancer as southern hemisphere countries?Here is a website just chock fucking full of interesting facts about how our auto and energy interests have colluded to keep the costs of energy high enough to be massively profitable to them, and the barriers to meaningful competition from cheaper, more efficient energy sources outrageously high. In fact, as you can probably tell from the link title, there's shortly going to be a little film about the untimely death of the electric car, which would have for 90% of us suited just fine as an around-the-town vehicle. I would say that a car that kept demand for gasoline low and improved energy efficiency would have neutralized the phony "threat" from oil-bearing Iraq by kicking the props out from under Saddam's economy, had we started to implement it 10 years ago when it was introduced. Wouldn't that have been nice? We could have used meaningful economic sanctions against the bastard and forced him to come into the modern world. I'm sure 2,600 dead American soldiers would have been happy with that choice, as well.
My book, podcast
From the link:
"Large increases in UV-B associated with the AOH have been measured with increases in UV-B at 297 nm of up to 38 times those of similar days with normal ozone. Recently we reported significant increases in sunburns during the spring of 1999 on days with low ozone because of the AOH."
This is exactly the kind of response I expected. These topics always bring out people with a political agenda skewing their science.
Unfortunatly those are all great details of the trees, but you just missed the big picture of the forest.
The Ozone hole is a natural phenomenon, a cycle of nature.
The hole is simply a product of a naturally thinning ozone layer, and cold air displacement. And these theories of CFC's eating the spare Oxygen molecules are a ridiculous stretch. No matter the concentrations of CFCs that your theory says might actually make it to the stratosphere, (dubious at best) it is still outnumbered billions to one by O1 and O2 that will more likely form O3 than become entangled with the CFCs.
It's recovering so fast because we are all using HEPA air filters that include ozone generators now. GO THINKGEEK!
What was the name of it? Who were the lecturers? Where are the papers?
ROFL
only trying to provide for themselves
So are drug dealers and common thieves. That's no excuse.
So, in other words, the thieves of our shared natural resources are going to be stubborn. That's their fault, not mine. If they want to harvest wood, they can grow their own wood on their own property. If they bribe the government into letting them steal public natural resources, their own property will be attacked and destroyed. Their stubbornness is not my fault or my problem. It just means I have to work harder to make their activities unprofitable.
Hi guys. We had the CFC-discussion here many years ago. Nice to see that you CAN change the world.
When I read about the Montreal Protocol, it comes to my mind, that there is another, VERY important thing, that should be done: the Kyoto Protocol.
Its so sad to see that America as on of the main emissioner of greenhouse gases has not joined the Kioto protocol which trys to lower emissions of greenhouse gases below the level of 1990. See Wiki.
The answer is yes, me.
You're the one with a political agenda. I'll listen to the side that presents data. So far, you have not. All you've offered is hand waving and bad analogies.
I agree the current global warming science lacks a lot of, well, science. I think it's better than the ozone hole stuff, but it's far from iron-clad.
I have to admit I am a bit skeptical about the global warming stuff, since I too remember in the 70s how we were told of the concerns of global cooling. And I also remember how when I moved to California in 1993, the lack of rain was due to global warming, while now the huge amount of rain we receive is said to be due to global warming. And don't forget the ever-popular blaming of two more active hurricane seasons than normal on global warming.
Global warming is a Chupacabra. Everything we see that can't (and perhaps needent) be explained is blamed on it.
I'm not writing it off though, global warming might be true. And it might even be man-made. I don't know if I buy the end of the world (huge sea level changes) theories though, since if the planet's system were that unstable, it wouldn't have stayed so similar though years of sunspot/waxing/waning cycles and countless volcanic eruptions.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Must be the better methods of detecting skin cancer and the wider access to medical services over time.
If this were the case, then the deaths due to skin cancer should be going down.
They have been increasing in Australia and New Zealand.
Right on. Wish I could mod you up.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
...maybe - just maybe - CFCs didn't have as much to do with it as we were told. Maybe, just maybe, the atmosphere is more complicated than we understand and maybe, just maybe, it would be a good idea to study problems before we base public policy on suppositions. Of course, we needn't do that with global warming, after all, we've got all the information we need on that in order to commit trillions in public resources, excuse me, American resources. Everyone knows that the US is the wholly responsible for it. Just because Europe missed its quotas by billions of tons and the third world never had any is no reason to absolve the United States of its culpability, right? Right?!
I disagree. Katrina wouldn't have had the impact that it did on New Orleans had the *systems already in place* worked properly. Since they didn't, no amount of 'care' or 'preparation' could have prevented what happened.
Read the Levee investigation team's report and tell me Katrina was preventable:(The rest of that article is highly recommended, btw).
It's easy to come up with simplistic "George Bush hates black people" slogans, it takes balls to face up to the fact that what happened was an engineering fuckup on par with the Tacoma Narrows Bridge and the Botched Tower of Pisa. On top of that, we had lousy leadership from the Mayor (who didn't enforce the order to evacuate the city) through to the Governer (who failed to send in the national guard) to the President (who until Katrina thought FEMA was excess baggage in the Federal Government). All of these combined to make a perfect storm that made Katrina worse than it should've been.
So was Katrina preventable? Was it one of those "around the corner" things that some care could have prevented? In hindsight, yes. In reality, no. A skyscraper might collapse tomorrow because some building inspector didn't do his job. An asteroid might strike NYC tomorrow because we didn't spend the $$$ needed to watch every inch of our skies. *You can't double-check everything*. And sometimes shit happens because you didn't and one or more people goofed up.
Folks,
The earth is 4.5 billion years old.
Over the course of this period of time, the "idea" that we know as "the earth" changed, often tumultuously, many thousands, possibly millions of times.
The by-products of the last 200 years of industrial revolution are pretty small and ultimately meaningless to the state of the planet and its living creatures.
What is the purpose of environmentalism? To protect the planet? Or to gain politcal power by instigating fear and disparaging others for their implied moral transgressions?
The earth can take care of itself. It has proven this for 4.5 billion years. It doesn't need humans or any of the other currently existing species to thrive and survive.
Pollution may just make our stay on the planet shorter. It may kill of some or all of the existing species. Or it may not. But the truth of the matter is that it only affects us for the short period of time we can expect to remain on the planet.
New species will arise in our place. It may take a few tens of thousands of years, but hey, that is a significantly small amount of time given the planet is expected to exist for another 4 billion years.
But the important thing to remember is that pollution only affects all the current species on the planet. It does not affect any species that has not yet evolved to take our places. And it may not even affect many of the current species on the planet. Heck, they may thrive in this environment even if we humans are do not.
We humans are not the most important thing on this planet or this universe. Our existence is a fluke. Recognize that, and you may be able to live the rest of your days with a calm mind. Fail to recognize it, and you just make your trivial existence (in the grand scheme of things) that much less peaceful.
The only constant thing is change. The earth is slowly changing as I type this, and will continue to do so for a few billion years.
The motivations, attitudes, and strategies of environmentalism are no different than an emperor attacking and absorbing another country. The primary motivation is power and control. Color these items any way that you want, but the leaders of the environmental movement are no different than Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, Napoleon, Hitler, the Catholic Church, fundamentalist Islam, etc.
History shows that the quickest way to gain power and control is to create a belief system, use it to obtain the initial followers, use the followers to forcibly convert the non-converted, and then use the belief system to expand in size and area.
History repeats. The true motivation of environmentalists (and PETA) isn't to save the planet from ourselves, but to gain power and control. Plain and simple.