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Antarctic Ozone Hole Shrinks 30 Percent
polar red sends us news of a story that many outlets have picked up from a European Space Agency press release: the Antarctic ozone hole is 30% smaller than it was during the previous record year. It's still about the size of North America. "Scientists say this year's smaller hole... is due to natural variations in temperature and atmospheric dynamics... and is not indicative of a long-term trend. 'Although the hole is somewhat smaller than usual, we cannot conclude from this that the ozone layer is recovering already,' [one researcher said]."
Why is it, when the hole gets bigger, it's "ZOMFG WE'RE GONNA DIE"
But, when the hole shrinks, it's "Well let's not be too hasty about saying things are improving"
Hmm?
I don't know how it will happen, but any money says that this will somehow descend into a flame-war about global warming. Not connected, people.
'This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it' - Eeyore
If the antartic ice sheet melts faster than predicted, some folks say, with convinction, that its proof that humanity has finally done in poor mother earth, and that we are all doomed. Now, we get a piece of good news, that the ozone hole is actually healing up, and that can't possibly be because humanity did something right.
Worst of all, we're probably going to find down the road that, because the ozone hole closed up, a bunch of carbon producing bacteria that would have otherwise been killed due to UV radiation have now lived, making the earth's carbon burden even worse. Or, perhaps, more oxygen producing bacteria live, making things better. Either way, the ozone hole closing will cause somme other climate change, just as we now find that regulations on the size of particulates in pollution actually made global warming worse.
With all these downsides to cleaning up the environment, I almost think we need to find few brave politicians willing to come out for oceanic dumping of nuclear waste, just to balance things out. Godzilla: wake up, damn you!
This is my sig.
But there's an amusing link between global warming (other such climate disaster) panic artists and hardcore Christians: If anything they want to happen happens, it's due to human activity, or God helping them out respectively.
However, should someone lose their football game, or should a forthcoming climactic disaster suddenly dissipate (even if just a little bit), well, you know, shit happens.
Faith is a beautiful thing, eh?
Whether or not global warming happens, and whether or not humans can prevent it, it often strikes me as a distraction from the issue of toxic pollution.
I mean, really: do you want to live in a world where merely breathing the air increases your risk of cancer? Where eating fish from the ocean causes cumulative mercury poisoning? Where the forests are replaced by vast landscapes of refuse, and you can't go swimming at a beach without considering fecal contamination?
I like the use of the word "somewhat" to indicate a 30% decrease.
To me, it seems that calling that "a substantial decrease" would be more truthful.
Of course, the researchers know as well that any news outlet these days would misquote or leave out the following sentence saying that the effect is probably temporary. But it's still stupid to (have to) explain a 30% decrease as only "somewhat decreased".
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
What's truly sad is when it's considered "embarrasing" to be overprotective of the only Earth we have when it comes to extremely complex environment analysis, and when it's somehow wrong to err on the safe side. I actually thought margins of error was a positive trait in science, in case of uncertianties.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
..spin this. We don't know near enough about long-term changes in our climate to make any conclusions. If you hear any scientist declaring as a fact that it does or does not exist and we did or did not cause it, they are far from credible.
That's what all this nonsense of "going green" has ever been about.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
Disclaimer: I wouldn't consider myself an environmentalist. I recycle some. I try not to buy a Hummer. That's about it.
The thing about the environment is that if it's screwed up enough, everyone dies. I don't know that humanity even can do that if they wanted to, but I'll assume yes.
It's sort of like sticking your wang into a blender that you're pretty sure was unplugged the last time you looked. Probably, that's safe, but who really wants to take that chance?
Screwing with the environment is like sticking humanity's collective meta-wang into that blender. Maybe it's okay, but ohhhh the pain if you're wrong.
It makes sense to me that people would try to err on the side of caution.
It seems asymmetric, but then, the situation is. There is an asymmetry in the consequences of being right vs being wrong.
If I hand you a bottle of an unknown chemical and say "go on, drink it, I think it's safe." and somehow says to you "He's a good guy, trust him." and someone else says "He's a liar, don't trust him." you're stuck with what might seem (in Fair and Balanced land) like an even choice. But, you see, the truth is that you have many choices of things to drink, and the cost of not drinking is miniscule, while the cost of drinking could be fatal. So I'm betting you won't drink it. Even though it looks like symmetry.
In this case, a large number of scientists have used words like "exponential" and "tipping point" and "cataclysmic change" in ways that suggest a deeper and more enduring truth is looming than mere lack of funding for the person speaking. But suppose we disregard the fact that considerable actual research has been done and considerable mathematical modeling has been done, and we just assume two strangers have flipped different coins and have made predictions that are quite different and unpredictable by any other means than merely trusting them, as effectively describes the days before Science.
The ordinary analysis one wants to do is to multiply the probability of the person being right times the a quantitative measure of the danger involved. In this case, both are 50% probability, since we think Scientists are not a special breed who have trained for life to predict things. So we just have to come up with a quantitative metric for "Oh, darn. We'll not have an ozone layer, we'll all get cancer, and we'll die (or in the good case we'll all move underground and only be able to come up above ground in space suits)." vs a quantitative metric for "Oh, darn. I'm embarrassed by predicting that the ozone layer was going to fail. It's true that the world will move on and we have lots of new Green technology and people are much more ecologically aware, but gosh, I'm blushing."
Something in me wants to assign a higher badness value to that first one than that second one. And hence, something in me believes more caution is warranted in believing safety than in believing a problem.
I have yet to hear a serious argument for why the world will be injured by behaving as if there is an ozone or climate problem (if there is not), and so I just don't understand why anyone ever makes this argument.
People are constantly making the argument that the people who want to do climate research are somehow money-grubbing. But so what? The people who don't want to do climate research are also money-grubbing. The world runs on money, and we're not going to get that out of the system, so we'd better stop discounting opinions because of it or we'll have no one employed to have an opinion.
Science relies on falsifiability at its core, so of course everything is a theory. That's not a condemnation, that's a statement of the bold thing that science is: a willingness to say what might be disproved and to tolerate the slings and arrows of criticism. These theories are holding up pretty well to scientific criticism, and where we don't, we're learning things. The opposition in this game isn't holding up an alternate theory--they're holding up the idea that Science has nothing to offer. If there's another theory, let's hear it, and if it's also "just a theory", let's hear an argument about why it's safe to bet the future of the human raceon that theory rather than this one.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
Because the new refrigerants are less efficient than the old ones, which means we use more energy (i.e. burn more coal, etc.) to get the same amount of cooling. In essence, we've decided to protect against the possibility of high-altitude ozone depletion at the cost of ground-level ozone and toxic pollution and increased CO2 production.
No one even considered the big-picture environmental impact of banning CFCs, we just lurched in to action. I'm not necessarily saying it was the wrong choice -- there were certainly non-cooling uses of CFCs that we could have (and did) cut without any significant detriment to the environment. But it would have been nice if we spent less time panicking and posturing about the ozone hole and more time creating pragmatic environmental policies.
The Earth is our home, numbnuts.
The link from man-made CFCs to ozone depletion was tenuous at best. Preliminary investigation into volcanoes shows that the amount of chlorine they spew dwarfs what man produces, and it is lost high in the atmosphere, instead of feet from the ground, yet media has never covered that part of the story.
Face it, panic-inducing reports are always going to be make headline news. Those who make the craziest predictions are going to be the media-darlings. It's never going to change.
I consider myself an environmentalist. I do what I can to be good to this planet, and spend time studying the issues out there. But, it really troubles me to see a lot of the bad science that is repeated over and over without being checked.
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Yes But... the resources we could have used to fix one thing could have been better used to fixed something else that could cause a greater damage. For Example. Spending Billions to fix sometime we know little about and have an inkling that it is our fault vs. Spending Billions on say Poluted Water Cleaning where we know the problem is real it has a tangable method for fixing, and we understand much more. We focus on Politations who make a job of talking alot about things they don't understand, and appeasing the public from the disaster of the week, with expensive and often not very effective methods.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I am not trying to troll here, I really am confused about this; please correct me if you have actually answers.
My understanding is that we discovered the ozone hole in the Antarctic immediately after we started to measure south polar ozone. That is to say, we have no measurements that predate the hole.
Is this the case? If is it, then why are we sure that humans have caused it (as opposed to it just being a natural part of the earth's atmosphere)?
"What happens if the actions that you deem "overprotective" are actually detrimental in the long run?"
Yes, what an amazing coincidence that we started dumping massive amounts of CFCs into the atmosphere at the same time that the Earth suddenly started needing CFCs to maintain its present state. It's a shame that we were duped into banning CFCs - hopefully the Earth will decide it no longer needs them.
How did this get an interesting? It gets a funny, if anything.
...)
This whole "F*ck environmentalism" sentiment, that was on diplay during Live Earth, for example -- where the hell are people getting this? F the environment is not punk, at least not anymore -- now saying "F the environment" is echoing the more polished but substantively equal sentiment of multinational corporations' CEOs. Not cool, dude.
We *need* this goddamn world.
I'm all for better living through chemistry, but that's *better* living, which includes taking care of the earth. These kind of casual remarks, when meant and/or taken as "interesting" rather than passionate sarcasm, are bad, bad, bad.
You will have descendants, your brother or cousin, etc., will have kids. And, a 10th generation descendant from your cousin and a 7th generation descendant from you probably share about the same amount of genetic code in common with you. (That's a guess. I'd be interested to know
So, all of us have a living, breathing, genetic legacy that'll carry on after we're dead.
Let's not leave a world to our sweet little great^10 grandchildren (or equivalent) that is covered in pollution and in the midst of violent and unpleasant weather.
And, while we're at it, let's keep the water clean for us to go swimming or something fun like that. Makes sense, doesn't it?
You have got to be kidding! We changed our behaviour and it worked? In such a short time frame? You know what? That's utter BS and most climatologists would concur. In fact, there is no clue why the hole shrank. Only a half-assed guess that is tailored to not conflict with the current position.
And scientists don't drive in pink Cadillacs because it is not in their nature. But they spend better than half their time screaming "M-Fer, I want more research funding". Or so my 15 years in academia and government research leads me to believe.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
The prophets of 1970 said:
-We would be out of oil by now
-Our forests would be gone by now(Remember those commercials - the one with the little girl walking with her grandfather that were wearing gas masks and they were in a dry river bed and she says "Grandaddy, what was it like to have trees?")
-The ozone hole will get larger and eventually allow kill 80% of life on the planet
-Mercury poison will kill all the fish (Fictional movie about it)
People like me who have been through this crap before are now cynical. Are there some serious environmental concerns? Sure, but it doesn't match the propaganda. The upcoming breed of kids are taking it for hook, line and sinker.
Along the same lines but different category, Uri Geller has a whole new audience to fool now and the kids today will probably think that he was some sort of magician like that other loser, Chris Angel. Uri Geller was a fake and no one will remember.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
You're either wierd or have low expectations.
You see, 'fixing the earth' is a complex affair, especially if you're not going to cop out and either eliminate humanity or return us to hunter-gatherer technology levels.
To the point that any climatologist should be able to balance a budget rather easily.
You see, I'd also expect them to be able to perform a certain amount of economic analysis and at least try to identify the 'best bang for the buck' methods for reducing pollution. After all, they are talking about messing with global economies. Causing a depression for trying to enforce uneconomical standards wouldn't help their cause in the long run. A prosperous economy has more funding for pollution controls, green research, efficiency improvements, etc...
I don't read AC A human right
maybe they do. But.... I don't listen to them anymore.
I think not being poisoned and irradiated to death is more a more fundamental concern than the balance of my (nonexistent) checking account, but maybe I just have screwed priorities.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I find your comment to be incoherent dibble. I can't tell if your agreeing that it's a problem or saying that you don't care.
The prophets of 1970 said: -We would be out of oil by now -Our forests would be gone by now(Remember those commercials - the one with the little girl walking with her grandfather that were wearing gas masks and they were in a dry river bed and she says "Grandaddy, what was it like to have trees?") -The ozone hole will get larger and eventually allow kill 80% of life on the planet -Mercury poison will kill all the fish (Fictional movie about it)
And 1984 was supposed to happen in 1984. Therefore, it can never happen.
Strange that you should reply with nothing but strawman arguments, and still get modded to 5 for it.
The post to which you replied said none of the things you bring up as "prophecies" from 1970. In fact, these are all ludicrous exaggerations which you use as strawmen to dismiss actual concerns of pollution.
The original post listed several specific things, none of which you addressed:
1) carcinogens in the air (which we, as humans, breathe to survive)
2) mercury biomagnification in fish, which in turn will accumulate in the human body and cause mercury poisoning if you too-frequently eat the wrong sorts of fish (generally larger predators, such as swordfish or tuna)
3) elimination of forests and creation of "vast landscapes of refuse" (which can adequately describe where our manufactured waste goes)
4) fecal contamination of the water around beaches, from sewage disposal
All of these describe the actual, current situation. They aren't prophecies; they have already happened.
Well when the noise level is already so high, passing any intelligible information takes an even stronger signal.
Unfortunately that generally causes more noise.
I find it ironic - if the ozone hole was 30% BIGGER this year they'd be crying gloom and doom. No mention of a 'randomly low year not related to the overall trend' in that situation. Amazing how "news" can be twisted and presented totally differently depending on your intended goal.
The lack of nuclear terorist attacks this year was zero. However, the past 100 years have been a fluke and we can expect the exponential trending to return next year. Beware the 100's of nuclear attacks coming! lol.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.