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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
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!
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.
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)?
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
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.