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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]."
we cannot conclude from this that the ozone layer is recovering already
In short, EVERYBODY PANIC and give us grant monies!
Since I don't have kids, and probably won't, I say screw the ozone. I'm all for living indoors anyways.
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
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?
be embarrassing if the hole was just the result of variations in various decades long solar cycles, after all we haven't been observing it for very long. we may have gone environmentally apeshit for no reason with regards to FHCs.
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?
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'
Very strange effect. It seems like lots of studies are done. The ones that show drastic environmental collapse are reported very widely. In this case the news seems good and there isn't an alternative study so we get the comment 'Although the hole is somewhat smaller than usual, we cannot conclude from this that the ozone layer is recovering already'. So the studies may be ok scientfically but picking the outliers which show immininent catastrophe and if that is impossible adding comments that the catastrophe might still be present is not.
So bad news is bad news. Good news means we can't conclude anything.
It reminds me of the 'worst headline ever' : 'Small earthquake : not many killed'. If you want to attract attention, I guess you need a bit of drama.
But maybe I'm complacent and we'll all die of avian flu or global warming or a meltdown in the financial markets causing a collapse of our civilisation.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Smaller ozone hole = more penguins = bigger Linux market share!
..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.
I told them to wash it in cold water, not hot!
Also unreported by the major media is the new crack in the consensus on ozone depletion in general. There are new indications that the mechanism scientists told us was destroying ozone might not be doing what they thought.
This is the only info available because the press won't report it and I don't have a subscription to the journal "Nature".
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
What? No goatse jokes on a "hole" story? I'm dissapointed. There's a hole in the trolling.
Table-ized A.I.
Goodness. It can't be more than a month or two ago I either read or heard (documentary/news) that the ozone layer was clearly in much better shape and giving the Montreal Protocol credit for it.
I guess this is a prime example of why I couldn't care less about the current environment/global warming hysteria. Hopefully they'll eventually calm down and start to make sense, as in talking as if they actually thought things through instead of the current knee jerk reactions. It's just political "look, we care!" posturing at the moment.
For example, the total car pool of the country I live in apparently contribute something like 0.000000012% of yearly man made CO2 emissions. Yet it's virtually the only thing politicians talk about. Way to shift focus away from there being a huge energy production boost to be gained from our hydropower plants by updating the turbines, thus reducing dependency on importing power produced by oh so environmentally friendly coal power plants.
Another example is an article that stated "we don't understand why the ice is melting as quickly as it is, it defies all our models", then later in the same article "there can be no doubt this is caused by mankind".
I think the truth is infinitely closer to "we don't have a clue but it sure gives us lots of column space" than anything else. Doesn't hurt to be conscious of our emissions and work to reduce them either way, but the way the politicians and media is handling this is hurting more than helping imo. I'm not the only one that stopped caring long ago.
If you accidentally read the fine article ('cause we know nobody actually tries to read it), you'll see that first off, it's 30% smaller than the record-setting ozone hole from last year. So while the value for this year is down, it looks to be about at or just slightly below the average level for the 90s. (So far, the 00s seem to have a lot of swings up and down, making it hard to visually estimate off the graph.) Furthermore, this year the hole was less centered over the South Pole than was the case in other years; this allows more warm air into the area which results in less ozone depletion. So the article has good reasons for the caution.
Apparently the "natural variations in temperature" argument holds up for the ozone layer when it's recovering, but is heresy when applied to global warming? Well, on the bright side (no pun intended), at least I have one more reason to be very, very skeptical about the "scientists" who believe so religiously in the imminent doom of mankind.
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)?
It's the chase for the almighty bottom line again. Climate researchers generate very little, if any, income from their research... operating costs and salaries have to be paid...urban heat islands... nobody's actually done research... whip up panic... grants and contracts to the climate researchers... flogged the increase in the ozone hole for years now... now that it shrinks, they have to downplay the event... causing the research money to dry up... they have to discount the recent evidence that contradicts all their carefully-crafted theories in order to keep paranoia high and money coming in.
I know that in your universe, scientists drive around in pink Cadillacs screaming "M-Fer, I want more research funding and iced tea!", but in the one I inhabit, climate researchers usually point to ozone hole shrinkage as a success story: we changed our behavior and it actually produced noticeable results in the 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.
It may not be conclusive that the hole shrank because of what we did, but we definitely reduced the stratospheric CFC concentrations: There's probably better stuff to be Googled up but I'm going to be late for work.
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.
I find your credentialism unconvincing- in fact you don't know how many years I have over you. I've been involved in those filings myself and am familiar with what happens. What I find offensive are the accusations that the entire scientific consensus on the issue is attributable to a desire for research funding. Most scientists do not receive funding for climate research. And it's not as if climate research dollars are even in short supply- after all, allocating that money and "waiting until the results are in" is basically how the president has dealt with all these problems.
This is slashdot. The article is about Antarctica. Penguins live in Antarctica. And this is slashdot. Antarctica-penguins-slashdot. Slashdot-penguins-Antarctica. See why we're concerned?
As for saying that the ozone hole would get larger
We've seen interannual jumps of 30% in ozone hole size before (e.g., here); it's within the range of natural variation, and as such, does not indicate some total failure of the models.
According to the World Meteorological Organization's 2006 assessment report on ozone depletion,
"By 2005, the total combined abundance of anthropogenic ozone-depleting gases in the troposphere had decreased by 8-9% from the peak value observed in the 1992-1994 time period. The overall magnitude of this decrease is attributable to the estimated changes in emissions and is consistent with the known atmospheric lifetimes and our understanding of transport processes."
I'm sure the WMO must be populated by renegade scientists who disagree with the majority findings.
Anyway, they also note,
"The shorter-lived gases (e.g., methyl chloroform and methyl bromide) continue to provide much of the decline in total combined effective abundances of anthropogenic chlorine-containing and bromine-containing ozone-depleting gases in the troposphere. The early removal of the shorter-lived gases means that later decreases in ozone-depleting substances will likely be dominated by the atmospheric removal of the longer-lived gases."
In other words, when we cut CFC emissions, we saw a significant and almost immediate change in trend as the short-lived CFCs were removed from the atmosphere (and we failed to replenish them). Now that the low-hanging fruit are gone, we're going to see a more gradual decrease in the future, as the longer-lived CFCs slowly disappear.
There are plenty of studies supporting these statements if you care to dig through the full report.
P.S. You also appear to be confusing atmospheric chemists with climatologists. There is some overlap, but mostly the ozone hole guys are not climatologists per se.