Slashdot Mirror
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
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!
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
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.
How about this argument:
More "westernized" nations are in the northern hemisphere, along with what used to be horrible environmental practices. The southern hemisphere has, all in all, less westernized nations. It would be fair to say that the North used to put out much more O3 destroying compounds.
Why is the hole bigger over the south than it is in the north?
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.
It's because gravity pulls the bad stuff down to the bottom of the globe, where it all collects.
Duh!
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
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.