Slashdot Mirror
Signs of Ozone Layer Recovery Detected
polar red writes "22 years of banning CFCs is starting to pay off. Researchers have finally been able to measure a reduction in size of the ozone layer hole, after finding the source of its fluctuations. 'Salby's results reveal a fast decline in ozone levels until the late 1990s, then a slow rebound that closely matches what theoretical calculations had predicted, says David Karoly, a climate scientist at the University of Melbourne, Australia. "It is the sort of result that was expected, but is the first to provide detection of an increase in Antarctic ozone levels," he says.'"
No, but I'll be sure to read all about it on Sunday.
This post comes with a double-your-money-back guarantee!
Any offense taken to this post is at your sole discretion.
You know, when there is a physical mechanism connecting two phenomena AND a correlation between them, that correlation != causation thing is simply, well, bullshit.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Hope your plane doesn't crash from all those flying Christians getting sucked into the jet engines.
It's because most of the evidence supporting global warming thus far is comprised of correlation studies. As I like to say, a good correlation paper can win you a high school science fair. A good causation paper can win you the Nobel prize. Which is precisely what happened with ozone depletion. A trio of scientists came up with an elegant, predictive, and empirically accurate mechanism to explain exactly how ozone depletion was occurring, and won the Nobel prize in Chemistry for it.
Come up with a comprehensive, predictive, and empirically accurate model for climate change, and you will probably win the Nobel prize (in something like physics, not a trophy prize like peace) and simultaneously convince the world's government that they must act. The problem with correlation studies is that they're always open to dispute since you never identify or test the actual mechanism causing the problem. That's what happened with cigarettes - for decades the medical community had tons of correlation studies saying that smoking was bad. But the government restrictions and bans didn't come about until medical researchers began to identify and confirm the mechanisms by which smoking was causing cancer.
Oddly enough climate change is something that comes out of the physics models when you put in what we understand of the climate. It has nothing to do with correlation, it's pure mechanical causation. As it happens, the observations do confirm the model.
And it also happens, that the exact same people who were arguing against CFC -> Ozone hole causation and smoking -> lung cancer causation started arguing against climate change. They obviously can fool some of the people all of the time.
Oh, and the actual mechanism of how smoking causes lung cancer was partly revealed a few year back, but is still not completely understood.
If you send the nation into poverty to clean the air
I think this is the aspect of the debate that annoys me the most - the hyberbolic exaggeration of the economic effects of reduced consumption of fossil fuels. There are of course real costs involved, but nothing that scientists or mainstream policy-makers have proposed is going to cause us to sink to Third World levels of deprivation, or revert to a pre-industrial economy. Citizens of Western Europe have been living with drastically higher gasoline prices than us for decades, and they don't seem impoverished to me. Downgrading to a smaller and more fuel-efficient car is not a huge decrease in living standards relative to what the rest of the world has to endure.