Over the Antarctic, the Smallest Ozone Hole In a Decade

hypnosec writes "The ozone layer seems to be on a road to recovery over Antarctica; according to Europe's MetOp weather satellite, which is monitoring atmospheric ozone, the hole over the South Pole in 2012 was the smallest it's been in the last 10 years. The decrease in size of the hole is probably the result of reduction in the concentration of CFCs, especially since the mid-1990s, because of international agreements like the Montreal Protocol."

Comments

Re:HypnoToad says

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Except that these processes are simple enough that we can measure the high altitude concentrations of these compounds and show that their influence on the O3 concentration closely matches our understanding of the processes involved.

Re:Non-story?

[Dan East]

The ozone "hole" expands and contracts with atmospheric temperature. The colder it is, the thinner the ozone, and thus the larger the hole. So the size of the hole is both seasonal, and coupled to polar temperatures. I believe the hole is the smallest ever because the temperature has been warmer, not necessarily because less ozone is destroyed by man made chemicals.

Re:This is great news.

[Anonymous Coward]

No. The hole in the ozone is caused by chlorine in the stratosphere, which gets there in chloroflorocarbons, catalyzing the O3 generated by the radiation in the upper atmosphere. It has nothing to do with climate change or greenhouse gasses.

Re:Non-story?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Surely if it's been shrinking all this time then you could have the same story every day: "ozone hole smallest size since $date". Has it grown occasionally for some reason?

For reasons that are sufficiently messy that I certainly couldn't do them justice(and there really isn't any point in copy/pasting a pretend understanding from wikipedia and just wasting space) ozone levels vary considerably over time, both because of natural seasonal weather patterns and because of changes in the presence of various ozone-depleting synthetic compounds.

My understanding is that trends on atmospheric concentration of more or less all of the really nasty ozone-depleting compounds have been positive since regulation went into effect; but that the size and shape of the ozone hole has been a great deal more chaotic from season to season(shape counts, for our purposes, because ozone thinning over the antarctic is a bad sign; but the number of epidemiologists who care about penguin melanoma is limited, while ozone thinning over Australia is directly troublesome).

In other words ...

[Daniel Dvorkin]

... scientists recognized an environmental problem and demonstrated a clear link to human activity, the scientists told the politicians about it, the politicians acted, and now the problem's going away.

My God, this is terrible! We must ensure that no such thing ever happens again!

Sigh

[RevDisk]

I hate to even point this out, because idiots will claim I am a global warming denier, climate change denier or kicker of cute puppies...

But I really wish that the climate change folks would take a note from the whole ozone thing. CFCs and other contributory substances (ozone-depleting substances (ODS)) were proven to have an impact. CFCs were replaced with hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) and other alternative solvents with minimal costs. And the problem was economically solved for the most part.

Folks proved what the problem was (ozone depletion), what was a very significant contributor (CFCs), how everything happened (in a scientific "can be repeated, with the same results every time"), set up accurate and provable models (Single Layer Isentropic Model of Chemistry And Transport (SLIMCAT), CLaMS (Chemical Lagrangian Model of the Stratosphere), etc), and how to economically mitigate the bad stuff by using less bad stuff. The last stage is arguably the most important. All of the climate change research and proof in the world is nice. But it doesn't mean jack if it doesn't produce economically acceptable alternatives.

X is bad? Fine. Accurately prove how they are bad, in a way that is relatively easy to proof in a repeatable way. Gimme alternatives that are viable (ie can be realistically implemented in a reasonable manner), that are economic (preferably cheaper, but no more than 5-10% more expensive) that are effective (preferably better, but no more than 5-10% less effiicient).

I spent time in former Soviet countries and third world countries. I'm aware of how bad pollution can be. It can be horribly nasty. I'm also not a moron, so I realize you have to be able to realistically solve the problem if you want to mitigate it. I'll bet myself $1 that I get called a climate denier, right wing puppy kicker or whatnot anyways.

Re:Sigh

[radtea]

X is bad? Fine. Accurately prove how they are bad, in a way that is relatively easy to proof in a repeatable way. Gimme alternatives that are viable (ie can be realistically implemented in a reasonable manner), that are economic (preferably cheaper, but no more than 5-10% more expensive) that are effective (preferably better, but no more than 5-10% less effiicient).

While I'm in agreement with this view, I'm also aware of how much messier the AGW situation is than the CFC situation was. Anything beyond "anthropogenic gases are probably adding about 0.2% (1.6 W/m**2) to the Earth's heat budget at the surface" is extremely model dependent, and models are just not that good at predicting the detailed response of such a complex system.

I am a computational physicist, and it is very clear after digging in to climate models a bit that climate models are not written by computational physicists, who typically have dealt with much simpler systems in much better controlled (and experimentally accessible) situations, which gives us a very healthy awareness of how inadequate our simulations are at capturing anything but the gross features of reality.

If a computational model of a radiation detector comes within 10% of reality you're generally doing pretty well, and radiation detectors of various kinds are about as simple as you can get in terms of physics.

So anyone who claims that climate models are adequate or even particularly useful as guides to policy response is likely not tightly coupled to reality. We don't really know what areas are likely to be affected by what kind of events. Even apparently simple things like an increase in hurricane force winds, or possibly an increase in the number of hurricanes, are hotly debated. No one, to the best of my knowledge, predicted ocean acidification as a likely outcome of increasing levels of atmospheric CO2, but this is likely going to be one of the more significant impacts. And so on.

As such, it behooves us to pursue a number of policies that won't address any specific threat, but which will a) reduce human greenhouse gas emissions and b) increase our ability to respond the climate-driven humanitarian disasters. In the former category would be nuclear power development and other green power sources, and in the latter things like increased funds put aside for international relief via existing organizations.

These positive actions have zero political support, however: people who are beating the drums regarding AGW policy are almost uniformly putting it in terms of controls and limits and restrictions on other people, which we know from far too much history never ends well, and certainly never solves the problem it was supposedly intended to address.

Re:So tell me...

[Pino Grigio]

It depends on the topic really. Not skeptical at all about the Holocaust, no, mostly because my Grandfather was at Burgen Belsen in 1945 with the British Army. And attempts to lump everyone who is skeptical of one thing together with anyone who's skeptical about anything is just a poor debating tactic.

Re:HypnoToad says

[Electricity Likes Me]

Good job misrepresenting that. Here, let me post the abstract, literally the first thing you'd read:

This Letter reports reliable satellite data in the period of 1980–2007 covering two full 11-yr cosmic ray (CR) cycles, clearly showing the correlation between CRs and ozone depletion, especially the polar ozone loss (hole) over Antarctica. The results provide strong evidence of the physical mechanism that the CR-driven electron-induced reaction of halogenated molecules plays the dominant role in causing the ozone hole. Moreover, this mechanism predicts one of the severest ozone losses in 2008–2009 and probably another large hole around 2019–2020, according to the 11-yr CR cycle.

The paper does not say it's dependent on cosmic rays exclusively, instead it points out that cosmic ray activity seems to play a significant role in determining the activity of halogenated molecules destroying ozone. Guess which one of those parameters we've totally screwed around with from the 1970s onwards?

I'll give you a hint: it's not cosmic ray irradiation.