Record ozone hole despite cuts in CFCs | The Nation | The Australian — This can’t be good. Is another mechanism at work?
THE hole in the ozone layer over the southern hemisphere is the largest ever, covering an area more than three times the size of Australia. During the last nine days of September, the hole in the ozone layer covered, on average, nearly 17.5 million square kilometres.The expansion to a size greater than the surface area of North America has been observed in recent weeks by American and Australian scientists.
“We now have the largest ozone hole on record,” said Craig Long of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The ozone layer girdles the Earth in the upper atmosphere, or stratosphere. It protects plants, animals and people by blocking harmful ultraviolet rays from the sun
“Is another mechanism at work?”
Nature perhaps?
nah, what was I thinking, it’s all Pesident Bush`s fault. 😉
Nature perhaps? nah, what was I thinking, it’s all Pesident Bush`s fault
Are those fiddles I hear playing in the background?
I’m no climatologist, nor am I a hardcore fundie with his head in the sand, but my understanding is that global warming and the ozone hole are incorrectly associated. The correlation between the use of CFCs and the ozone hole is weak at best, and no atmospheric phenomenon has been discovered that can take a dense particle like a clouro-flouro-carbon into the upper atmosphere. At the same time, there are lots of natural factors that are entirely out of the ability of human beings to control that can cause the thinning of ozone. As I said, I’m no expert, but those are my personal conclusions based on the dozens of sources that I’ve read over the years.
I want to be clear: I’m not saying that humans don’t have a huge responsibility in maintaining the environment of the planet. I just hate how only one side of environmental discussions is considered, and anyone that contradicts that view gets mocked and incorrectly labelled, regardless of the validity of their arguments and data.
I never really understood how the industiralized world (mostly in the Norther Hemisphere and the folks using the most CFCs) would be blamed for a hole in the Ozone over the furthest point in the Southern Hemisphere.
Interesting how few comments there are to news of climate disasters (as opposed to say weather disasters).
Climate Dread is a catchphrase employed in a lengthy article in The Tyee:
http://thetyee.ca/News/2006/10/20/ClimateDread/
I’m no climatologist, ….but my understanding is that global warming and the ozone hole are incorrectly associated.
Don’t feel bad. It’s probably not the only thing you misunderstand.
I never really understood how …
You shouldn’t feel bad either.
Unless you’re a climatologist, in which case you’d be an idiot.
Science is hard. Leave it to the scientists.
First of all, CFCs are a catalyst, and therefore persistent. That means we’ll actually peak before declining as the CFCs already extant are absorbed into soil and water, removing them from the air.
Second, the air is thinner at the poles due to the planet’s spin. That’s why a reduction in ozone is visible there.
#6 “Unless you’re a climatologist, in which case you’d be an idiot. Science is hard. Leave it to the scientists.”
Right, leave it to climatologist like Mann, who uses bad math to “prove” how man is causing catastrophic global warming.
Science isn’t that hard to understand. And laymen with a strong science background (i.e., college grads who pulled A’s in math, chemistry, and physics) can follow the arguments from “scientists” just fine.
And I really resent anyone telling me that my background and 135 IQ leave me ill-equipped to have an informed opinion when I take the time to review the evidence. And experience has shown me that the closer the “science” is to an environmental agenda, the more skeptical you must be of the conclusions being reported.
If we’d listened to environmentalist scientists in the early 90’s we could look forward to headlines like ‘warmer temperatures despite drop in greenhouse gases.’ It’s still not as bad as the New York Times reporting More people in jail despite drop in crime’
People listen, but the regulators do little or nothing. I remember as a child people telling us that if we didn’t cut mercury emissions, fish would become unsafe to eat. I remember people warning us about CFCs. I remember when the first dead zone appeared in the Gulf of Mexico, and now there’s one off the northern california coast.
Yada yada yada, no action. Nobody with any influence really cares, or they would take real action.
I’m sorry, it’s been a long week and I’m a bit crabby. I’ll be more cheerful tomorrow.
#8, Dr. Smith. So I see you disagree with Mann. I don’t know him or his math. But what about Dr. Frazer, who wrote:
“We were looking at data on the NASA site and noticed the hole looked likely to be the biggest ever,”
or Craig Long from the NOAA who is quoted as:
We now have the largest ozone hole on record,
or David Hofmann, NOAA’s Director of Global Monitoring who said:
These numbers mean the ozone is virtually gone in this layer of the atmosphere
Of course, these three guys were all talking about the ozone layer over the South Pole, not how smart they are. They had something to add to the conversation other then that they got straight “A”s.
It has been my observation that if you have to tell others how smart you are, it’s because you just ain’t too smart at all. Intelligence has it’s own way of showing it self.
Further proof that we don’t have the slightest idea on how nature really works.
#13 Fusion, I only made reference to my IQ because some fool chose to denigrate the reasoned opinion of another, implying that only an idiot would question the conclusions of scientists. My IQ doesn’t mean I know more about any given topic than another, but it does demonstrate that there are few damn topics I can’t at least follow. If we were discussing string theory, then I would withhold comment. But the topic is climatology — which is not a topic beyond the understanding most posters to this blog.
And the single, biggest problem I have with the ozone hole debate is how some scientists can take three decades of observed data, claim the first decade of data represents the natural state of the world since microbes first swam in its seas, then claim the downward trend of the next two decades is the result of man’s use of CFCs. To state it as theory would have been fine, but they treated it as an established fact.
Oh, by the way, I believe it was Science that last year reported the ozone hole had virtually disappeared. Not surprising at all that the hole isn’t behaving the way they thought it would — something that usually happens when you make grand claims based upon limited data.
“While the size of the hole is alarming, it does not mean that increased amounts of ozone-depleting chemicals are reaching the atmosphere, said Paul Lehmann with the Bureau of Meteorology Research Centre in Melbourne. “There is mounting evidence that the ozone is slowly recovering,” he said.”
—–and—–
“”There are less ozone-depleting chemicals but they are more effective (when it’s cold),” Dr Fraser said. “This is the coldest year ever.” Also, chlorine and bromine remain in the stratosphere for about 50 years.”
Coldest year. Global warming. OK. Time to stop worrying about things we don’t really understand and deal with what we do. Auto exhaust is poison, let’s cut down it’s generation. Contain ozone depleting chemicals better. Stop using IE. Drink more water.
CFC’s are catalysts. That means they breakdown ozone without change to the CFC molecules. They are infinitely reusable.
The ozone layer is a bubble thin film tens of thousands of feet above the ground. It’s only a few meters thick. It’s a special stasis location where stable O2 molecules are kicked around by solar energy available at that altitude into the unstable O3 config. This is a continous process. The O3 eventually percolates downwards into lower reaches of the atmosphere where it breaks down. A new batch of O2 wafts up and the cycle repeats.
Now what happens with the layer breakdown is the CFC which we’ve pumped into the air (chemically stable) eventually circulates up into the ozone film, where it continuously acts as a catalyst, breaking O3 into O2 very efficiently. The CFCs of course eventually circulate back down, but more CFC comes up…. to break this cycle requires two things. We stop pumping CFCs into the air. Second, the CFCs already dumped, millions of pounds of it, have to break down at some point. They aren’t. It will take a while for the atmosphere to get rid of those extremely tough molecules. In the meantime, the O3 layer will continue to disintegrate.
This is all info that’s been available for almost thirty years.
The major problem of the ozone hole is not the Antarctic one (Apologies to all the kiwis reading this) but the same penomenon happeling over the Arctic. Most of Canada, Russia and Europe would be affected by that happening. (About half of the most densely populated areas in the world lie there)
Thank God CFCs are banned or it would make the situation much worse! On the other hand, not only CFCs, but also SO2 and NO2 affect O3. “Luckily” enough most of the sulphour- and nirogendioxide come down as down as acid rain.
And the US is playing some catch-up as I’ve recently read in an article somewhere that they’re starting to use low-sulfur fuel as well. So they are starting to think further ahead then the next quarterly financials… 😉
The only question that remains is: will it be enough and soon enough?
Fabrizio