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.'"

Re:Climate Change Deniers

[0123456]

The CFL manufacturers had less money than the oil people. Sorry. I forgot...

Didn't the 'ozone hole' only become an OH MY GOD WE'RE GOING TO DIE problem after the patent on CFCs in air conditioning expired?

Re:Climate Change Deniers

[tibit]

Global warming is caused by the emission of gases, mostly CO2, but also CFC replacements that are 1000s of times more potent than CO2.

Fixed that for ya. Apparently Nature doesn't provide free lunches :(

Re:Some curious coincidences

[Mindcontrolled]

Nice crackpot you found there. My favourite - his acid rain piece. "Decades of monitoring to detect an effect". Right. Tell that to the deforested mountain ridges in my home county that have recovered just fine after SO2 was essentially removed from coal plant exhaust. As for that nature reference - you conveniently omit that this is not a paper, but a news blurb. Serious papers on the issue? Well, rather thin in that department. I met Paul Crutzen on several occasions and had some nice talks with him. Calling him a tool of special interest lobbying is quite... off the mark.

Re:Some curious coincidences

[Mindcontrolled]

SO2 is insofar part of the subject in question as the crackpot mentioned above rants about acid rain not existing in the quoted blog. As for the references. Yes, ClOOCl photolysis under stratospheric conditions modelled in the lab is by a factor 6 lower than previously predicted. So? To quote the abstract of the paper in question: "This large discrepancy calls into question the completeness of present atmospheric models of polar ozone depletion" - true that. At no point, the basic mechanism is questioned, though. To quote the part of Rex' quote you conveniently omitted: "Overwhelming evidence still suggests that anthropogenic emissions of CFCs and halons are the reason for the ozone loss.". In summary - you and the crackpot above take part of the usual scientific process, which is characterized by continuous refinement of models, out of context and construct a fundamental disagreement from it, which never existed in the first place. Basic propaganda tool.

Re:Climate Change Deniers

[Mindcontrolled]

The radiative equilibrium between incoming sunlight and blackbody radiation for Earth would result in a temperature about 20K lower than observed, when not taking atmospheric effects into account. Accounting for absorption and reemission by atmospheric CO2 you arrive at the actual average temperature. Said spectroscopic properties of CO2 are simply measurable in the lab. I actually did the experiment in a lab session about 14 years ago - part of the physical chemistry II lab. Are you seriously questioning the existance of the greenhouse effect as such?

Re:Climate Change Deniers

[williamhb]

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.

But you're responding with the equally hyperbolic fallacy of assuming that the sum total of fossil fuel consumption and carbon output is people driving cars, and that just getting SUVs off the road would fix everything. The guilty secret of why western Europe's carbon output has dropped so much is because a lot of the dirty stuff like mining and manufacturing has been outsourced, and many of the economies have refocused on finance. Now, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out that not every country can do that: you cannot have a world that is solely populated by bankers. China's, India's, even Australia's carbon outputs meanwhile have shot up as their share of the manufacturing and mining (particularly mining in Australia's case) load has increased. Only this time we also have the additional carbon output of shipping stuff all the way around the world as nothing is made locally any more.