[HN Gopher] Levels of banned CFCs rising
___________________________________________________________________
Levels of banned CFCs rising
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 196 points
Date : 2023-04-04 16:17 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| brianwawok wrote:
| Why can it not be countries that don't care just using CFCs
| still?
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Or companies that stashed a stockpile then to avoid the
| disposal costs, and are not letting to drip out. Or both?
| anonym29 wrote:
| China is mentioned as having been a likely culprit in the past.
| I don't understand why Westerners are so keen to make major
| sacrifices to quality of life in the name of fighting climate
| change when nothing we do will make a statistically significant
| impact in the long run with major population centers like
| China, India, and Nigeria continuing to grow more wealthy with
| rapidly increasing demand for reliable, 24/7 energy production,
| cheap air conditioning, etc.
|
| The PCA is a joke that gives these countries essentially
| unlimited ability to continually move their own goalposts for
| "peak carbon", no real difficult sacrifices required for them
| until after they've reached that moving target.
|
| China has been infamous for decades for not even having
| reliable currency data, what on earth makes us think they're
| even collecting (let alone honestly sharing) reliable data on
| CO2, let alone HFCs and CFCs, beyond willful naivety,
| irrational optimism, and quasi-religious climate dogma
| demanding ideological conformance?
|
| The harsh reality nobody on the political left in the west has
| the courage to acknowledge that climate change is 100% out of
| the control of our WEIRD (wealthy, educated, industrialized,
| rich, democratic) countries, and no amount of self flagellation
| over "climate racism", nor vicious hostility towards "climate
| change deniers", nor radical proposals to destroy the entire
| energy grid is going to make even a proverbial "drop in the
| bucket" difference in climate change. Climate dogma is the TSA
| to climate change's terrorism - wasteful, ineffective
| theatrical performance art that degrades everyone's quality of
| life while doing effectively nothing to address the actual
| problem, intended strictly to appease the neuroticism of the
| shmucks dumb enough to believe it makes a difference.
|
| I get that this sounds pessimistic, cynical, and even a little
| misanthropic, but it's also what the actual data is telling us.
|
| This isn't a fight we can win with the way things are done in
| China not changing. Totalitarian demands for ideological
| conformance present an impenetrable barrier for "real"
| progression of humanity in virtually every aspect in every
| country where they are practiced, including the climate change
| cult itself in the US.
| tzs wrote:
| For whatever upper limit we finally decide we must keep
| warming under there will be a corresponding total amount of
| greenhouse gases that can be in the atmosphere without
| pushing warming past that limit.
|
| Since the atmosphere does not care about arbitrary man-made
| boundaries it makes no sense to do an unweighted comparison
| of the emissions of different countries when trying to decide
| which countries are emitting too much and need to cut back
| and which countries are using less than their fair share and
| can still expand.
|
| One way to see this is to look at what happens when a country
| splits in two. With an unweighted comparison for determining
| shares any country that is using more than its share could
| split into smaller countries. The union of those smaller
| countries would still be emitting at least as much as before
| but it would move the finger to point at someone else.
|
| The sensible comparison is to weight by population, with
| adjustments for trade to account for countries outsourcing
| their emissions to others.
|
| India is around #130 in emissions per capita. Nigeria is
| around #170. They are both currently _way_ below their fair
| share. If India and Nigeria as part of growing more wealthy
| needed to increase their emissions to the same level as
| Brazil, that could be offset by the US cutting emission by a
| mere 10%.
| sokoloff wrote:
| If you're going to create a quota for countries, it's not
| obvious that you should allow credits for outsourced
| emissions. If a country wants to use its previous quota on
| trade, it can but it gets no credit excusing it.
| scythe wrote:
| >China has been infamous for decades for not even having
| reliable currency data, what on earth makes us think they're
| even collecting (let alone honestly sharing) reliable data on
| CO2, let alone HFCs and CFCs, beyond willful naivety,
| irrational optimism, and quasi-religious climate dogma
| demanding ideological conformance?
|
| IR spectroscopy from satellite data.
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030147972.
| ..
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| Was going to say... I would guess/hope that combining
| chemistry and meteorology would allow researchers to
| measure samples of air outside China's jurisdiction and
| come up with reasonable estimations of any emissions they
| are omitting.
| solarkraft wrote:
| > I don't understand why Westerners are so keen to make major
| sacrifices to quality of life in the name of fighting climate
| change when nothing we do will make a statistically
| significant impact in the long run with major population
| centers like China, India, and Nigeria continuing to grow
| more wealthy with rapidly increasing demand for reliable,
| 24/7 energy production, cheap air conditioning, etc.
|
| Can't convince the others to do it if you don't do it.
| anonym29 wrote:
| Is the strategy of doing it ourselves and politely asking
| China and India to get on board this century working so
| far?
|
| I'm not saying we _shouldn 't_ be taking steps to reduce
| our carbon footprint in the west, I'm saying that doing
| that and hoping that other countries will voluntarily join
| us isn't working.
| rocket_surgeron wrote:
| >Is the strategy of doing it ourselves and politely
| asking China and India to get on board this century
| working so far?
|
| Yes.
|
| Western shifts to less-harmful methods and materials
| increases the size of the market for those methods and
| materials and lowers their costs, spurring adoption in
| places not as rich as the West.
|
| The early adoption of solar panels in the west drives
| production capacity in poorer nations that are more
| manufacturing-oriented. The increased production capacity
| increases supply, which lowers prices, which makes it
| more affordable for them to transition to solar (and
| other technologies).
|
| International conventions, treaties, and agreements
| headed by richer nations bring along poorer nations.
|
| In the US, harmful emissions like CO2 and GHG plateaued
| in the 70s and 80s and started declining on both a total
| and per-capita basis in the 2000s. They are still much,
| MUCH, higher than the rest of the world but are
| declining. In China and India emissions have started to
| slow their rate of increase or have plateaued in the last
| 10 years.
|
| China went from ~5% of their energy coming from
| renewables and nuclear in 2000 to 15% in 2019. The US was
| at approximately 40% in 2020. Given the rates of change
| China will probably surpass the United States in
| renewable/nuclear generation as a percentage of their
| electricity generation in 10-20 years.
|
| I would expect the emissions curves to mimic those of
| Europe and the United States, lagging by 30-40 years.
|
| This is a decades-long effort, not something that can be
| realized in years. The infrastructure built 20 years ago
| still has 30 years left in it, so the targets we want to
| hit in 50 years need to be planned for and built today.
|
| But as for your question "the strategy of doing it
| ourselves" isn't really valid.
|
| Each individual American emits roughly 3x the amount of
| CO2 that a Chinese person does. We're not "doing it
| ourselves" we are barely sacrificing anything while
| expecting people poorer than us to do what we don't want
| to do.
|
| https://robbieandrew.github.io/GCB2022/PNG/s76_2022_Conti
| nen...
| babypuncher wrote:
| Absolutely. Wealthy nations like ours investing heavily
| in renewable energy makes the technology cheap enough
| that fossil fuels stop looking attractive even to poorer
| nations.
| trasz3 wrote:
| And let me guess, you're not even aware that green every in
| China - eg nuclear power plants - is growing much quicker
| than in US?
| avianlyric wrote:
| We're already seeing countries decouple their economic growth
| from CO2 output (even after accounting for offshoring)[0].
| Coupled with the fact that green technologies like wind and
| solar are either cheaper, or cost competitive with fossil
| sources of energy, plus the history of developing countries
| leap frogging up the tech tree (for example many African
| countries jumped straight to mobile banking). There's
| absolutely no reason to believe that developing countries
| will cause anywhere near the same levels of environmental
| damage as western countries did during their development.
|
| Additionally, western countries could just pay developing to
| use greener tech, covering extra cost's needed to build
| carbon neutral economies, given western nations have profited
| enormously from their exploitation of the natural
| environment.
|
| To believe that climate change is hopeless problem, and that
| solutions could not only be developed, _but already exist_ ,
| is pointlessly cynical and counterproductive. Rather than
| explain why we're all doom, you could instead do some
| research and learn about the interesting work going on to
| solve the exact issues you mention.
|
| [0] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-gdp-decoupling
| jjoonathan wrote:
| The factories that make solar panels and wind turbines for us
| today will make solar panels and wind turbines for the rest
| of the world tomorrow, and also more factories in between now
| and then.
|
| > make even a proverbial "drop in the bucket"
|
| These drops in a bucket are exponential. What did your mother
| teach you about exponentials?
|
| > the way things are done in China not changing
|
| China is making solar panels and nuclear reactors like the
| future depends on it. They are part of the problem, yes, but
| they are definitely part of the solution too.
|
| > climate change cult
|
| Wanting clean air and tame climate is "cult" behavior?
| horns4lyfe wrote:
| As far as the cult goes, I think they probably mean the "we
| have to tear down the economy and re build it to address
| climate Justice" and "any sacrifice is worth it in the name
| of climate change crowds". Of which a large number just pay
| lip service, but there are still a lot of true believers.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| I would be much more sympathetic to these concerns if I
| saw credible green extremist policy pushes of the kind
| you describe, but the extent of green policy so far seems
| to be... EV subsidies for Elon Musk.
|
| No, right now green extremists are primarily just
| bogeymen invoked by the usual conservative causes. I just
| don't feel a pressing need to jump into this fight on the
| side of legacy energy. Not yet and probably not ever.
| anonym29 wrote:
| This is precisely my criticism of that crowd. They aren't
| proposing real solutions, just "EVs everywhere!" while
| EVs are ostensibly not even a fully mature technology the
| way ICE's are yet.
| babypuncher wrote:
| It's almost like solving this problem gets harder and
| harder the longer we put it off.
|
| If only we knew this was a looming problem 40 years ago
| and started doing something about it back then. The total
| economic cost would have been much lower.
|
| And the scary thing is, the cost of climate change is
| only going to get worse. Eventually we will reach a point
| where the cost is unavoidable, and we will be spending
| trillions dealing with the consequences rather than
| billions preventing them.
|
| There is a reason our own military pegs climate change as
| one of our biggest national security risks in the 21st
| century, because things are going to get very ugly when
| large populated regions of the world become inhospitable.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Why would you think that China doesn't care about climate
| change? It's going to affect them too after all. Per-capita,
| the US is still by far the biggest emitter of greenhouse
| gases in the world.
| nemo44x wrote:
| We just need to convince all the people in poor and up and
| coming countries to stay poor.
| jmcqk6 wrote:
| > I don't understand why Westerners are so keen to make major
| sacrifices to quality of life in the name of fighting climate
| change when nothing we do will make a statistically
| significant impact in the long run with major population
| centers like China, India, and Nigeria continuing to grow
| more wealthy with rapidly increasing demand for reliable,
| 24/7 energy production, cheap air conditioning, etc.
|
| Because we still all gotta share this earth together, and
| destroying it faster helps no one. How is that difficult to
| understand? Do you honestly think that just going "fuck it,
| let's keep polluting because other people are doing the same"
| is really going to get us to a better place?
| babypuncher wrote:
| The ban on CFCs has been a huge success and likely prevented
| an awful lot of melanoma.
|
| It's a similar story with leaded gasoline.
|
| I'll never understand this argument. "Why should we care
| about our health if {insert poor country here} doesn't care
| about theirs"? It's just a convenient excuse to keep making
| the problem worse and worse. The correct solution here is to
| find the culprits and pressure them into complying with
| international goals, not just give up and turn the Earth into
| an inhospitable furnace.
| Leary wrote:
| If you look at cumulative historical emissions, whether CO2
| or HFCs, it is the West that produced the majority of the
| pollutants that is currently in the atmosphere. The west,
| therefore should bare the majority of the responsibility for
| their actions since they produced this tremendous externality
| when they were industrializing.
| Gareth321 wrote:
| It sounds like you're arguing we should be cool with China
| destroying the environment because some other countries
| already damaged it. Am I understanding your argument
| correctly?
| ftrobro wrote:
| USA is the only western country in the top five for
| historical CO2 emissions since 1850 (unless you consider
| Brazil a western country):
|
| https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-which-countries-are-
| his...
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| [flagged]
| anonym29 wrote:
| This is not what I am advocating for. To be unequivocally
| clear, I absolutely do believe in man-made climate change,
| and that the solution to it cannot be found down the path
| of ignoring it.
| Pxtl wrote:
| How is "Accelerate the wealth generation in developing
| nations" an alt-right idea?
| altrigjtroll wrote:
| [dead]
| teg4n_ wrote:
| how does that have anything to do with the alt-right??
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| This sort of ignores the global nature of our supply chains
| though. Someone can be very green in life here in the EU
| because all the products they buy are manufactured in China
| and their environmental impact is externalised and put onto
| the stats of another country that's trying to meet our
| demands.
|
| By regulating what's available on markets here we can
| pressure maufacturers elsewhere.
|
| What is the alternative you would suggest? We have no direct
| regulatory power over anyone but ourselves.
| anonym29 wrote:
| I understand that pointing out problems in complex systems
| without proposing a solution is ultimately indifferent from
| eloquent bitching, which I can certainly be fairly accused
| of.
|
| That said, what the west is currently doing to address
| climate change - analogous to cheering for the people
| trying to push a derailed 130-ton freight car back onto the
| rail tracks with unassisted manpower alone - is not a
| solution either.
|
| The first step towards a real solution is recognizing that
| what we are currently doing is a categorically pointless
| waste of time, so we can stop wasting energy and thought on
| that and start diverting it to actual solutions.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > so we can stop wasting energy and thought on that and
| start diverting it to actual solutions.
|
| If there were better "actual solutions", stupid moonshots
| wouldn't get funded in the first place. I don't think
| your framing of this situation is very accurate.
| ireflect wrote:
| You are a very good writer and I'm intrigued by this
| thread. Can you elaborate on what you see as actual
| solutions and how they would look (no matter how far
| fetched)?
| anonym29 wrote:
| Thank you for the complement. I'm under no delusion that
| I have the solutions to the whole world's problems
| figured out. These ideas are like unrefined chunks of
| coal, rife with imperfections and riddled with flaws and
| only under the great pressure and heat of vigorous,
| critical debate may they ever hope to become diamonds.
|
| I think R&D on the scale of what the US spent relative to
| GDP during WW2 might be a place to start. That's
| economically likely to require severe and heavy cuts
| across the board and may require a transformation of what
| are seen as the traditional roles of government. Half of
| all spending in the US goes to social security, medicare,
| and medicaid. These three programs combined take up
| almost triple US military spending. What's worse, they're
| mathematically unsustainable. Social security and
| medicare are effectively pyramid schemes that are running
| out of new people to recruit (result of low birthrates,
| dramatic improvements in life expectancy, and the lowest
| rates of net immigration into the country, as a % of
| existing population, in this country's history). These
| programs are going to die sooner or later anyway, why not
| rip off the band-aid now and start putting that enormous
| spending towards solutions for problems that can save
| billions rather than millions?
|
| At the same time, there probably needs to be major
| overhauls to the US tax system. Even when top marginal
| rates were close to 90% last century, large corporations
| effectively bought politicians to create enormous tax
| write offs for them. As a result, total federal
| government receipts as a percent of GDP have never left
| the range of 16%-26%. Let's consider a flat federal tax
| rate of 27% across the board, with only one category of
| write-offs: R&D for carbon-negative / climate-healing
| solutions (as opposed to carbon neutral / climate-
| unaffecting solutions). We're going to need to be capable
| of removing other countries' carbon emissions if we fail
| to get them on the same page diplomatically or
| militarily, and I will never support military
| intervention (read: mass murder of innocent civilians) as
| a solution.
|
| Imagine the sheer power of the US government being
| deployed full-force, with such overwhelming financial
| backing that we strive to go so deeply carbon negative
| that it doesn't even matter whether India and China are
| on board or not.
|
| Yes we would be giving up the fights on a lot of
| problems, but IMO, no problems other than climate change
| and nuclear conflict between superpowers threatens the
| whole of humanity. While not perfect, the nuclear
| superpower problem is not getting worse as quickly as
| climate change, so on some level it makes sense to go
| full-steam-ahead on resource allocation to the largest
| issue first, and then work our way down the chain to
| smaller ones, rather than overextending ourselves and
| failing to solve problem #1, like we're doing now.
|
| These are obviously some pretty radical proposals and I
| don't think there is political will to even have anything
| remotely like this seriously considered, so our corrupt,
| money-influenced political system probably needs to be
| changed first.
|
| Just like how FTP separates the data plane (political
| outcomes) from the control plane (political process), we
| too need to protect the control plane from adversarial
| influence (big corporation lobbyists, citizens united,
| etc) before we can ever hope to achieve meaningful
| political outcomes.
|
| Accordingly, whatever solves the political corruption
| ("lobbying") problem first should probably be our first
| step.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| If you think that nothing we are doing could possibly
| help, you are ignoring the power of exponentials and
| economies of scale. Besides, a planet with colossal
| amounts of solar/wind/battery/nuclear production capacity
| left over from a developed world ramp is in a much better
| place to help the developing world than one without.
|
| > stop wasting energy and thought on that and start
| diverting it to actual solutions
|
| I thought you didn't have any actual solutions and
| admitted as much?
| anonym29 wrote:
| To be clear, it's not that I think nothing we're
| currently doing helps, it's that I think everything we're
| currently doing is grossly insufficient.
| 8note wrote:
| I don't think you're giving the west a fair shake here.
|
| The work the west(and China) is doing to develop non-
| fossil fuel based tech cheap is directly applicable to
| those growing economies, and not a pointless waste of
| time.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| I think its right to point out the particular futility
| here, but I also think that it is a mistake to attribute
| it all to a "mistake" or particular irrationality of the
| West as a whole.
|
| These things appear to us a "pointless" and a waste of
| time because there are overriding economic principles we
| just don't want to touch, it is a willful pointlessness
| that is quite apparent in the big picture. It's not
| China, it's capitalism, (of which, granted, China is a
| huge agent within).
|
| If we lived in a world where the problems were simply
| about the distribution itself of food and shelter and
| power, we could point to the complexity of the systems,
| and understand the risks of wrongheadedness in the face
| of them, but we live in a world plagued by bad faith and
| non-human incentives that certainly muddy these waters,
| but it doesn't mean there aren't some simple solutions to
| a few things people haven't thought of...
|
| To create this dichotomy between the West and China is to
| deny the Anthropocene we are all in! One that is defined
| necessarily by the literally geological forces of a
| world-dominating economic order.
| bluGill wrote:
| The west is moving to renewable energy quickly. It will
| take time, but we have made a lot of progress and are
| making more.
| timmg wrote:
| > This sort of ignores the global nature of our supply
| chains though.
|
| To me the answer is a pretty easy one:
|
| Take the CO2 emissions of a country and divide by its GDP.
| That gives you a CO2 per dollar. Then decide on a CO2 cost
| per unit for your country. Now apply that as a tariff _per
| dollar_ of imports from said country.
|
| It's imperfect, of course. But I think it is close enough
| to estimate what we want it to do.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| Do the difficult thing. Stop buying from China. As
| consumers, buy things with a transparent supply chain. Look
| for ESG reports on the companies you buy from.
|
| The hard part of this is it requires consumers to be
| educated and act. This almost never happens unless the
| costs for not acting are built into the prices of goods.
| Doing that requires political will. It's going to make a
| lot of people very angry; and we're not talking indulgences
| in the form of cap & trade, either.
| TylerE wrote:
| So, don't buy anything containing electronics?
| anonym29 wrote:
| Produce political solutions that steer the market towards
| developing electronics domestically again, or reducing
| the need for such electronics in the first place.
| ikiris wrote:
| what political solutions do you envision that would
| reduce demand for electronics in a meaningful way?
| anonym29 wrote:
| >The hard part of this is it requires consumers to be
| educated and act.
|
| Agreed 100%.
|
| >Doing that requires political will. It's going to make a
| lot of people very angry; and we're not talking
| indulgences in the form of cap & trade, either.
|
| Also an astute observation. It may be the case that this
| is ultimately a problem with our political system first
| and foremost.
|
| But economic sanctions alone will not halt the
| manufacturing base of an economy the size of China's.
|
| China and India need to get on board for real. Asking
| politely is not working. I'll never advocate for the
| initiation of force, but something is going to need to
| change in a big way to convince these countries to join
| us in a fight that will strip all of us of a little
| short-term prosperity, if we want to leave a planet that
| our great grandchildren can safely habitate.
| munk-a wrote:
| I might suggest the slightly less difficult thing that I
| think _could_ be reasonably politically accomplished.
| Introduce carbon tariffs on goods imported from dirty
| countries to make their products less competitive and
| provide an incentive to clean up manufacturing.
| evandale wrote:
| I want to go one step further than this idea and
| introduce carbon tariffs on imported goods coupled with
| price ceilings so corporations can't pass off the tariffs
| to wealthy people and still profit. The corporations
| should be paying these taxes and their bottom line should
| suffer if they're selling dirty goods. They should not be
| able to make the profit margins they're making today by
| manufacturing cheap trash in China and selling it for
| insane markups in first-world countries.
|
| The price ceilings should be set based on some amount of
| maximum profit margin companies should be allowed to
| make. If they want to make bigger margins they're going
| to have to move manufacturing to cleaner countries and
| then they can apply their insane markups.
| munk-a wrote:
| I'm actually quite in favor of, essentially, a minimum
| VAT tax. The US demands that good manufacturing pays some
| reasonable level of VAT taxes (let's say 10% as an
| example). If Apple builds a laptop in China they value at
| 300$ (paying 45$ in VAT to China) and then ship it over
| to Bermuda to "endow it with their brand" adding 1700$ to
| the value and paying a VAT tax of .5% then, once it
| arrives at US shores, we simply bar the good entry until
| 9.5% of 1700$ is surrendered to the US government to
| account for VAT dodging.
|
| It's an incredibly easy way to close a whole bunch of tax
| loopholes at once.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| So, an import tariff that is waived against imports from
| countries with sufficiently high taxes on production,
| provided those taxes are characterized the right way?
|
| Seems like a monumentally bad idea
|
| > It's an incredibly easy way to close a whole bunch of
| tax loopholes at once.
|
| I don't think it closes any tax loopholes.
| munk-a wrote:
| Tax compatibility is a pretty solved problem - countries
| frequently coordinate to make sure income and other taxes
| don't end up being double counted so it's not like this
| would happen accidentally[1]. And the point isn't so much
| that the US should collect all this revenue - it's just
| to make tax havens moot and unnecessary.
|
| Why spend money shipping laptops to Bermuda so you can
| put a sticker on them there if you aren't saving any
| money?
|
| 1. There's a positive incentive here, if you work and
| live in country A and are considering working in country
| B either country B can craft their tax system so that you
| won't end up paying the same taxes to both country A or
| country B... or they can not do that. If they fail to
| make their tax law compatible they lose out on your tax
| income (it instead all goes to country A) since nobody
| wants to be double taxed - if they make their tax laws
| compatible then they essentially get some free income and
| another earner. Digital nomads pulling down six digit
| salaries in low cost of living countries also injects a
| whole lot of money into the local economy and generally
| just makes things better - and the country retains the
| right to limit visas if they ever have any issues with
| it.
| anonym29 wrote:
| Great baby step. I'm all for it. Let's just make sure
| nobody is under the impression that this is anything more
| than a baby step - far more will be needed, ultimately.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| > nothing we do will make a statistically significant impact
| in the long run
|
| We've already reduced estimated warming from ~6 degrees to
| ~3.5 degrees or so. It's not enough, but it's a hell of a lot
| better than statistically insignificant.
| christkv wrote:
| [flagged]
| Pxtl wrote:
| Realistically, China is playing both sides here and everybody
| knows it. On the one hand, they know there's no real
| political consequence for polluting yet - they're happy to
| loot the commons as hard as they can.
|
| On the other hand, China is also investing a furious amount
| of money into green tech, doing multiple moonshots at a time
| on this stuff. So when the world _does_ start to enforce
| standards globally, they 'll be in the winning position.
|
| So in this era where nobody is putting in an earnest effort
| on climate change, they're winnning... and the day we switch
| over to caring and enforcing the rules globally, they'll keep
| on winning.
| asperous wrote:
| We don't have to trust their numbers, we have satellites that
| can monitor the emission levels.
|
| The US pollutes at roughly twice the amount on a per person
| basis as China. In addition we "outsource" some of our
| pollution to them by them doing our manufacturing.
|
| It's tough to both raise the standard of living (reduce
| poverty) while also reducing pollution but China has a lot of
| initiatives to be more green; for examples 150 new nuclear
| reactors planned in the next 15 years. They benefit from the
| better air quality so it's a goal for them.
| anonym29 wrote:
| We do have a worse starting point, but as another commenter
| has pointed out, we're trending in the right direction and
| China is trending in the wrong direction.
|
| Part of the solution is necessarily going to be temporary
| reductions in American energy consumption, writ large,
| until we can produce technology to sustainably remove
| carbon emissions from the environment at scale. I'm all-in,
| for instance, on banning SUVs and "light" trucks for
| personal ownership, which categorically require more energy
| input (regardless of whether gasoline, hydrogen, electric,
| etc) than sedans and compact cars - to say nothing of the
| pedestrian safety risks, no less.
|
| Hell, I'm open to considering energy quotas for residential
| homes, to be reduced to a level sufficient only for the
| sustainment of life past a certain threshold, to
| disincentive wasteful use of electricity.
|
| These are all tiny steps in the right direction, and all
| insufficient alone, but our progress in saving the climate
| is a vector value, not a boolean value. A bunch of little
| improvements in the right direction do help, but we cannot
| accept them as a "complete" solution on their own.
| scottLobster wrote:
| "to be reduced to a level sufficient only for the
| sustainment of life past a certain threshold," Wow, do
| you hear yourself? Who decides what "threshold" is
| acceptable, you? You think you should be able to
| determine whether my infant daughter freezes in the
| winter or swelters in the summer? Oh I'm sure your theory
| involves some utopian government that never gets anything
| wrong.
|
| What you're proposing is a dystopian police state where
| the government decides how warm or cold your house should
| be on any given day. Of course the rich will be able to
| just pay any fines to keep the power/gas on, so they can
| blast their AC all summer while the poor swelter or go
| into debt to pay fines, because their house unfortunately
| isn't built in the shade and gets hotter than the ones
| around it, so the government weather stations think their
| house is cooler than it actually is. Or the government
| will have to put thermostats in literally every house to
| accurately monitor internal temperature, and decide
| what's good enough for you.
|
| Why not grocery rations while we're at it? The government
| will assign you the number and type of foods you're
| limited to, namely the ones that produce the least carbon
| emissions to produce and with the caloric and nutritional
| profiles determined by the government to be ideal. Would
| cure obesity as a side effect!
|
| Also housing will be limited to a certain number of sq ft
| per person, any existing property with a footprint
| exceeding that number will be seized and turned into
| multi-family housing, with government-determined "fair"
| compensation to the existing property owner of course.
|
| Both of those ideas follow the same priorities and
| rationale as your energy quotas.
|
| Shit like that is the real reason why the second
| amendment exists. You're probably just wealthy enough
| that you assume you'd be among the ruling elite that
| maintains its personal freedom, or you really haven't
| thought these ideas through. I'm far less worried about
| climate change, something we can at least potentially
| adapt to at cost, than I am about rhetoric like this.
| It's akin to the Chinese Nationalists opening the Yellow
| River dam in 1938 in an attempt to slow the Japanese
| advance. The resulting flood killed between
| 400,000-900,000 civilians directly depending on who's
| counting, made millions more homeless, and ultimately did
| little to slow the Japanese advance. But I guess it was a
| "tiny step in the right direction" from a war-fighting
| perspective, right?
| Shaanie wrote:
| The alternative is that we do nothing until it's too
| late, and then the consequences will be much worse. Don't
| worry though, society is terrible at preventive action,
| so I'm pretty confident we're going for the reactive
| action once it's too late.
| bluGill wrote:
| The trends are the US is reducing emissions. I'm not sure
| what China us doing (I know they build a lot of solar, but
| i'm not clear if they are also building coal power plants)
| mrguyorama wrote:
| They are building, buying, and using a lot of coal, but
| that's mostly a temporary regression in their
| environmentalism from a significant economic reduction.
| Remember, at one point they were literally _closing their
| airports_ because it 's too smoggy to operate safely.
| China will reduce their fossil fuel usage even if global
| warming was not a concern, simply because they don't like
| the lost productivity and societal happiness that comes
| from breathing so much smog.
| dirtyid wrote:
| >temporary regression
|
| ...
|
| >China will reduce their fossil fuel usage even if global
| warming was not a concern
|
| Pretty much, security enviroment has changed. So
| indigenous energy security = short/medium term coal is
| back until electrification proliferates.
| marcinzm wrote:
| Last I checked China, India, etc. still have a much lower per
| capita carbon footprint than the US.
| inkblotuniverse wrote:
| They're looking to catch up! They don't want to remain
| poor, after all.
| tzs wrote:
| They don't need to come anywhere near US levels of per
| capita emissions to stop being poor. Here are some
| countries that are generally considered to be reasonably
| wealthy, and their per capita emissions as a percent of
| US per capita emissions: 63% Japan
| 61% Germany 36% UK 30% Switzerland
|
| India is at 12% now and China at 48%.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| They are just as much looking to leapfrog and have
| opportunities to do so. Without massive numbers of oil
| and coal lobbyists, as just one example, it is far
| _easier_ for them to jump straight into massive renewable
| energy sources and skip a lot of Western CO2 mistakes in
| their "bootstrapping" processes.
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| Google says per capita is for each person. And there are a
| lot more persons in both India and China. _Much_ lower isn
| 't going to help for long.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > This isn't a fight we can win
|
| The right doesn't even believe that climate change is real,
| they aren't participating in any fight.
| anonym29 wrote:
| Declaring your own countrymen an enemy in a war that
| countries five times our size is winning is not going to
| convince them to join your side.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > Declaring your own countrymen an enemy
|
| This is historically more of a right-wing phenomenon in
| the US. Though I concede it is becoming stronger on the
| left in recent years, as their frustration boils over.
| Seems they've finally concluded that the right wing will
| never be coming to the table in good faith, so might as
| well fight fire with fire.
|
| We're all losing.
| TylerE wrote:
| They're my enemy because they already declared me theirs.
| nluken wrote:
| I mean what do you propose western nations do? Nothing? Yeah
| stupid measures like removing straws from restaurants make 0
| difference, but pushing for more fuel efficient vehicles and
| cleaner sources of electricity seems like a worthwhile effort
| without much QoL sacrifice. Green infrastructure (i.e.
| reducing car dependence) also seems to improve quality of
| life in many places, so I would argue we should be trying to
| do that regardless. Also don't dismiss that doing these
| things puts international pressure on developing nations to
| clean up their energy as demand increases. Western nations
| can't demand that the rest of the world reduce emissions
| until they do first. Reducing carbon domestically is
| necessary to try to reduce it abroad.
| hammock wrote:
| >I mean what do you propose western nations do? Nothing?
|
| We could compel China and other countries, by diplomatic
| and other means
| smoldesu wrote:
| That sorta requires you to lead by example, first.
| hammock wrote:
| Does it? The US is currently compelling Russia to give up
| its claims in eastern Ukraine, despite occupying whole
| parts of Syria and other places itself
| trasz3 wrote:
| US hasn't invaded Syria in a colonial war. They also
| didn't commit genocide in Syria.
| hammock wrote:
| Someone might want to tell the people of Syria.
|
| >"The Syrian Arab Republic affirms that the practices of
| the United States of America and the illegal presence of
| its forces on parts of the territory of the Syrian Arab
| Republic is an actual embodiment of the crime of
| aggression," the Syrian Mission to the United Nations
| told Newsweek.
|
| >"Syria stresses that the lies promoted by the U.S.
| administration are nothing but a failed attempt to
| justify the acts of aggression and the flagrant violation
| of the sovereignty, unity, and territorial integrity of
| the Syrian Arab Republic,"
|
| https://www.newsweek.com/syria-demands-end-americas-last-
| for...
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| We've been observing for more than a year now how well
| that works in practice. Don't overestimate your
| abilities.
| tzs wrote:
| How do you diplomatically convince another country that
| their people need to have a lifestyle and standard of
| living that emits a fraction of the CO2 that your people
| emit?
| hammock wrote:
| They're doing it to us (Americans)... stands to reason
| that it can be done to others
| tzs wrote:
| Doing what to us?
|
| The current US lifestyle has CO2 emissions per person 2x
| that of the current Chinese lifestyle, and over 8x that
| of the current Indian lifestyle.
|
| Total emissions from India is 1/2 US emissions and total
| from China is 2x US emissions, but switching to per
| country instead of per person doesn't really help because
| the US is the #2 emitter by country (we are #16 per
| capita).
| hammock wrote:
| >Doing what to us?
|
| Diplomatically convincing us that we need to have a
| lifestyle and standard of living that emits a fraction of
| the CO2 we currently do...
|
| I think we agree..
|
| Why so hostile?
| rcme wrote:
| I think it's pretty clear that the only two outcomes of
| this scenario are societal destruction via climate
| catastrophe or we find a way to cleanly 1000x our energy
| production.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| > find a way to cleanly 1000x our energy production.
|
| Have you heard of our lord and savior Nuclear Fission? We
| should build a shitload of restores all over the place.
| asdff wrote:
| Nixon wanted to have 1000 operating nuclear reactors in
| the U.S. by 2000. Today we have 92 of them, which power
| 8% of our electricity demand. Making the assumption that
| those other 918 reactors we would have had generate the
| same output as these, we could have been almost entirely
| powered through nuclear energy today had nuclear energy
| not seen pushback over the last 50 years. Instead, c'est
| la vie
| anonym29 wrote:
| We're making important strides on fusion too, which makes
| fission look like a waste of radiological material, in
| comparison.
| wongarsu wrote:
| They are not really competing for the same material.
| Fission smashes neutrons into big atoms to make them
| smaller, fusion smashes small atoms into each other to
| make them bigger. Both work by making atoms of the more
| stable medium-sized variety, and extracting the energy of
| that process.
|
| But yeah, looks like commercial fusion reactors are
| getting closer.
| lll-o-lll wrote:
| Ha! We need a 100x or 1000x improvement in efficiency
| before a commercial power station becomes viable.
|
| I can't see fusion energy being a reality in my lifetime.
| thfuran wrote:
| Aren't we still on the "fusion never" funding timeline? I
| mean, we might accidentally luck into it, but it's not
| like we're really trying hard.
| [deleted]
| josephcsible wrote:
| > what do you propose western nations do?
|
| Ban imports of goods made in ways that would have been
| illegal to do here.
| guhidalg wrote:
| Which ones should we start with? We can't go from 0 to
| 100 overnight, that would halt everything.
| warning26 wrote:
| Why not? Hard stop on all noncompliant trade with China.
|
| Would destroy the economy in the short run, but it would
| eventually correct.
| ikiris wrote:
| "If we kill all of our populace, we wont care if the
| world warms" isn't a very compelling argument.
|
| What do you think destroying the economy does?
| ticviking wrote:
| Start with those where the environmental impact is best
| known and understood.
|
| Impose escalating tariffs on those items from any nation
| not meeting those goals.
|
| We will buy less or they'll be made more cleanly. Worst
| case making them in countries that make them cleanly
| eventually becomes profitable with the tariff protection.
| asdff wrote:
| You could do all of them and give companies time to
| adjust their supply chains. I'm sure given such a
| sweeping order, supply chains will reorient rapidly to
| other places.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > I mean what do you propose western nations do?
|
| > Western nations can't demand that the rest of the world
| reduce emissions until they do first.
|
| The west is working hard at lowering it's emissions, but
| all that work is getting undone because China's emissions
| aren't slowing down. Coal is incredibly cheap when there's
| no carbon tax or emission standards. One of the many
| reasons it's cheaper to manufacture in China and why North
| Americans and Europeans can't compete [0]. Comparing the
| US[1] and China[2], the US has:
|
| - Decreasing per capita emissions in the US starting in
| 1973 (-27%)
|
| - A decrease in the countries emission starting in 2007
| (-13%)
|
| Meanwhile for the same period China has had
|
| - a 7x increase per capita since 1973 (+532%)
|
| - 48% increase for its global emissions since 2007
|
| So it is possible to drastically reduce our carbon
| footprint thanks to innovation and smarter power
| generation.
|
| Time to add tariffs on goods produced by states who made
| the decision of going all-in on polluting power generation,
| and potentially apply immigration quotas to citizens of
| these countries.
|
| [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/26/us-leads-greenhouse-
| gas-emis...
|
| [1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states
|
| [2] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china
| Apocryphon wrote:
| No fan of straw bans, but aren't they motivated by a
| different ecological issue, namely reducing plastic waste
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| You're thinking of plastic bag bans.
|
| Bags blow in the wind and wind up all sorts of places.
|
| Straws mostly wind up in proper trash streams.
| asdff wrote:
| If it was really about that, you'd think they'd force
| starbucks to sell you a cold drink in a paper cup instead
| of what is basically a giant straw you can't locally
| recycle anyhow.
| nluken wrote:
| Yes they are so perhaps that was a strawman, if you will.
| I could equally have made the point with "sustainable"
| versions of inherently unsustainable products or any
| manner of surface-level "environment-friendly" change.
| jonp888 wrote:
| Accept that nothing of significance will be done until it
| is far too late and most of the world is drowning, burning
| or starving.
|
| Enjoy your life, for goodness sake don't have children and
| prepare for the collapse of civilisation in around 50 years
| or so.
| VLM wrote:
| Not every culture values virtue signaling as much as the
| current regime in the west; performative acts are not
| necessarily going to influence other cultures such as
| China, etc.
| babypuncher wrote:
| Banning CFC's was not "virtue signalling". The Montreal
| Protocol has been a massive success and likely already
| saved countless lives.
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| Do you see all investments in green energy and waste
| reduction - even those that are creating material effects
| at a national level - as performative?
| anonym29 wrote:
| I agree. China is either going to require us to find a
| real diplomatic solution, or get so good at producing
| technology that removes carbon from the environment
| sustainably, at scale, that we can simply suck up other
| countries' excess carbon. Either way, these will be
| expensive and the political will for such solutions is
| probably not here in our current political system. I
| commented further down about needing to address political
| corruption first and foremost (removing "lobbyists",
| overturning CU, etc) - I think this will be an important
| step in producing a political system that will even allow
| us to effectively address climate change in the first
| place.
| dzader wrote:
| [flagged]
| anonym29 wrote:
| Do you intend to refute any part of what I actually said,
| or just to engage in unproductive name-calling?
| dzader wrote:
| [flagged]
| Clent wrote:
| Read the article. It can be a manufacturing by-product. It's
| likely that there are unknown sources producing it as a
| product.
|
| If it was purposeful that would be trackable.
| Supermancho wrote:
| Assuming the global monitoring can track the source (if it
| was intentional or not), is not based on information from the
| article.
|
| > This is what happened a few years ago, when researchers
| detected high levels of CFC-11 in the atmosphere2, and traced
| them to eastern China3. They deduced the source on the basis
| of readings from monitoring stations in South Korea and
| Japan, reporting it in May 2019, and afterwards, levels began
| to fall. Scientists got somewhat lucky with CFC-11:
| monitoring stations equipped to detect that particular
| chemical happened to be located relatively close to the
| source.
|
| Maybe we just need to be lucky again?
| jchw wrote:
| The article implies something different: that it was lucky
| they were so easily able to track the first CFC-11 incidents:
|
| > Scientists got somewhat lucky with CFC-11: monitoring
| stations equipped to detect that particular chemical happened
| to be located relatively close to the source.
| leereeves wrote:
| > Why can it not be countries that don't care just using CFCs
| still?
|
| And somehow manufacturing them without anyone knowing?
| hinkley wrote:
| How well do we understand chemical evolution in landfills?
| Superfund sites? Maybe nobody is making it and it's happening
| anyway.
| bbarnett wrote:
| I wonder if it is old appliances, air conditioners, etc being
| scrapped, but without processing the refrigerants?
|
| Some appliances could be 30 years old?
| kulahan wrote:
| The article explains this.
| dbg31415 wrote:
| I find that the US is very lenient when it comes to inspecting
| environmental practices. What is it, most oil rigs get inspected
| 5% as often as they should? I forget the number, and I'm just
| quoting some movie... someone will know, but it was a very small
| number.
|
| China shows a blatant disregard for the environment.
|
| Russia also seems to have no concern for environmental
| protection.
|
| India may not have the financial means to prioritize
| environmental protection.
|
| It's likely that some places that previously used banned
| chemicals simply hoarded them or purchased them at a lower price
| once other countries began enforcing bans.
|
| It's not surprising that banned chemicals are still being used,
| and the same will likely happen with gasoline.
|
| As we shift towards electric vehicles, the price of gas will
| decrease, making it more difficult to move away from petroleum-
| based products. As a result, anyone still "developing" will
| inevitably use more petroleum than they did before.
|
| It's disheartening to say, but we're in a tough spot when it
| comes to the environment. I can't really envision any scenario in
| which short-term greed (even spanning one lifetime) doesn't
| destroy humanity.
|
| And are we even able to transition off petroleum? States like
| California and Texas already have massive power grid issues....
| and that's with sub 5% of the vehicles drawing power.
|
| Think a Republican President would have even paused to make sure
| his pen worked before approving the Willow Project? Pretty hard
| to go against a state that overwhelmingly wants more jobs.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/12/climate/biden-willow-arct...
|
| It's a bleak situation.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| If it turns out this is happening because all of the EPA
| employees are working two jobs to keep up with inflation, I'll
| laugh.
| ryanblakeley wrote:
| > The collective annual warming effect of these five chemicals on
| the planet is equivalent to the emissions produced by a small
| country like Switzerland.
|
| > When CFCs were phased out, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) were
| brought in as substitutes. But CFCs can crop up as unintended by-
| products during HFC manufacture.
|
| > The appearance of CFC-13 is much more baffling. "We really have
| no clue" where the emissions are coming from, Vollmer says. "We
| don't know of any chemical process where this will show up as a
| by-product."
| hammock wrote:
| >The collective annual warming effect of these five chemicals
| on the planet is equivalent to the emissions produced by a
| small country like Switzerland.
|
| Why is warming effect what matters here? During the original
| CFC crisis, it was the hole in the ozone layer we were more
| worried about.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| They both matter, and the ozone hole has started to heal
| whereas global warming is getting much worse. 40 years ago,
| the CO2 level was also only 345ppm or so compared to 420ppm
| today and rising much more rapidly than in the 80s, so
| overall warming is becoming more acute.
| briantakita wrote:
| Because the Global Warming with record snowpacks is a scheme
| to consolidate institutional power. These chemicals will get
| more attention & researchers can raise more money by
| associating it with Global Warming. This financial incentive
| has encouraged the rapid rise of papers mentioning APGW or
| Global Warming.
|
| ---
|
| I accept the incoming downvotes. Another view of the truth is
| reward enough. Sometimes unpopular things need to be said.
| lamontcg wrote:
| - Actual glaciers are melting all over the globe and ice is
| going down. Yearly snowpack in an isolated area doesn't
| contradict the global trend.
|
| - It is called "climate change" not "global warming"
| because you're dumping more energy into the system,
| evaporating more water and stronger storms can be one
| result.
|
| - California flipping from drought to massive storms
| doesn't cancel out, it is evidence of increasing extremes.
|
| - Sometimes unpopular opinions are just wrong.
| dashundchen wrote:
| Because it's non-negligible source of warming greenhouse
| gases that is completely avoidable - we have plenty of
| substitutes available to us with lower global warming
| potential. Releasing 1 kg of CFC-13 will trap the same amount
| of heat as 14,000 kg of CO2.
|
| Project Drawdown lists managing refrigerants as one of the
| top 10 solutions to limit warming in both 1.5 and 2C
| scenarios.
|
| https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/table-of-solutions
|
| https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/refrigerant-management
| eloff wrote:
| Yes, but the point is the danger from the warming
| contribution is less than the danger from an ozone hole, so
| why focus on the warming? Unless the ozone depletion is
| below the recovery rate.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| The article suggests that it is currently below the
| recovery rate (but only just).
| morsch wrote:
| _The combined emissions of CFC-13, CFC-112a, CFC-113a,
| CFC-114a and CFC-115 increased from 1.6 +- 0.2 to 4.2 +-
| 0.4 ODP-Gg yr-1 (CFC-11-equivalent ozone-depleting
| potential) between 2010 and 2020. The anticipated impact
| of these emissions on stratospheric ozone recovery is
| small. However, ongoing emissions of the five CFCs of
| focus may negate some of the benefits gained under the
| Montreal Protocol if they continue to rise. In addition,
| the climate impact of the emissions of these CFCs needs
| to be considered, as their 2020 emissions are equivalent
| to 47 +- 5 TgCO2._
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-023-01147-w
| eecc wrote:
| Gg, Tg? Is that Giga-gram and Tera-gram? Why not kg, the
| SI standard unit for mass?
| wcoenen wrote:
| "Teragram" appeared in the original IPCC reports circa
| 1990, so this has been a thing for at least a gigasecond.
| Turskarama wrote:
| Adding an SI prefix to an SI unit is standard practice
| rather than adding a bunch of trailing zeros.
| heyoni wrote:
| I think it is an SI unit:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(mass)
| eloff wrote:
| Thanks, that makes sense now.
| bluGill wrote:
| Both matter, though warming wasn't considered a big deal, the
| media was still coming away from warning about a coming ice
| age (i've never figured out what was going on there, as a kid
| I heard it more than once, but now few admit the scare
| existed). The ozone hole was a big deal.
|
| Now that CFCs are banned the ozone layer is recovering. I'm
| guessing these emissions are not really enough to harm the
| ozone layer much (so long as they don't get worse!), but they
| add to greenhouse gases that are not in control.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > i've never figured out what was going on there
|
| The media lying is what happened. Either because they don't
| know anything about any subject and misunderstood some very
| non-surprising papers or because somebody was paying them
| to lie so people wouldn't believe on global warming.
|
| It's hard to say how much of what reason.
|
| And nowadays people go scrutinize the scientific papers to
| find the bad ones... and there aren't any. Because there
| were never any, the entire thing waas invented elsewhere.
| iamerroragent wrote:
| " though warming wasn't considered a big deal, the media
| was still coming away from warning about a coming ice age
| (i've never figured out what was going on there, as a kid I
| heard it more than once, but now few admit the scare
| existed)."
|
| https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/that-70s-myth-did-
| cl...
| [deleted]
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| >as a kid I heard it more than once, but now few admit the
| scare existed.
|
| People very rarely admit to backing the wrong horse that.
| Nobody will tell you they sold AAPL and MSFT stock in the
| 90s. Nobody will tell you they believed the racist
| propaganda back in the 60s. Nobody will tell you they
| believed Iraq had WMDs in the 00s. Nobody will tell you
| that they believed the people who were saying Long Island
| would soon be under ice in the 70s.
| kadoban wrote:
| There was like one story in a popular science magazine
| once that got a lot of play, and many people heard about
| it because it's a vivid story. That's about the extent of
| it.
|
| Climate change deniers also keep it alive because
| enlarging it validates their distrust of scientists.
| bluGill wrote:
| It was more than one story. PBS programs and other
| sources ran with it.
|
| Notice that i'm careful to say it was the media, and not
| sound science.
| Scramblejams wrote:
| No, the stories also made it into Newsweek and Time,
| which were pretty much the dominant credible news
| weeklies at the time, circulated to many millions of
| households. It's easy to look back now and say that was
| just sloppy work, but I remember some academic authority
| figures in my young life taking the idea seriously a
| decade later as a result.
|
| It was delivered with an imprimatur of authority from
| multiple sources and left an imprint for a long time.
| midasuni wrote:
| I certainly advocated for action in Iraq in the early
| 2000s. I have a naive world view, informed I guess by a
| lot of 90s American media output, about America saving
| the world, Iraq was one of those opportunities.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| I they hadn't totally botched it post invasion, maybe it
| would have worked too.
|
| But let's see, tell 800k armed angry men they are out of
| a job and tell them to _" go home, please don't steal any
| AK47s on your way out, mmmkay thanks goodbye go home and
| be a good boy now"_
| anoonmoose wrote:
| Would love to hear what you think about the Ars Technica
| article linked in another reply to GP, and how it relates
| to what you and GP said.
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| I always figured it was a Y2K style "experts make
| narrowly scoped statements and journalists blow it out of
| proportion and make it look like the world is ending"
| type panic. The article doesn't really look into that
| side of things other than to say it happened.
| bluGill wrote:
| They didn't address the popular media of the day, only
| what science was really saying.
| magicalist wrote:
| Scroll down to "This journalist wrote a story, and you
| won't believe what happened next"
| londons_explore wrote:
| People have become used to the thin ozone layer. In much of
| the world, you now can't stay outside all day without getting
| sunburn. There are not many reports of sunburn from 100 years
| ago.
|
| I haven't managed to find any measurements or even estimates
| of what UV levels at ground level were before we started
| making CFC's - it seems we didn't think to measure it!
|
| Feel sorry for all the animals and plants for whom suncream
| isn't an option...
| outworlder wrote:
| > People have become used to the thin ozone layer. In much
| of the world, you now can't stay outside all day without
| getting sunburn. There are not many reports of sunburn from
| 100 years ago.
|
| So are you saying we evolved skin melanin production from
| UV radiation for no reason whatsoever? People that live in
| the desert used to (and still do) cover themselves with
| clothing just because of fashion standards?
|
| Sunburn has been a problem for our species ever since we
| shed most of our fur.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Romans were believed to have a 'pale white' skin. They
| lived in Rome, and while there are records of sunshades
| (Velarium), it doesn't seem they were common. For
| example, the colosseum, a place people might stay many
| hours, had only 30% coverage.
|
| I don't think someone with similar skin would last long
| in Rome in the sun today...
| meindnoch wrote:
| Modern people barely spend time outside compared to the
| Romans. No wonder we're getting sunburnt when we finally
| go out in peak summer. If you spend most of your time
| outside year round, you'll develop a natural deep tan
| which offers considerable protection from the sun.
| asdff wrote:
| My grandfather spent all of his time in the garden, with
| no sunscreen and somehow no sunburn, and was extremely
| dark compared to anyone else in our family as a result.
|
| In the past though, usually people just wouldn't be out
| when the sun is high in the sky to begin with. People
| would also cover themselves up from the sun, you see this
| today with how desert communities dress, or how certain
| tribes will paint themselves in ochre that has uv and
| mosquito protection.
| waboremo wrote:
| Why risk melanoma for a little bit of "natural
| protection" when sun screen exists?
| robocat wrote:
| AFAIK the biggest risk of melanoma occurs from sunburn. I
| would guess a protective tan from regular sunlight is
| probably healthy overall (depending on how you get your
| tan: confounding benefits and risks for any activity
| would drown out signal?). Lifestyle risks trump melanoma
| risks.
| outworlder wrote:
| > A strong distinction in skin color is frequently seen
| in the portrayal of men and women in Ancient Rome. Since
| women in Ancient Rome were traditionally expected to stay
| inside and out of the sun, they were usually quite pale;
| whereas men were expected to go outside and work in the
| sun, so they were usually deeply tanned
|
| Those commoners sometimes wore hats (pileus)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_in_ancient_Rom
| an_...
|
| There are also descriptions of treatments for sunburn.
|
| There's no doubt that the ozone layer depletion increases
| the amount of UV light that we receive. Sometimes
| dramatically(very location dependent). But it's not like
| people could just toast in the sun all day without
| protection and not get burned.
| barkingcat wrote:
| People also had much lower life expectancies. I don't
| think it's useful to say that because the people in
| antiquity didn't have sun protection they were stronger
| or somehow immune to sunburns ... maybe they just died
| before living long enough for it to matter.
|
| Or maybe they all died from cancers of all kinds, just
| not categorized as such, or died by murder / wars before
| cancer became an issue.
| kadoban wrote:
| The vast majority of historically lower life expectancies
| is due to changes in death rates in the first few years.
| People who made it to adulthood weren't all keeling over
| at 35.
| Lewton wrote:
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-at-
| age-15...
|
| Life expectancy at age 15 has gone up from 60 to 90
|
| That's still a massive increase
| silisili wrote:
| I'm going to politely call bullhicky on this statement.
| Sunburns have existed for much longer than 100 years - in
| fact, the first modern/commercial sunscreen was invented
| almost 100 years ago. Cursory searching shows that
| Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, etc had different methods of
| attempting sunscreen.
|
| Is the sun worse now than then? Maybe, probably. But it's
| borderline alarmist to just declare sunburns are a recent
| phenomena.
| pasabagi wrote:
| I seem to remember the last time this happened the culprit was
| discovered to be people stealing CFC-containing waste tars from
| the factories they worked at, then selling them on for use in
| bitumen roads.
|
| Iirc, CFCs are a unintended byproduct of a lot of industrial
| organic chemistry that uses chlorine - so there's an unfortunate
| mismatch of incentives between factories, which wish to reduce
| costs, politicians that want to reduce costs, and thus regulation
| and/or regulatory enforcement, and people who don't want a nice
| new melanoma.
| varunjain99 wrote:
| I'm surprised this isn't measured more frequently after the CFC
| crisis we had back in the day. Also, very puzzling that they have
| different theories for different CFC's... surprising to have
| independent trends causing this?
| aclatuts wrote:
| Maybe a lot of old equipment that used CFCs are now collectively
| leaking at the same time?
| rekoil wrote:
| Yeah that must be it. Very unfortunate.
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