[HN Gopher] Study: The ozone hole is healing, thanks to global r...
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Study: The ozone hole is healing, thanks to global reduction of
CFCs
Author : gnabgib
Score : 84 points
Date : 2025-03-05 18:40 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.mit.edu)
| wtcactus wrote:
| Of course that, as usual, this was due to the West taking the
| hit, and China continuing doing pollution as usual:
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48353341.amp
|
| Let's hope that now that Europe needs to focus on more important
| issues, they stop hindering our productivity with environmental
| artificial limits so that China can keep increasing their
| pollutants and industry.
| jahnu wrote:
| > the West taking the hit
|
| It's not like the west didn't benefit massively from it
| initially. Just like with carbon emissions where China will
| likely never emit as much as say the US will cumulatively,
| despite a much larger population too.
| yyyk wrote:
| In fairness China did crack down on that[0]. Some limits are
| excessive, but here the minor hit was worth it.
|
| [0]
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03277-w
|
| https://www.dw.com/en/ozone-layer-recovery-back-on-track-aft...
| WastedCucumber wrote:
| Thank you for posting this, this is a very important follow-
| up to the parent's linked paper.
|
| I'm a stratospheric scientist. Back when the reports were
| written, that CFC's were still being emitted in China, our
| community was pretty bummed and weren't very hopeful, but we
| were very happily surprised when China got those emmissions
| under control so quickly.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > they stop hindering our productivity with environmental
| artificial limits so that China can keep increasing their
| pollutants and industry.
|
| This is a strange take to me. We've had a great positive
| environmental impact and your take away is "but China is bad so
| we should also be bad!"
|
| Why not instead use tarrifs and international pressure for what
| it's good for. "Goods linked to CFC emissions get an automatic
| 25% tarrif".
| mrexroad wrote:
| To be clear... are you suggesting that b/c one party started
| doing something damaging that we should all forgo trying and
| continue doing something that is a clear and present danger to
| our atmosphere's ability to provide UV protection?
|
| I'm also curious what issues you suggest Europe focus on that
| would require abandoning these straightforward, if slightly
| more costly, manufacturing efforts.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Annoyingly you'll see this brought up as a "false alarm by
| environmentalist" by climate change deniers when it's really a
| time we absolutely succeeded.
| gunian wrote:
| on the nature of ontology :)
| ajross wrote:
| "If a problem was fixed, it wasn't a problem" is a really,
| really difficult cognition problem to crack. And unlike a lot
| of other fallacies it tends to affect the hyper-rationalist HN
| set _worse_ than other demographics (who generally don 't have
| a problem with the idea that someone fixed something).
|
| We saw the same thing on the front page here just last week in
| the Bald Eagle thread, pointing out that it wasn't particularly
| endangered and that even if it was it was never so in Alaska.
| This in a discussion about how it was _not_ listed as
| endangered in the continental US anymore precisely because of
| the success of the conservation effort under the Endangered
| Species Act.
| nashashmi wrote:
| I always wondered why the climate impact of a recovering ozone
| was not taken into account when forecasting climate change?
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Is it not?
| rtkwe wrote:
| Back then? Can't say but my guess is it wasn't assumed we
| would actually manage to do anything about it I imagine. CFC
| is one of the few times we've managed to win an environmental
| fight.
|
| I'm not even sure it has a particularly strong effect, a
| quick search [0] shows that a depleted ozone would have a
| moderate cooling effect and a full layer would be slightly
| warmer but it's swamped by the effects of more direct green
| house gases.
|
| Now the current and some variation of the future state of the
| ozone layer is definitely accounted for in the models, we
| just have so much more compute to throw at the modelling we
| can try many more scenarios but even then by [0] it looks
| like it's a minor effect.
|
| [0] https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/research/ozone-
| uv/moreinfo?view=...
| bluGill wrote:
| > CFC is one of the few times we've managed to win an
| environmental fight.
|
| Go back to 1950 and try to breath in LA. Go to your local
| gas station and ask for leaded fuel. To measure the PH of
| the next rain fall. There are been many environmental wins
| over the decades.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > Go back to 1950 and try to breath in LA. Go to your
| local gas station and ask for leaded fuel. To measure the
| PH of the next rain fall. There are been many
| environmental wins over the decades.
|
| Your parent might mean by "we" the people who are living
| now, in the era when environmental concerns have become
| politicized, so that victories can't be bipartisan and so
| have become much less common. (It's inconceivable to me
| these days that the EPA was founded by Nixon!)
| bluGill wrote:
| Environmental policy has always been political. That you
| are surprised the EPA was founded by Nixon show how
| little you understand how political it always has been,
| and how common compromise has been in all policies.
| jmward01 wrote:
| I remember visiting LA in the late 80's and having my
| eyes water due to the pollution. I can't imagine what the
| 60's and 70's must have been like. Unfortunately it is
| only easy to be an environmentalist in this country only
| when lakes are burning and the air is so bad you choke on
| it. We should have national pollution park where
| companies are allowed to do whatever they want but it is
| also a national park that has guides to show how bad
| things are just so people can understand what life is
| like without environmental controls.
| opwieurposiu wrote:
| The "national pollution park" is actually a pretty good
| idea. Currently we outsource that to China.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| The problems would be the same they were in the early
| 20th century. Pollution doesn't stay contained in neat
| little political boundaries and half the major
| contributors will be bankrupt when you finally want to
| clean up the mess. It also ends up being a shitty
| situation for the workers who have to endure the
| environment through no particular fault of their own.
| rtkwe wrote:
| True I forgot about smog and acid rain, never been to LA
| that I remember much less during the height of the smog
| covering. London also had times when the entire city was
| covered in super dense smog that cut visibility
| incredibly short.
| chowells wrote:
| Wasn't the concern about the ozone layer primarily about the
| UV shield it provides? That has a much more significant
| direct effect on human health than it does on the climate.
| hammock wrote:
| Haven't seen that personally, which is a good thing
| dylan604 wrote:
| As a kid we learned about the hole in the ozone layer as well
| as acid rain in LA, and how it was reversed by changes in human
| behavior. Talking to younger kids today, they act shocked at
| the concept of acid rain as if they no longer discuss it. I'm
| sure that's as designed by the climate deniers in government
| positions. I can only imagine it getting worse over the next 4
| years
| cogman10 wrote:
| The change in LA from the EPA's and cali's strict emissions
| rules is incredible.
|
| I remember visiting in the 90s as a kid and seeing how
| incredibly smoggy it was. It was just as bad as pretty much
| any place out there and all from burning gas in cars.
|
| Now it's very often crystal clear. It's really stunning how
| much policy changes can impact the air.
| freen wrote:
| Only happened because Ronald Reagan got skin cancer on his nose.
| [0]
|
| Classic GOP: it's not a problem until it affects me, personally,
| and then we absolutely have to fix it.
|
| Until then? Liberal fear mongering, special interests, etc. etc.
|
| [0] https://time.com/5564651/reagan-ozone-hole/
| nashashmi wrote:
| Give republicans the coast line and see them go!
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| It only happened because the solution was cheap and worked
| well.
|
| The "magic" of the Montreal Protocol wasn't any kind of
| sympathy or joint cooperation to save the Earth. No one had to
| sacrifice anything so it breezed through no problem.
| xorcist wrote:
| I am often reminded how similar the discussion around global
| warming and the one around CFCs were. There was much shouting
| about destroying the economy, and how the cold chain was a
| remarkable invention that ensured we did not die from food
| poisoning and did we really want to go back to medieval times?
| Maybe sell ice from a lake?
|
| Sure there are alternatives but they are both expensive and with
| sub par performance. We need to have alternatives that both
| cheaper and better before we can do anything?
|
| But no, rich countries showed that they could actually get
| together and ban harmful chemicals, and by sheer economic force
| alone turn the whole world around. Research was let loose when
| there was economic incentives, mass production effects set in and
| over time the expensive and bad alternatives was cheap and good
| enough.
| hammock wrote:
| Full paper:
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/383293168_Fingerpri...
|
| It's crazy to me that after studying the ozone hole for 75 years,
| this is the first and only paper that confirms the hole healing
| was primarily caused by human interventions.
|
| Also, an important caveat is made by the authors: "The forced
| response in this study considers GHG and ODS only, and does not
| include known forcings from important volcanoes and major
| wildfires after 2012", which are the top non-human factors that
| ozone hole deniers always point to when trying to debunk stuff
| like this.
| harvey9 wrote:
| Some credit must go to Dr. Allan Neyman. 2024 marked 25 years
| under the shield.
| webworker wrote:
| "Burr, it's cold in here ..."
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