Ozone Hole Lasting Longer; Maximum Depletion Area Largest Ever

[hatrack]

U.N. Agency: Ozone Hole Lasting Longer
By Erica Bulman
Associated Press

GENEVA - "The ozone hole over the South Pole, already as large as it has ever been, is also lasting longer this year, heightening concern about harmful UV radiation reaching the Earth, the United Nations (news - web sites) weather organization said Friday.

Compounding matters, the thinnest area is the largest ever measured, roughly two-thirds of the hole's total size, the World Meteorological Organization (news - web sites) said.

'The ozone hole is getting larger, deeper and is lasting longer,' said Michael Profitt, a leading expert on the ozone hole at the U.N. agency. 'It has never stayed this large, this late.

EDIT

The World Meteorological Organization also said the thinnest part - with the ozone level 50 percent below the pre-ozone hole period of 1964-1976 - exceeded 5.7 million square miles for the first time. It peaked near 6.95 million square miles on Sept. 26. That is two-thirds the size of the ozone hole."

EDIT

Yahoo News

[ozone_man]

1. Thanks for the post.

First time that I've been over here. Very nice, I will have to visit once in a while.

[Vogon_Glory]

2. Ozone Hole--Eeeek!

I was on a railroad enthusiasts' group tour in Patagonia several years ago. At that time the ozone hole had grown large enough to spread to Puerto Montt down at the southern end of Argentina. I still shudder at the thought of the Ozone layer effectively ending five hundred miles south of me and that seven minutes of exposure in the Ozone Hole meant (and still means) permanent skin damage.

--VG

[IndependentThinking]

3. Ozone Hole My ass

More blow hard crap from people who would like to regulate everything. Basically regulation is good if it works and can ( key word here ) provide a real solution to the problem.

The hole in the ozone layer has been evident since the mid seventies, since then the public have been continually hit over the head with dis-information by placing the blame on the chlorine component of man-made Chloro-fluoro-carbon (CFC) gases.

Scientists, experts and big business perpetrate fraud on the specting
public on a daily basis, as proven by past misdeeds. Monopolies and profits displace facts and truths in the corporate world, no more so than in the ozone hole debate.

The ozone layer contains some 320 million tons of ozone which can be destroyed by methyl bromide, hydrogen fluoride, halons, nitrous oxide etc. as well as chlorine. The ozone layer is ontinually "replenished" ( wow I bet the media never told you that !!! ) by the natural combination of sunlight and oxygen. Nature( what do you mean "Nature", I thought only humans did this ) also depletes the ozone in a number of ways, sea-water evaporation releases 600 million tons of chlorine, volcanoes produce 1 million tons, and burning biomass another 4 million tons annually.

Ok who is up for math? - Only 7,500 tons of chlorine are released from the breakdown of CFCs every year, against 600 million tons from the evaporation of seawater and 36 million from volcanoes. I never would have guessed that!!

Mount Erebus, in Antarctica, is a volcano that has been active from 1972-1992 with a 1984 peak that saw 1000 tons of chlorine emitted per day. Antarctica also has a super cold weather vortex that plays a crucial role in ozone depletion; ergo, one big hole over the Antarctic! Wow isn't this exactly where most of the propaganda was focused on in regards to the "hole" in the Ozone.

The 1992 Rio Conference was sponsored by DuPont, one of the worlds largest producers of CFCs (that were about to become public domain), Now, in 1997, DuPont has gained absolute monopoly over the replacement R134a gases that are worth $16 billion annually!! I'll let you guys figure out what happened here!!

Look people. I agree that a green earth is a good thing without all of the greenhouse gases. Automobiles are getting better every year and I see less and less of the old smog, smoking cars on the road.

What we have here is : "THE ECOLOGICAL TRUTHS VERSUS ENVIRONMENTALISM" and no I didn't get this off of CNN or any other left or right wing media. Get a grip people. Dis-information is running amuck.

[hatrack]

4. Ah yes, the Rush Limbaugh volcano argument!

What form of chlorine is emitted by volcanoes? Chlorine dioxide, which is water-soluble.

What does that mean? It means that volcanic chlorine emissions, like those of Mt. Erebus and (more famously) Mt. Pinatubo in the early 1990s precipitate out as rain before reaching the stratosphere. These emissions can't even make it to the tropopause, meaning that they pose no threat to the ozone layer, which is located substantially higher up in the stratosphere.

And as long as you bring up the subject of disinformation, DuPont made every effort to smear and discredit Rowlands and Molina, starting with the laboratory discovery of the effects of CFCs on ozone, and extending well past the discovery of ozone depletion over Antarctica. In fact, with the threat of any regulation diminishing in the early years of the Reagan Administration, DuPont went so far as to announce that it would stop all research into CFC alternatives.

However, even their big-buck PR campaign couldn't stand up to the gathering weight of scientific data and accelerating depletion, in the northern hemisphere as well as in the southern. Rowlands and Molina winning the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their discoveries may have influenced DuPont's altered stance as well. Of course, DuPont immediately unveiled a campaign to promote HCFCs and HFCs as substitutes, despite their known ozone-depleting characteristics, which are not as pronounced as those of CFCs.

Speaking of disinformation, why don't you go and peddle your brand of it elsewhere? Your arguments are bullshit.

[pmbryant]

6. Good post

Thanks for the details of volcanic chlorine emissions and for the info on DuPont's behavior.

--Peter

[pmbryant]

5. At least one very important factor that you're leaving out

From the Union of Concerned Scientists web site ("The Science of Ozone Depletion", emphasis added):

http://www.ucsusa.org/global_environment/archive/page.cfm?pageID=551

In the early 1970s, the detection of significant concentrations of chlorocarbons and CFCs in the lower atmosphere was coupled with the realization that photochemical and rainout processes that usually remove most pollutants from the lower atmosphere were not working for these compounds.

It became clear that many halocarbons would remain in the atmosphere for a long time and might build up to high enough atmospheric levels to cause real mischief. It is now known that many CFCs and halons are extremely stable and reach the stratosphere intact. They have atmospheric lifetimes between 50 and several hundred years, so that significant fractions of their peak concentrations will persist in the atmosphere long after emissions of these chemicals have stopped.

And of course it is quite true, as you say, that ozone is continually being created and destroyed by natural processes. In the natural system, these processes reach an equilibrium, and a certain amount of ozone persists in the ozone layer, protecting the Earth from the Sun's harmful UV radiation. CFCs and other man-made ozone-destroying chemicals disrupt this equilibrium and tip it in the direction of destroying more ozone.

Claiming this is some big conspiracy amongst "Scientists, experts and big business" is preposterous. Are environmental organizations and the Union of Concerned Scientists in on this scam? Also note that the Montreal Protocol where virtually all industrialized nations (AFAIK) decided to phase out CFCs and other ozone-destroying chemicals was signed in 1987, 5 years before the Rio Conference. I have no clue if the Rio Conference was actually "sponsored by DuPont", as you claim, but that is irrelevant anyway.

--Peter