> Yet despite experiencing large seasonal growth this year, the ozone hole is still decreasing in size overall. "Based on the Montreal Protocol and the decrease of anthropogenic ozone-depleting substances, scientists currently predict that the global ozone layer will reach its normal state again by around 2050," said Claus Zehner, ESA's mission manager for Copernicus Sentinel-5P.
So if we can survive the next thirty years, we're good. I can barely look forward to the next five.
Edit: Woah. Humor doesn't translate well on this site doesn't it?
I'm not saying the world is ending. I'm just saying with the next five years it looks bloody bleak, at least for me, turning 40 doesn't look fun.
With wars, environmental mess going on; the world looks very dystopian to the vision where it could be utopian in thirty years. The good always triumphs, you just have to fight past the evil first and that could happen.
This sort of ridiculous, silly rhetoric needs to end. It's not just unproductive, it's counter-productive.
"ThE wOrLd Is EnDiNg!" is such a tired line, used by religious fanatics since the beginning of time. Modern-day climate activism has indeed become it's own sort of religion, complete with the same sort of doom-and-gloom "repent now before it's too late" rhetoric and increasingly not based on facts or science but instead emotional ploys, fearmongering, and faith based arguments.
No.. the world isn't ending tomorrow, within 5 years, or even in the next few decades. Yes, we should do better to protect the environment.
We just don't need the sensationalism - it turns people off and away from all the silliness.
The world won’t end for billions of years. In the next few decades, a whole bunch of humans will be financially devastated, physically relocated, and made dangerously jealous, defensive, and angry by climate change. Spin it how you like.
> In the next few decades, a whole bunch of humans will be financially devastated, physically relocated, and made dangerously jealous, defensive, and angry by climate change.
The zealots pushing the sensationalism often don't comprehend the forces at play - both natural and human-made. It's just religious fervor regurgitated because they passed some sort of faith purity test and were rewarded by other zealots with internet points.
There's conflicting motives here - one that says the California coastline should always remain exactly how we enjoy it today, and one that says all of California used to be ocean floor.
Any affirmative action we take to "preserve" the environment how we like it is in itself destructive to natural forces.
With that said, any human-made actions that accelerate natural forces or create un-natural forces should indeed be minimalized or removed.
The problem is the time scale. Zealots like to scare everyone into believing the world ends tomorrow - just like actual religious zealots tend to do to encourage conversion. If they can scare you enough to join them, they they see that as a win.
The world is getting greener by the day - but these things take time. We're just not ready to have a 100% renewable system yet, but one day we will be there. The incentives to get there cannot be allowed to be fear - it must be logic. A greener future has to be the logical move.
This is a straw man argument : Those who don't agree with me must be ignorant religious fanatics, surely not people who have been listening to what scientists working on the subject have been saying for more that 30 years.
Nobody really believes the worlds is going to disappear under big wave, it's of course a shorthand for "I have strong reasons to believe that my living conditions will degrade terribly over the next years (and I think we are collectively ignoring the problem ?)"
If feel like you are denying the level of denialism the topic gets which to me is a much bigger concern that people being overly alarmist.
I am not sure that level of denialism is the fault of fear-mongerers rather than the fact that most people want to bury their head in the sand, don't change anything to their way of life and carry on business as usual.
> The world is getting greener by the day - but these things take time. We're just not ready to have a 100% renewable system yet, but one day we will be there. The incentives to get there cannot be allowed to be fear - it must be logic. A greener future has to be the logical move.
Sure but that's putting under the rug a lot of important questions.
Climate don't care whether we are trying. Most scientists say it's not going fast enough and that not going fast enough will put us in big trouble.
Another question is how much fossil fuel will be necessary for the transition, are we sure we are the spending the most of our fossil energy in order to make the switch ?
I agree, but people have been ringing the bells about climate change for 40 years. When will we actually do something about it? I think the increased sensationalism is, at the very least, a sign that people are becoming afraid about our lack of action.
This is false dichotomy. We are doing things about it - but those things take time to mature and become ready. The Zealots just cannot fathom things not being good enough to act catastrophically right now.
We simply are not ready yet to ditch fossil fuels and go full-electric - among other things. There will be a day, yes, and that day might be within our lifetimes (hopefully), but forcing it right now when it's clearly not ready is so incomprehensibly short-sighted that it borders on insanity. We cannot even keep the lights on year-round as it is.
Imaging going full-eclectic everything today. The amount of pain the nation would feel would lead to an irreversible backwards slide of all the progress that's been made. It would set the climate activist agenda back decades.
My point is, the cooler heads need to prevail here. We are marching ever-towards a cleaner future - we just aren't there yet. We need to stop the silly posturing and tribal signals, such as plastic straw bans and what-not, and focus on what actually matters... and not force it until it's actually ready.
You are saying we are getting there, but don't give evidence that the pace of change is fast enough. Instead you call everyone who says the pace isn't fast enough (which includes most of the scientists working on climate change btw) "sensationalists" and "zealots".
Do you have any evidence that the current pace of change is sufficient to avert the most damaging aspects of climate change?
I strongly disagree that we are doing something about it. We are doing the bare minimum, if that. Until we start heavily regulating corporations on their carbon impact and taxing further carbon from being extracted from the ground, we aren't truly doing something about climate change.
I couldn't disagree with you more. We're barely scratching the surface of what needs to be done to preserve some stability in our climate and by extension our way of life for the next decades.
So yes of course we should ban plastic straws, even though it looks a bit silly given the much larger sources of environmental damage that have not been banned yet. We should seek to ban these too, and as soon as possible.
And indeed, doing this will cause some pain. Things will become more expensive (or more fairly priced, if you consider externalities). We may be able to buy less junk. Would that be a "irreversible backwards slide of all the progress that's been made"?
Totally agree. The world is the best it has ever been by nearly any metric.
My father had to _literally_ practice hiding under his desk at school with a Geiger counter in preparation for nuclear war. He was then _drafted_ into Vietnam... I don't think I have it so bad.
"The world is the best it has ever been by nearly any metric."
How about fertility of the soil, area of land covered by desert vs forest, number of insects and in general diversity of wildlife, amount of fossil fuels burned every minute, amount of opioids intake, anti depression drugs consumption, number of days you have to wait to see a special doctor, inflation rate, ...
So good to hear, that you are currently doing well. And we surely could be worse off and many things certainly did improve. But give it some more geopolitical escalation and you getting drafted as well in the neae future remains a very real possibility.
I mean, if we look at history, climate change (even much smaller than what we are facing) tends to trigger wars. Suddenly land that was valuable isn't and vice versa. Even in the most optomistic scenario it will probably destabalize the world order and result in conflicts.
Like e.g. weather events are thought to be one of the likely factors in the late bronze age collapse. There's evidence that unusual climate events coincided with the fall of rome. Like obviously a lot of other factors were at play, climate just pushed something brittle to its breaking point.
Especially because we are talking about the ozone layer not climate change.
The ozone layer is in the process of being fixed. It is not going to kill us (anymore than the increased cancer has in the past). Yes it would be bad if we started releasing CFCs again, but the status quo on this one is good. Literally one of the best success stories of environmentalism.
The biggest problem with envirinmentalists is there is a lunatic fringe who has no idea what they are talking about spout non-sense, this makes the real issues look like BS too even when they are not.
If you are over, say, 25, then you know that the last 10 years have been _exceptional_ years for our climate, and that the time for normal non-sensational warnings was 40 years ago or 50 years ago.
Look at a graph of CO2 emissions and you realize that we are in a place where what was alarming in the 80's was the result of only _half_ of the CO2 pumped into the atmosphere since 1900 ( https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions )
And now we are using energy to cover for the effects of using energy a decade ago.
Things are worse and they will reach the point over the next five or ten years that heat events and cold events will become more deadly for more people and the fact that you're tired of hearing about it isn't the problem.
The problem is that people haven't been taking the danger seriously and now it's an immanent and deadly danger.
Are you kidding? How many temperature records were broken? How many "once in a 100 years events" happened? Texas had two such winter storms in less than 10 years. There have been record droughts in France, and then record rainfalls. An unprecedented heat dome in the Pacific Northwest. Vast areas in the Middle East and South Asia, and hell the US too, are approaching unliveable wet bulbs temperatures in the summer.
Which exactly part happens all the time? Each year setting temperature records? "Once in a lifetime" climate disasters? Wildfires getting worse and worse?
On the wet bulb temperature front, it's literally unprecedented and quite impactful. Millions of people would be unable to survive where they currently live and would need to move.
Isn't amazing how actual people can put their heads in sand and say "Oh it's just media conspiracy and lies to fuck over us poor people!" about anything they don't like.
Added irony that the person is a commenter on HN, who is probably the top 10% of the richest people in the world.
> If you are over, say, 25, then you know that the last 10 years have been _exceptional_ years for our climate
And if you know anything about statistics, its that ancedotes are not the plural of data and that humans have a severe recency bias.
The facts about climate change are damning enough, i don't know why people feel the need to resort to poor logic and fallacies when describing climate change. The truth is actually on your side. Lets present that instead.
> The facts about climate change are damning enough, i don't know why people feel the need to resort to poor logic and fallacies when describing climate change. The truth is actually on your side. Lets present that instead.
In fairness, that demonstrably hasn't worked on the politicians for the last hundred years.
> And if you know anything about statistics, its that ancedotes are not the plural of data and that humans have a severe recency bias.
> The facts about climate change are damning enough, i don't know why people feel the need to resort to poor logic and fallacies when describing climate change. The truth is actually on your side. Lets present that instead
I don’t think that the majority of people deals well when confronted with statistics.
Honestly always fascinated by this kind of line. Like pedantry aside, it always reads like we are all working together towards some big press briefing in the future, to let everyone else know about climate change for the first time. Like who is the audience here? The swing voters here aren't going to decide the election!
Yeah but people do this. Consider for a moment that most environmentalism is really just self-preservation... consider the experience of the "earth" over its lifetime, compared to humanities...
Feel the need to *just a thought, Im not some anti-climate change nut job...
Alaska is like ~20% of the entire US area. It's the single largest state, which when removed, drops US from >1 million km^2 bigger than Brazil to 500k km^2 smaller than Brazil.
In addition to other reasons, Alaska was accepted as a state either last or second-last -- I remember in the same year as Hawaii but I don't know if one was officially accepted before the other. I suspect that history would cause people in older generations to think of Alaska when there's a state to arbitrarily drop from some calculation and younger generations would mimic that tendency.
Because it's the largest state by far, so it's easier to do the math on. The next 3 biggest states put together don't add up to the size of Alaska. Alaska's land dedicated to national parks alone is bigger than the entire size of the land in each of the 23 of the 49 remaining states.
For a more hands-on demonstration, I like this little site which lets you move/rotate [0] and superimpose nation boundaries, while adjusting the shape to account for 2D map projections.
The Montreal Protocol has been a massive success and was even strongly supported by Reagan (possibly due to his own skin cancer scare, according to one article). Though I'm highly skeptical it could make it through today's political system in the US.
Nah I think it could pass today. What set it apart was there was an equivalent cost chemical to switch to. It would be kind of like if there were a different liquid hydrocarbon than gasoline that cost the same, doesn't emit CO2, and only took minor tweaks to the engine design to switch to.
Yet I see the “do your own research!” crowd now reference the ozone hole as another example when a cabal of evil scientists came up with a cash grab that the mainstream media terrified everyone with for no reason, and “now no one even talks about it!”.
Yeah, there are a lot of crazies, but there are also a lot of vacation property owners, tennis players, golfers, etc. and saying, truthfully, that no one will be able to do anything outside again, even with sunscreen, nobody will come rent your properties in Florida to go to the beach again, and the solution doesn't cost anything, it should pass.
And yet those same people out right deny that climate change, and its accompanying sea level rise, is a myth. You'd think the wealthy property owners and governor of a state where it's most valuable economic sectors are on the coast and a mere 10 feet or less above sea level would behave more rationally about the preventable danger that has been predicted for decades, but alas.
I guess they're banking on selling their five million dollar beach home to Aquaman.
That's silly, the ozone hole goes from high latitudes to low, and was bigger in the southern hemisphere. Therefore was going to affect Florida well after it affected most other places.
OTOH Florida is full of people who deny global warming. Even though Florida actually is ground zero for coral bleaching, increased strength of hurricanes, and sea level rise.
People act on what they connect with for whatever combination of reasons. This seldom matches what they logically SHOULD connect with.
Just putting this here for a future "told you so".
It's not "man made climate change", it's the upcoming Sun micronova which will cause a pole shift in 15 to 30 years. It happens every certain number of tens of thousands of years on your planet. You should have felt the sun "feel different" over the last few years. It's getting stronger and it's slowly decreasing your protective magnetic field.
In a few decades you'll be hit with catestrophic floods, tectonic plate movement, earthquakes, and blasted with solar radiation.
Man-made climate change is definitely happening: carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas (we have known this since the 1880s) and we are adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere in very large amounts. Both of these are indisputable.
If the poles are reversing, that does not negate man-made climate change. It does the opposite: it makes man-made climate change that much worse. It makes it even more important that we reduce atmospheric carbon, and it gives us a much shorter timeline to do it in.
> Yet despite experiencing large seasonal growth this year, the ozone hole is still decreasing in size overall. "Based on the Montreal Protocol and the decrease of anthropogenic ozone-depleting substances, scientists currently predict that the global ozone layer will reach its normal state again by around 2050," said Claus Zehner, ESA's mission manager for Copernicus Sentinel-5P.
> Yet despite experiencing large seasonal growth this year, the ozone hole is still decreasing in size overall. "Based on the Montreal Protocol and the decrease of anthropogenic ozone-depleting substances, scientists currently predict that the global ozone layer will reach its normal state again by around 2050," said Claus Zehner, ESA's mission manager for Copernicus Sentinel-5P.
What a stupid headline. I have no idea how many times the size of Brazil is normal. Is this 3x as large? Is it 10 percent larger? The whole measure is completely meaningless.
That's part of the clickbait-ness. "Surely the actual article uses real numbers, let me click and see..."
Also, this is the problem with current (what gets passed off as) journalism. The quality of the reporting is replaced with creativity, hyperbole, etc. It's hard to take the profession seriously when it doesn't follow its own rules, doesn't bother to police itself, etc.
100 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] thread> Yet despite experiencing large seasonal growth this year, the ozone hole is still decreasing in size overall. "Based on the Montreal Protocol and the decrease of anthropogenic ozone-depleting substances, scientists currently predict that the global ozone layer will reach its normal state again by around 2050," said Claus Zehner, ESA's mission manager for Copernicus Sentinel-5P.
Edit: Woah. Humor doesn't translate well on this site doesn't it?
I'm not saying the world is ending. I'm just saying with the next five years it looks bloody bleak, at least for me, turning 40 doesn't look fun.
With wars, environmental mess going on; the world looks very dystopian to the vision where it could be utopian in thirty years. The good always triumphs, you just have to fight past the evil first and that could happen.
"ThE wOrLd Is EnDiNg!" is such a tired line, used by religious fanatics since the beginning of time. Modern-day climate activism has indeed become it's own sort of religion, complete with the same sort of doom-and-gloom "repent now before it's too late" rhetoric and increasingly not based on facts or science but instead emotional ploys, fearmongering, and faith based arguments.
No.. the world isn't ending tomorrow, within 5 years, or even in the next few decades. Yes, we should do better to protect the environment.
We just don't need the sensationalism - it turns people off and away from all the silliness.
Yes, or dead.
By contrast, this is the exact sort of haughty condescension that pushes people further away, often right into the hands of real extremists.
The sensationalism is there because the problems of our ecology are literally sensational. Dismissing that is the real turnoff here.
The zealots pushing the sensationalism often don't comprehend the forces at play - both natural and human-made. It's just religious fervor regurgitated because they passed some sort of faith purity test and were rewarded by other zealots with internet points.
There's conflicting motives here - one that says the California coastline should always remain exactly how we enjoy it today, and one that says all of California used to be ocean floor.
Any affirmative action we take to "preserve" the environment how we like it is in itself destructive to natural forces.
With that said, any human-made actions that accelerate natural forces or create un-natural forces should indeed be minimalized or removed.
The problem is the time scale. Zealots like to scare everyone into believing the world ends tomorrow - just like actual religious zealots tend to do to encourage conversion. If they can scare you enough to join them, they they see that as a win.
The world is getting greener by the day - but these things take time. We're just not ready to have a 100% renewable system yet, but one day we will be there. The incentives to get there cannot be allowed to be fear - it must be logic. A greener future has to be the logical move.
This is the exact sort of haughty condescension that pushes people further away, often right into the hands of real extremists.
Nobody really believes the worlds is going to disappear under big wave, it's of course a shorthand for "I have strong reasons to believe that my living conditions will degrade terribly over the next years (and I think we are collectively ignoring the problem ?)"
If feel like you are denying the level of denialism the topic gets which to me is a much bigger concern that people being overly alarmist. I am not sure that level of denialism is the fault of fear-mongerers rather than the fact that most people want to bury their head in the sand, don't change anything to their way of life and carry on business as usual.
> The world is getting greener by the day - but these things take time. We're just not ready to have a 100% renewable system yet, but one day we will be there. The incentives to get there cannot be allowed to be fear - it must be logic. A greener future has to be the logical move.
Sure but that's putting under the rug a lot of important questions. Climate don't care whether we are trying. Most scientists say it's not going fast enough and that not going fast enough will put us in big trouble. Another question is how much fossil fuel will be necessary for the transition, are we sure we are the spending the most of our fossil energy in order to make the switch ?
We simply are not ready yet to ditch fossil fuels and go full-electric - among other things. There will be a day, yes, and that day might be within our lifetimes (hopefully), but forcing it right now when it's clearly not ready is so incomprehensibly short-sighted that it borders on insanity. We cannot even keep the lights on year-round as it is.
Imaging going full-eclectic everything today. The amount of pain the nation would feel would lead to an irreversible backwards slide of all the progress that's been made. It would set the climate activist agenda back decades.
My point is, the cooler heads need to prevail here. We are marching ever-towards a cleaner future - we just aren't there yet. We need to stop the silly posturing and tribal signals, such as plastic straw bans and what-not, and focus on what actually matters... and not force it until it's actually ready.
Do you have any evidence that the current pace of change is sufficient to avert the most damaging aspects of climate change?
So yes of course we should ban plastic straws, even though it looks a bit silly given the much larger sources of environmental damage that have not been banned yet. We should seek to ban these too, and as soon as possible.
And indeed, doing this will cause some pain. Things will become more expensive (or more fairly priced, if you consider externalities). We may be able to buy less junk. Would that be a "irreversible backwards slide of all the progress that's been made"?
I guess this makes me a Zealot in your book.
My father had to _literally_ practice hiding under his desk at school with a Geiger counter in preparation for nuclear war. He was then _drafted_ into Vietnam... I don't think I have it so bad.
How about fertility of the soil, area of land covered by desert vs forest, number of insects and in general diversity of wildlife, amount of fossil fuels burned every minute, amount of opioids intake, anti depression drugs consumption, number of days you have to wait to see a special doctor, inflation rate, ...
So good to hear, that you are currently doing well. And we surely could be worse off and many things certainly did improve. But give it some more geopolitical escalation and you getting drafted as well in the neae future remains a very real possibility.
*embarrassed British cough regarding the Opium Wars*
That said, your list is half global, half national. We're not all suffering from the mistakes of the USA in over-prescribing things.
Yes .. like the post I was replying to.
Like e.g. weather events are thought to be one of the likely factors in the late bronze age collapse. There's evidence that unusual climate events coincided with the fall of rome. Like obviously a lot of other factors were at play, climate just pushed something brittle to its breaking point.
And flat out ignoring it turns you into a Republican, and clearly hasn't accomplished anything so far.
You can't complain about say, food prices, and also not recognize how the weather in the last few decades is a contributor to food yields.
But no, expensive food prices is the President's fault (either current or prior), and talking about it is sensationalism.
The ozone layer is in the process of being fixed. It is not going to kill us (anymore than the increased cancer has in the past). Yes it would be bad if we started releasing CFCs again, but the status quo on this one is good. Literally one of the best success stories of environmentalism.
The biggest problem with envirinmentalists is there is a lunatic fringe who has no idea what they are talking about spout non-sense, this makes the real issues look like BS too even when they are not.
Look at a graph of CO2 emissions and you realize that we are in a place where what was alarming in the 80's was the result of only _half_ of the CO2 pumped into the atmosphere since 1900 ( https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions )
And now we are using energy to cover for the effects of using energy a decade ago.
Things are worse and they will reach the point over the next five or ten years that heat events and cold events will become more deadly for more people and the fact that you're tired of hearing about it isn't the problem.
The problem is that people haven't been taking the danger seriously and now it's an immanent and deadly danger.
If that isn't exceptional to you, what would be?
On the wet bulb temperature front, it's literally unprecedented and quite impactful. Millions of people would be unable to survive where they currently live and would need to move.
Added irony that the person is a commenter on HN, who is probably the top 10% of the richest people in the world.
I'm aware this is anecdata, but I'm not used to needing to wear shorts in September, let alone October.
Taking something serious, is something very different from a doomsday cult.
And if you know anything about statistics, its that ancedotes are not the plural of data and that humans have a severe recency bias.
The facts about climate change are damning enough, i don't know why people feel the need to resort to poor logic and fallacies when describing climate change. The truth is actually on your side. Lets present that instead.
In fairness, that demonstrably hasn't worked on the politicians for the last hundred years.
> The facts about climate change are damning enough, i don't know why people feel the need to resort to poor logic and fallacies when describing climate change. The truth is actually on your side. Lets present that instead
I don’t think that the majority of people deals well when confronted with statistics.
Ah yes, not ending “in the next few decades.” What a reassurance.
Feel the need to *just a thought, Im not some anti-climate change nut job...
And if you do, I recommend Neutrogena SPF 50+ sports spray.
USA is bigger due to Alaska.
https://www.alaska.org/how-big-is-alaska
https://www.thetruesize.com
[0] Rotation of the last-touched country outline is possible by dragging around the "N" compass in the lower-left.
I guess they're banking on selling their five million dollar beach home to Aquaman.
https://pubs.usgs.gov/sim/3047/
OTOH Florida is full of people who deny global warming. Even though Florida actually is ground zero for coral bleaching, increased strength of hurricanes, and sea level rise.
People act on what they connect with for whatever combination of reasons. This seldom matches what they logically SHOULD connect with.
"Two additional regions of Asia were sources of banned ozone-destroying chemicals"
https://research.noaa.gov/2022/03/09/two-additional-regions-...
Since everything Reagan did was wrong... :-/
It's not "man made climate change", it's the upcoming Sun micronova which will cause a pole shift in 15 to 30 years. It happens every certain number of tens of thousands of years on your planet. You should have felt the sun "feel different" over the last few years. It's getting stronger and it's slowly decreasing your protective magnetic field.
In a few decades you'll be hit with catestrophic floods, tectonic plate movement, earthquakes, and blasted with solar radiation.
If the poles are reversing, that does not negate man-made climate change. It does the opposite: it makes man-made climate change that much worse. It makes it even more important that we reduce atmospheric carbon, and it gives us a much shorter timeline to do it in.
> Yet despite experiencing large seasonal growth this year, the ozone hole is still decreasing in size overall. "Based on the Montreal Protocol and the decrease of anthropogenic ozone-depleting substances, scientists currently predict that the global ozone layer will reach its normal state again by around 2050," said Claus Zehner, ESA's mission manager for Copernicus Sentinel-5P.
Also, this is the problem with current (what gets passed off as) journalism. The quality of the reporting is replaced with creativity, hyperbole, etc. It's hard to take the profession seriously when it doesn't follow its own rules, doesn't bother to police itself, etc.