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If only we could get such swift global action on greenhouse emissions. Both problems are essentially the same yet the difference in action couldn't be wider.
One of the significant differences is that in the 1980s when the issue of ozone depletion was being confronted, politics was not as polarized. One of the great successes of those arguing for action was recruiting Conservative British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, a trained chemist, as an advocate
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/energy/2016/10/will-ma...
There is another major difference:
Fossil fuels contribute a lot of energy to the needs of people and organizations. Solar and wind will take time to take over the infrastructure. CFCs on the other hand could be much more easily replaced.
Dr. Margaret Thatcher
EDIT I must apologise to my parent, and to HN in general. Her thesis was undergraduate:
> ... four-year Chemistry Bachelor of Science degree, specialising in X-ray crystallography under the supervision of Dorothy Hodgkin. Her dissertation was on the structure of the antibiotic gramicidin. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Thatcher
Tackling ozone depletion is a lot easier: we stop using some chemicals. Not a big deal.
Tacking climate change is asking everyone to stop using energy (as we know it) which is fundamentally existential.
They're not in the same category of proportional impact.
It's not quite that severe, but as you note the substitutes are a lot more painful than they were with CFCs. Plus the problem is much much larger. We aren't getting out of this with just a little sunburn.
One big difference is that you could prove the ozone layers thining and so it was easy to get political backup, plus the solution was fairly simple. The climate debate is mostly political and there is no way to prove the effects only speculate. If just people would let scientists do science and not mix in political agendas we would have been much better of and money could have been spent for things we can actually do rather than being wasted on lofty political projects.
If the environmentalists had concentrated their efforts into educating people about CO2 as a pollutant that causes the acidification of the oceans, I think increases in CO2 emissions could have been slowed and reversed a long time ago. The chemistry is very straight forward and the damage to the oceans very easy to show and explain.
Unfortunately, instead of trying to find replacements for the energy produced by fossil fuel(nuclear was just sitting their, ready), it seems to me the most vocal environmentalists were basically anti-technology and anti-human and hoped the the huge fear of global warming would be enough to get a huge range of policies they had been pushing of decades passed. No such luck and the other side has now politicize global warming to their benefit.
No way to prove the effects? That's a controversial statement, considering the 99%+ scientific consensus that we are headed towards a global catastrophe.
They are qualitatively the same, but the public and scientific case for ozone depletion is a lot stronger. If I had to guess there is like 5-sigma significance that (1) CFCs damage the ozone layer (2) the ozone layer is worth saving and (3) regulating CFCs will help.
Even if you fully accept that regulating CO2 is a good idea, the beneficial effects of that action will barely be noticeable for decades.
There’s a scale difference.
CFC was a small part of the economy.
As a first approximation, burning fossil fuel is the economy.
They are not really the same: eliminate the accidental release of niche refrigerant substances for which substitutes are available, versus the mass spewage of CO2 and hydrocarbons.
Note that refrigerants can be substituted without changing the refrigeration hardware at all. No infrastructure changes are required. There is no "tech stack disruption" at all.
I don't totally agree. Modern fridges are worse than old ones in terms of noise and I think that has something to do with replacing CFCs with less effective coolants.
I know this because I tried several of newest quietest models before discovering ammonia absorption cooling.
During the eighties, when I was young, the river Rhine in the Netherlands was a very polluted river where fish had all but disappeared. Trees in forests were dying because of acid rain. The ozone layer was shrinking and exposing people to lethal levels of UV. Those were scary problems. Now the Rhine has salmon swimming in it. Trees seem to have mostly recovered and the ozone layer is also recovering.
People argued that these problems couldn't be fixed, that they would be too expensive to fix, etc. But now there is good progress. That gives me hope about other problems on this planet.
My view of addressing climate change because of global warming is that it is going to require a bit more effort but that it is fundamentally just as doable. Better still, we are actually doing it. The question is are we doing it fast enough and are going about it as efficient as we could. People sure seem to waste a lot of time defending the status quo, arguing for inaction, or questioning whether there even is a problem to solve.
The core problem as I see it is addressing our energy needs and kicking off a second industrial revolution in the process. That's exactly what is happening right now. For me that prospect is the main goal. Saving our planet is a nice side effect though.
If we solve the technical problem of producing as much clean energy as we could possibly need, we could all have air-conditioning in our houses, terrace heaters in our gardens in the winter, irrigate our deserts with desalinated water from the sea, supply our industries with clean carbo hydrates produced straight from the air, etc. These things are all very energy intensive.
Demand for energy is outstripping our ability to conserve it. Therefore solving clean plentiful energy is key. It's the only thing that will get us results.
But the BBC reported earlier this year that somebody is cheating and making CFC-11 - banned by the Montreal Protocol.
It's home insulation production in China. The culprits are fully aware it's illegal, but China has some problems in getting compliance to its own laws.
https://content.eia-global.org/posts/documents/000/000/761/o...
You would think China with all that control over businesses and their population could prevent people from polluting their rivers with plastic and spewing it into the Pacific Ocean!
Chinese Communist Party is weak. Their authority dissolves like sugar in the face of US Dollars.
Now that I've read both articles (mistaking yours as the OPs for a second and getting really confused)... I think this paints a pretty clear picture in my head, ignoring the spin, that while yes the ozone layer has been improving, there are still risks, and potentially bad players we need to continue to be vigilant for.
How are these incompatible stories? Worldwide ozone destroying chemical production is way down, which is allowing the ozone layer to regenerate back to pre-industrial levels. Meanwhile, some polluters are cranking out banned CFCs and freeriding on the worldwide reduction efforts.
Much like CO2 production, some level of emissions are well within the ability of the biosphere to deal with without harm. But if everyone emits willy nilly then we'll end up well past those limits.
How much CFC production was accounted for in the models that predicted the O3 layer healing? How much production can be handled and what is current production? Those are the answers one would have to have before writing this off.
The major contributor to ozone depletion is probably CFC-12, which has a much lower boiling point than CFC-11 and was far more widely used (and vented into the atmosphere) for refrigeration.
CFC-11 boils at 24C. CFC-12 boils at -30C.
I'm not an expert, but repairing/healing seems like a misleading analogy for what's happening
Ozone is produced naturally, the ozone layer will return itself to pre-industrial ozone concentrations simply by leaving it alone. You can call it regeneration or repair or healing or whatever you like.
No expert either, but it seems fairly apposite. The atmosphere is continuously generated by a vast complex system. This incorporates many homeostatic mechanisms tending to push the system back to its dynamically stable state. As long as we don't push the system too far, removing recent perturbations will result in auto-repair.
This is one of the few sources of hope that we can step back from the ecological-collapse abyss. In many cases we just have to get out of the way. Unfortunately, we probably won't. Replacing complex evolved enduring systems with primitive technological short-lived ones makes heaps of cash.
Ok, now that refrigerates are ozone safe can we get all the regulations removed from them? At least for the safe ones?
Right now if you don't reclaim the R-134A from your car AC or fridge it is a $27k fine while you can buy cans of it to blow out your keyboard. Same goes for propane. This makes the new fridges that use propane almost impossible to work on since nobody has the reclamation equipment for R290.
R-134A has a global warming potential of 1550 over 100 years [1], i.e. about 45 times more effective than methane, so while it's not eating the ozone layer you probably shouldn't be spraying it around by the tonne either.
Edit: and CO2 has a GWP of 1 (as the reference point for GWP), so R-134A is way more effective than that.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential#Value...
Judging by the duster cans I have here [0] it looks like they've switched to HFC-152a which has GWP but does not deplete the ozone layer.
But the point is that they're the same exact substances, given different designators depending on the use. HFC-134a is perfectly legal to vent into the atmosphere, yet if it's in a refrigeration system (and thus called R-134a) it is not.
R-290 is just the refrigeration name for plain propane. I don't know the GWP etc of propane, or the relative amount that would be contributed by deliberate venting of refrigeration systems. But I do know that a $27k fine for doing so is nonsensical - given gas grills, blow torches, and industrial/distribution gas leaks.
[0] I didn't buy them. I personally have never had a problem using an air compressor (the traditional worry is condensation droplets), but if you're paranoid go get something like the Metro DataVac.
In a perfect world, requiring reclamation would help. In the real world it just pushes this off to gray market recycler. They will come by and pick up your broken fridge for free for the recycle value but most will just vent the refrigerant no mater what. They just claim it was zero pressure when they found it. Hooking up a reclamation machine and paying for the refrigerant disposal would take all the profit out of this service.
So the fine mostly just stops the fridge from being worked on by qualified professionals. Perfectly fixable items are going in the trash because nobody wants to buy dedicated equipment for every refrigerant used. R134A is common enough to make the equipment worthwhile to own but not so much for propane and other less common refrigerants.
Anecdotally, the techs that I've seen servicing AC are pretty casual about venting excess pressure or purging lines into the air.
When I was a brewer, we retrofitted our chiller from R22 to R410A (had to change compressor oil to POE, but was otherwise a seamless transition). The techs from the shop we contracted to do the changeover let all that R22 bleed off into the atmosphere because they forgot their reclamation cylinder.
Any truth to the theory that the banned refrigerants were about to lose patent protection while the "better" ones still had plenty of years left on their patent?
But let's not mess it up again, please?
My father-in-law firmly believes that the hole in the ozone was caused by space shuttle reentry, and that's why it's patching now, and also that CFCs couldn't possibly make the hole because they are heavier than air. Does anyone have the data to refute these claims?
Ideally the person who claims something needs to provide the data to back it up.
My father-in-law doesn't believe that the moon landings took place. All the data in the world cannot convince him otherwise. The only good strategy in the face of these types of claims is to go up the crazy scale. For example when he tells me that the moon landings didn't happen, I tell him he's naive it he thinks the moon exists. The moon was blown up in the 50's due to a nuclear test gone wrong and what we're seeing now is an artificial projection.
Does that strategy work?
> Does anyone have the data to refute these claims?
I firmly believe that gravity is caused by a bunch of invisible garden gnomes that hold you down. Does anyone have the data to refute these claims?
"Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are heavier than air, so how do scientists suppose that these chemicals reach the altitude of the ozone layer to adversely affect it?"
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chlorofluorocarbo...
Also, see the definition of homosphere:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth#Other_laye...
"The homosphere and heterosphere are defined by whether the atmospheric gases are well mixed. The surface-based homosphere includes the troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, and the lowest part of the thermosphere, where the chemical composition of the atmosphere does not depend on molecular weight because the gases are mixed by turbulence. This relatively homogeneous layer ends at the turbopause found at about 100 km (62 mi; 330,000 ft), the very edge of space itself as accepted by the FAI, which places it about 20 km (12 mi; 66,000 ft) above the mesopause."
Note that the ozone layer is well within the homosphere so CFCs readily mix into it from surface emissions.
> ... because they are heavier than air. Does anyone have the data to refute these claims?
Going up the crazy scale: Has he burst into flames? If no, then air mixes heavier and lighter components. If yes, then the 21% O2 is actually at the bottom and should be 100% as it is heavier than N2.
Gases have a thermodynamic tendency to mix, despite weight differences. The atmosphere isn't a layer cake of heavy gases below light gases. If it was, we wouldn't be able to breathe because the ~1% of argon (and all the heavier gases) would sit below the oxygen layer.
Does he have data to back up those claims?
I guess I'm more looking for a response to "yes CFCs can destroy ozone even though they are heavier than air," and "here is a graph of the size of the ozone vs space shuttle reentries" that shows a non-correlation.
This is kind of funny. Until you realize that some people actually believe this stuff. Either way, burden of proof should always work the other way around. Other than strong believe, did this father-in-law actually offer some scientific evidence/proof to support his theory?
This is not to say that established theories would always hold scrutiny. Thinking of e.g. what we thought about tectonic plate movements/continental drift only ~100 years a go.
At the large scale of the atmosphere and in the lower layers, the relative weight of gases doesn't matter (otherwise Oxygen and Nitrogen would seperate out and there wouldn't be a mix of other gases in it either).
The makeup down here is largely controller by convection and turbulences, only farther up the relative weight starts to matter.
Does he think the space shuttle was/is the only craft reentering the atmosphere?