September 12th, 2008 Ozone hole over the Antarctic
From NASA News
This is considered a “moderately large” ozone hole, according to NASA atmospheric scientist, Paul Newman. And while this year’s ozone hole is the fifth largest on record, the amount of ozone depleting substances have decreased about 3.8% from peak levels in 2000. The largest ozone hole ever recorded occurred in 2006, at a size of 10.6 million square miles.
The Antarctic ozone hole reached its annual maximum on Sept. 12, 2008, stretching over 27 million square kilometers, or 10.5 million square miles. The area of the ozone hole is calculated as an average of the daily areas for Sept. 21-30 from observations from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) on NASA’s Aura satellite.
What I find most interesting is this press release from last year from NASA:
NASA Keeps Eye on Ozone Layer Amid Montreal Protocol’s Success
NASA scientists will join researchers from around the world to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Montreal Protocol.
In that PR they write:
“The levels of ozone depleting compounds in the atmosphere continue to drop, thanks to 20 years of scientific advances following the signing of the Montreal Protocol.”
“The Montreal Protocol has been a resounding success,” said Richard Stolarski, a speaker at the symposium from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. “The effect can be seen in the leveling off of chlorine compounds in the atmosphere and the beginning of their decline.”
No mention of the possibility of cosmic rays then, but in the face of a reversal, I wonder if maybe they’ll consider alternate suspects. Sometimes I think of our current atmospheric science like a stubborn district attorney that refuses to look beyond what he considers the prime suspect.
“We’ve got our criminals and their names are CO2 and CFC, I’m confident that the forensics will show them guilty beyond a shadow of the doubt”.
Trouble is, if forensics had the same sloppy data gathering and adjustment procedures as we’ve seen climate science, the defense would have the forensics tossed out easily.
h/t to David Walton
“This year’s Antarctic ozone hole is 5th biggest”
I don’t understand. How can they say it’s the 5th biggest when they don’t know how big it was before they started measuring it in the late fifties?
Despite the lack of man-made global refrigerants, it’s due to man-made global warming … or … is that … because of?
CO2 is now being looked at as a cause of the ozone hole? I can’t wait for these ‘experts’ (apparently in deception) to give us the reasons why the northern ozone hole isn’t as big as the southern hole.
Re Richard Sharpe (14:34:16) :
Maybe it has something to do with the earth’s N-S magnetic poles in that some of the sun’s charged particles are being drawn in to the southern pole via the field lines?
I think something people can relate to in this country concerning the ddt ban is the return of the bedbug as a major pest in hotels in the US. DDT had them just about knocked out. Now they are returning and people are finding their homes infested with the things. I support the use of DDT for things such as lice, bedbugs, and mosquitoes.
Is there no end to it?
First the stock market crashes, then the election results, now this.
Must I forever lie awake at night, worrying about the 10’s of thousands of penguins that will die of skin cancer?
Mike Smith (08:28:45) wrote:
The 2007 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was given to Gerhard Ertl in the field of surface chemistry. What he found was the the chemical reaction between ozone and CFC’s believed to cause the ozone hole does not occur in the real atmosphere, only in the lab.
Do you have a cite for that bit about the chemical reaction between ozone and CFCs occurring only in the lab? All the articles discussing his award that I saw implied that his CFC research supported the consensus.
Remember this?
2008-09-16 10:09:59
New theory predicts the largest ozone hole over Antarctica will occur this month
http://newsrelease.uwaterloo.ca/news.php?id=4997
WATERLOO, Ont. (Tuesday, Sept. 16, 2008) — A University of Waterloo scientist says that cosmic rays are a key cause for expanding the hole in the ozone layer over the South Pole — and predicts the largest ozone hole will occur in one or two weeks.
Sorry for not reading the post more closely
On Junkscience and DDT: When Steve Malloy started saying that DDT hadn’t caused the problems with egg shell thinning, I decided to look for myself. I don’t find Junkscience to be consistently credible, they can be right on occasion, but they are not without bias.
I went back to original source materials from the 1960s, and found several lab studies of large birds where groups were fed different amounts of DDT in their feed. The groups with the most DDT had less breeding success and more broken eggs in the nest, all statistically significant results, for several types of birds. Studies also found a specific biological mechanism responsible for the thinning, as noted earlier today.
So why does Junkscience have a list of studies finding to the contrary? I can’t really say, although I can speculate from some of the comments above that they might have been studies of small birds, which I’m not aware were affected as large birds were, and which weight a few ounces rather than a few pounds. So perhaps the eggs might not have broken because of the smaller weight.
In any case, I take science very seriously, I know as well as people on this blog that what officials tell us can turn out to be wrong. Scientific evidence is best made by verification of studies, by testing of hypotheses, by looking for alternative explanations, and by data. So instead of taking Junkscience at its word, I found about 8 of the best studies from the time that I could find, and they were completely consistent that DDT was the cause for the egg shell thinning and the near extinction in the lower 48 of several large birds.
In other words, I questioned Junkscience the same way that many on this blog question the orthodoxies of this day: what is good for the goose is good for the gander, that’s what science is about. (I’m agnostic right now about the orthodoxies of the day — I’m waiting to see if Arctic sea ice continues to recover, should the sun remain quiescent, to see if sea levels might decline, glaciers regrow, but I’m open minded to the possibilities.)
I would have accepted Junkscience’s findings, had they been corroborated, but they were not. I think many readers of this blog may, upon reflection, decide that the way I approached the DDT issue is entirely consistent with the spirit and approach of this blog.
Iam shocked at the size of that hole.
That is just down right scary looking.
If it is going to take 60 years to heal the hole, most of us will have expired from this life.
I am really sorry our planet has been so hurt.
Maybe it is being caused by all the damage the bombs do when there is war.
It is most likely the results of the chemicals they use to make bombs.
See, Mother Earth hurts too, when there is war. Everything hurts from war.
It is not a particularly non-typical hole. The hole opens and closes on a seasonal basis. If this is anywhere near the worst harm done to mother earth, our worries are over.
Unfortunately not, however.
To wit, prehistoric man’s utter destruction of most of the earth’s large mammals (The Pleistocene Overkill) radically affected the environment of the earth ever since. No amount of time will ever, ever repair it.
Yaakoba: It’s going to be alright. Obama’s going to be President, there’s going to be no more war, and Mother Earth is going to heal.
Tom,
please go reread those DDT studies. The good ones acknowledge that DDT causes shell thinning. The really good ones showed that the amounts of DDT in the wild had little affect on population. The junk ones used higher levels of DDT in their EXPERIMENTS than were seen in the wild and showed negative outcomes. You know, kinda like all those carcinogen scares we have been inundated with over the years.
The primary issue was, and is always, REASONABLE USE!!!!!
This even goes for water. If you overwater what happens (besides wasting water).
The Eagle issue was much more to do with shooting, trapping, poisoning…
Sadly this was the real kick off of JUNKSCIENCE being used to damage society through propaganda.
General question???
Please – has there ever been a record of “No Hole in the Ozone Layer at the South pole”?
How does anyone know that the Ozone hole isn’t a natural phenomenon?
Dan Hawkins-
Thanks for reminding me to buy this book. Its been on my list for a while now.
“But Is It TRUE? A Citizen’s Guide to Environmental Health and Safety Issues.” (Aaron Wildavsky, 1995)
The book is unfortunately out of print.”
I just successfully ordered a paperback edition on Amazon. Looks like it is available, even if not in print.
John Cooper- thanks for the additional information on the shuttle external tank coatings and the o-ring fiasco. Asbestos is your friend when it comes to keeping burning fuel plasma inside a solid rocket booster shell. *sigh*.
As far as the ozone hole scare and skin cancer, the US government could enable a huge reduction in skin melanoma cases by ordering the forced resettlement of everyone from south of the 40th parallel to more northern climes. To keep this in perspective- The predicted 10% or so reduction in ozone absorbance of UV-B in the mid-latitudes due to CFC emissions up thru 2000 (assuming no Montreal protocol) is equivalent to moving south about 200 miles. The UV exposure in the tropics (where no ozone hole is possible) is far higher than the UV exposure experienced directly under a complete ozone hole in the Antarctic (and as we all know, the ozone ‘hole’ is not a region of zero ozone concentration at any time, since the ozone level appears not to drop below about 100 Dobson units at any time).
Same way we know that it has never before been possible to travel from the pacific to the Atlantic via the Arctic.
To wit, prehistoric man’s utter destruction of most of the earth’s large mammals (The Pleistocene Overkill) radically affected the environment of the earth ever since. No amount of time will ever, ever repair it.
I call bullsh!t! The Pleistocene Overkill has NEVER been proven. Furthermore, even if Man did do that, SO WHAT! MegaFauna like the Dire Wolf routinely hunted and ATE our ancestors!
Personally, I’m sick to death of people who claim to be Darwinian adherents yet continually wring their hands over species extinction.
Mark (17:29:04) :
Maybe it has something to do with the earth’s N-S magnetic poles in that some of the sun’s charged particles are being drawn in to the southern pole via the field lines?
The solar ‘particles’ reach both poles.
Graeme Rodaughan (20:59:03) :
One of Anthony’s links in his post goes to http://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/ . From a graph ther, it appears there was no hole in 1979, 1980, and 1981. It also says “220 Dobson Units were not found in the historic observations over Antarctica prior to 1979.”
Anthony often includes useful links to the original sources in his posts, even though they sometimes come from NASA.
“Sadly this was the real kick off of JUNKSCIENCE being used to damage society through propaganda.”
Not even close. What about eugenics? And I’m sure there are many more even earlier examples.
Graeme,
Good question!
As soon as we had technology to “see” over the antarctic, we found a “hole”. Now, the hole is not really a hole, just a reduction in ozone density. So, the “hole” has been there ever since we have been able to look. It oscillates in density from “not really a hole” to “looks like a hole”.
So, we don’t know whether or not it is a natural phenomenon. There are theories for both natural and anthropogenic causes.
I think Wildavsky’s book points out that the birds in the studies got a diet with lots of DDT and below normal amounts of calcium. If you can remember back to when Carl Sagan, et. al. was thrilling us with Nuclear Winter, one of the facets was that since there was little atmospheric transfer between N. Hemis. and S. Hemis. and most of the bombs would be detonated in the N. Hemis. the S. Hemis. would be a refuge. So I have always wondered how the CFCs, mostly released in the N. got down to the south. I womder if any enviro-scare story has any truth to it.
To Richard Sharpe (21:37:46) :
Never before possible?
Thanks for the answers.
(RS: I assume that you are being ironic – I must be a bit thick today – I don’t really get it…)
Cheers G