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
How does anyone know that the Ozone hole isn’t a natural phenomenon?
So far as I know, when it was discovered, it had a hole in it. It opens and closes just about every year so far as I know.
The Pleistocene Overkill has NEVER been proven.
I suppose not. Yet it seems likely.
Furthermore, even if Man did do that, SO WHAT! MegaFauna like the Dire Wolf routinely hunted and ATE our ancestors!
Well, yes, that was my indirect point. Also, it was a comment on prehistoric man’s environmental abuse in contrast to the modern attitude.
Personally, I’m sick to death of people who claim to be Darwinian adherents yet continually wring their hands over species extinction.
You will have noted a lack of handwringing on my part.
For those who are sarcasm impaired, please take your sarcasm detectors in for a tune up.
If so much time and money has been spent trying to figure out the damaged ozone hole, then maybe a little more should be done to test the hole for heavy metal damage. Such as lead and zink levels. Along with sodium and radon levels.
All the risidual of explosives go somewhere, usually up.
I bet all the years when there has been heavy war, this hole has grown.
I bet that hole is a result of metal lead particals.
They will figure it out someday that Mother Earth loves all creation. And when we destroy creation we destroy the ozone.
When I was a kid, if hens were short on calcium in their diets, the shells of their eggs broke when they stood on them. My aunt used to grind up old shells to feed to the hens so small that they wouldn’t recognise them and therefore learn to eat the shells of their new layings. Maybe nothing’s changed.
Geoff A
I don’t know about CFC’s though it looks like the mechanism and reasoning for it causing a whole in the antarctic is unlikely.
DDT causing egg shell thinning? That one has failed a lot of experimental tests. If you cherry pick like crazy you can maybe still believe it, but in the real world raptor birds in particular showed their largest increase rates during years of peak DDT use. (per both Hawk Mountain and Audobon counts) It was certainly possible to mess up ecosystems by removing food sources expecially for insect eating birds, starvation is a much better explanation than the egg shell mechanism that doesn’t fit the data.
Millions of innocent human lives is a high price to pay for this myth.
Must I forever lie awake at night, worrying about the 10’s of thousands of penguins that will die of skin cancer?
………
Lol Mike, fortunately for the penguins apparently its dark and cold when the hole forms. Has anyone done a regional temp vs hole size study. Record cold in Antartica might not be the result of the hole as indicated by some studies but instead be the forcing.?
And as for DDT, birds aside, I seem to remember there being a fear that it was accumulating in human food sources and in humans themselves alarmingly quickly. There is still to this day DDT trace in water, animals and human milk from areas where it was used and has since been banned, although the good news is that the concentrations drop the longer it is not being used. Seems it takes longer to degrade in cooler climates than in tropical ones as well. Below are links…..
http://www.springerlink.com/content/j1173j72677386r7/
http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp35-c6.pdf
According to the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Water Quality Assessment Plan initiated in 1991,
which focuses on the water quality in more than 50 major river basins and aquifer systems, the frequency
of detection of DDT and its metabolites in bed sediment in the 1990s remains high (USGS 1999).
Im sorry but DDT is bad stuff as are most persistant organic polutants. There are alternatives out there.
Tom I would like to see those “original” “1960s” DDT studies that support your position. While it was a long time ago, (1980) I did an extensive literature search looking for support of your assertions. Neither I, nor the chemistry departments at 2 major universities were able to find the support that you claim exists. Oddly we had no trouble finding many studies that did not support them.
I tried very hard to prove Rachel Carson had not made up her famous “and no birds sing” out of whole cloth. I, or I should say we, failed.
The issue that destroys a persons youthful idealism is easy to remember.
You just gotta love Yaakoba. He (she?) is the vanguard of the new science.
Tom I would like to see those studies also. Will you please post the links or at least the details so I can read it at my library?
Mike
How exactly do these results compare with the “revolutionary” theory linking ozone hole and cosmic rays? For what I remember this new approach predicted the largest ozone hole ever would be found this year because of the very low solar flux.
Does anybody have an idea?
I do want to say that DDT was not a hoax. Reason magazine’s Ron Bailey, among many others, made this point. It really did cause a number of birds in the U.S. to have huge declines in populations because their egg shells would break. This was determined in the field as well as in experiments in the lab, which found the biological mechanisms by which DDT caused eggshells to get so thin.
—————–
In reality, there was never any evidence that egg shells in the field had thinned. The laboratory experiments were so flawed, that it is reasonable to determine that they had been set up to prove the theory rather than test it.
They fed chickens diets high in DDT. They also fed the chickens diets poor in calcium and put the chickens in a high stress environment. Two conditions that any farmer could tell you would result in eggs with thin shells. Then when the shells were found to be thin, it was blamed on DDT, not the other factors.
Come to think of it. The way these experiments were run does remind me of current climate science.
Tom, Do you not consider Peregrine Falcons and Bald Eagles large birds?
http://www.junkscience.com/ddtfaq.html#ref7
There was never any argument as to whether CFC’s were capable of putting chlorine into the stratosphere. The argument was about how destructive the chlorine was to the ozone in the stratosphere.
Eagle populations began recovering years before the DDT ban was put in place. Bans on hunting and habitat destruction were given credit at the time.
Mike Bryant:
Goes back a long way, like the sun orbiting the earth, heroin and cocaine being good for you, etc..
Old Coach:
I’d say that we can conclude it’s natural, but don’t really know whether it’s exacerbated by anthropogenic causes.
Mike Bryant says:
I think you have that exactly backwards. The part that is speculation…in fact myth…is that there was ever any worldwide ban of DDT that resulted in millions of deaths for malaria. The fact is that DDT has never been banned worldwide for public health use and has continued to be used in some countries where it is still effective. Alas, it is not effective in many places because mosquitoes developed resistance to DDT after it was used indiscriminately in agriculture, which is precisely one of the things that Rachel Carson warned us about. (There are also other failures in the fight against malaria…including simply a lack of commitment of resources on the part of the industrialized countries.) To the extent that these warnings have stopped such indiscriminate use of DDT, allowing it to remain effective in some regions, one can just as easily speculate that millions of lives may have been saved by such warnings.
It seems to me that many of you self-proclaimed “skeptics” here haven’t been very skeptical when it comes to buying the myths on DDT and its supposed ban propagated by anti-environmental groups (such as JunkScience.com, which lives up to its name). Here are some useful resources:
http://info-pollution.com/ddtban.htm
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/ddt/
Joes Shore said:
See what he did there? Misrepresentation.
There may not have been an official worldwide ban of DDT by all countries, but the true fact of the matter is that the use of DDT was banned in many countries, and its use strongly curtailed in many others, due to the misguided knee-jerk reaction of meddling environmentalist do-gooders [sound familiar?]
The result of the DDT ban: many millions of people died of malaria as a direct result of those concerted efforts to ban its use. This NPR article is about the mildest criticism of anti-DDT efforts that I could find [do a search of “DDT, malaria, deaths” and you’ll get over 272,000 hits].
If even a liberal taxsucking propaganda organ like NPR is now forced to admit that DDT use saves lives, then we can be sure the real benefits are much greater, and the number of lives saved is way more than would ever be admitted by the likes of those who still try to sell the failed hypothesis that CO2 causes runaway global warming.
The sooner DDT is brought back to kill anopheles mosquitoes and many other disease carrying insect pests, the more lives will be saved.
Ahhh, yes, your messiah warned you about it.
Can you explain to me precisely the metabolic pathways involved in the resistance to DDT that insects have developed?
Alas, it is not effective in many places because mosquitoes developed resistance to DDT after it was used indiscriminately in agriculture, which is precisely one of the things that Rachel Carson warned us about.
I agree wholeheartedly that the indiscriminate use of DDT was irresponsible. Not because it became much less effective (it is so contrary to insects that ineffectiveness is impossible), but that it was unnecessary and there might have been longterm disastrous effects (there weren’t). So, yes, I agree that the way it was used was an unwarranted risk.
But rather than banning the stuff, we should have constrained it much as we have constrained the use of all other insecticides. And the studies that have claimed it to be ineffective are called into question and do not consider the fact that it is an incredibly effective repellent quite aside from its role as an insecticide.
Silent Spring, in spite of its (erroneous) scientific basis, never happened. it was every bit as much a novel as State of Fear. I do not consider Rachel Carson to be villainous. I do, however, consider her to be an invaluable and most unfortunate object lesson. One that we badly need to learn from.
Smokey says:
I have never argued that the right-wing anti-environmentalist movement does a bad job in getting their deceptions out onto the web. Yes, you guys are very good at it. But I find it strange how you and your fellow anti-environmentalist advocates completely ignore the issue of insect resistance. Why is that?
And, the story you gave (which you carefully tried to distance yourself from by denigrating NPR because it is apparently not as fair and balanced as, say, Bill O’Reilly) backs up many of the facts that I have noted: For example, it says, “The WHO previously approved DDT for dealing with malaria, but didn’t actively support it.” (Some have argued that even this statement is an exaggeration of the shift in the WHO position made by Arata Kochi in order to try to look like he was doing something important and big when he was making what was at best a slight shift of emphasis.)
And the story you linked to also notes:
And, here is the discussion of resistance in that story, a discussion that seems to be almost completely absent from the writings of the anti-environmentalists since it undercuts your whole argument:
Richard Sharpe says:
No because I am not a biologist although I am certain you can find ones who would. There was a series of blog articles by an entomologist, one of which is here: http://membracid.wordpress.com/2007/06/13/ddt-malaria-insecticide-resistance/
However, are you seriously doubting that resistance is in issue? How else would you explain how in places like India back in the 1970s (or thereabouts), malaria skyrocketted at the same time as DDT use there was huge and still rapidly increasing?
I never did advocate indiscriminate use. I have strongly advocated modern usage, as supported (finally, ‘way too late) by the WHO et alia. And, as I also commented, DDT is possibly even more valuable for its repellent qualities as for those lethal.
And, yes, as Lomborg points out, a huge number of lives would be saved if even a small fraction money publicizing AGW were instead spent on combating malaria. Every dollar lost to AGW policy comes comes from somewhere else. Usually (directly or indirectly) out of some poor person’s hide.
Ahhh, ever full of weasel words.
Provide me with a cite so I can look at the exact circumstances of the so-called skyrocket. Also, what exactly is meant by “DDT use there was huge and still rapidly increasing?”
As always, the devil is in the details.