From MSNBC: WELLINGTON, New Zealand — International efforts to phase out the use of chlorofluorocarbons and other ozone-depleting substances may be paying off, according to research revealed Friday by the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in New Zealand.
The Antarctica ozone hole is the smallest it has been in the past five years, NIWA said.
While a one-year reduction in the ozone hole can’t indicate a recovery stage, NIWA’s atmospheric experts say the new information adds to a pattern of less severe ozone holes in recent years.
Satellite data combined with ground-base measurements, including the Antarctica New Zealand Arrival Heights observatory near Scott Base, show the hole reached a maximum area of about 22 million square kilometers (about 8.5 million square miles) and a 27 million ton deficit of ozone this year, compared with 24 million square kilometers (about 9.3 million square miles) and a 35 million ton deficit last year.
The largest hole, according to NIWA, was 29 million square kilometers (about 11.2 million square miles) and a 43 million ton deficit, recorded in 2000 and then repeated in 2006.
“We see a lot of year-to-year variation in ozone holes, caused by differences in atmospheric temperature and circulation,” said NIWA atmospheric scientist Stephen Wood in a prepared statement. “So we can’t definitively say the ozone hole is improving from one new year of observations.”
“However, we have now had a few years in succession with less severe holes,” Wood said. “That is an indication we may be beginning to see a recovery.”
…
More at MSNBC
Antarctic ozone hole smallest in five years
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Bart says:
December 7, 2010 at 4:28 pm
Stephen Wilde says:
December 7, 2010 at 1:36 pm
“Once the impossible has been excluded then whatever remains however implausible must be the truth.”
LS: “Once pseudo-scientific wishful thinking has been excluded whatever remains however contrary to that must be the truth.”
Whichever, it’s rotten logic.
indeed, but it fits with many of comments here.
MostlyHarmless says:
and bubbagyro agrees.
Trouble is that they have both forgotten that the destruction of ozone by chlorine (or bromine) radicals is catalytic which means that the chlorine radicals are not destroyed in the reaction, but instead hang around to start all over again. This, together with the fact that CFCs are very stable, long lived molecules (which is why they were used as refrigerants and extinguishers in the first place), so it is quite difficult to break them up to form those radicals, means that the effects will be around for a long time.
MostlyHarmless also says,
I have bolded the word which reveals the fallacy – if you exchange a CO2 molecule in the atmosphere with one in the ocean, you have not changed the concentration. I do not know whether the ‘hundreds of years’ estimate is accurate, but it is an estimate of the time required to change the concentration, not an estimate of the residency time.
Just a question (or two)
I’m assuming Freon is a CFC.
I’m assuming CFC’s destroy O3
I know that Freon is about 4 times heavier than air.
How does Freon (a CFC) ‘float’ up to the altitude necessary to destroy the O3?
Just askin’
FijiDave says:
December 7, 2010 at 6:29 pm
I know that Freon is about 4 times heavier than air.
How does Freon (a CFC) ‘float’ up to the altitude necessary to destroy the O3?
By diffusion:
“The stratosphere is ‘stratified’, because, being an inversion layer, you cannot have vertical mixing, or convection. HOWEVER, you can have diffusion — a random motion of gas particles, through collisions, back and forth, forth and back, which gradually moves molecules throughout a region. Light molecules diffuse more readily, and heavy molecules more slowly. Freon molecules are very heavy, so they diffuse up into the stratosphere over decades. So, the freon now in the stratosphere is a result of freon gas being released over the last half century, and gradually diffusing into the upper stratosphere. And, now that it is there, it will stay there, even if ALL FREON IN THE LOWER ATMOSPHERE DISAPPEARS, for another century or so.”
From: http://cseligman.com/text/planets/atmospherestructure.htm
jimmi says:
December 7, 2010 at 5:53 pm
Chloride and bromide radicals come mostly from the oceans and volcanoes, not from breakdown of freons. There are thousands of other chlorinated compounds produced naturally by inorganic processes that exist in the atmosphere, which have much greater impact than the tiny amount of compounds produced by humans living on earth’s outer skin, with such humans only having access to elements that are found only in the first few meters of an earth with 4000 miles until its core! What anthropohubris!
I don’t know how we can begin to deal with the half-truths propagated by non-chemists and Climate “scientists” here. Half-lives of molecules have nothing to do with steady-state concentrations when modeling equations are formulated. The residence times of molecules like CO2 are used in equations to determine what the steady state will be. Yikes! People here are using this tautologically and it is forcing me to go bye-bye.
But if it is not in a steady state, then the ultimate concentration is determined by the difference between the absorption and emission rates, not by the “exchange rate” which is the confusion I was correcting.
As for chlorine from volcanoes , try reading this, as it shows the actual concentrations and origins of chlorine containing compounds in the atmosphere, from measurements not guesswork
http://www.epa.gov/ozone/science/myths/volcano.html
PS I’m a chemist
“An Arctic Ozone Hole, if similar in size to the Antarctic Ozone Hole, could expose over 700+ million people, wildlife and plants to dangerous UV ray levels. The likely hood of this happening seems inevitable based on the deterioration of ozone layer caused by the effects of global warming on the upper atmosphere.”
Except that UV levels closer to the equator are MUCH higher than under the “hole”. Another alarmist, and totally false, claim.
It would be nice if they would take the same hope for the ozone hole recovery and apply that to the Arctic ice, which seems to have been behaving in a similar fashion (except from its minimum in 2007 – not 2000 or 2006 like the ozone hole). But hey if you believe in something enough, it’s going to be true no matter what.
Billy Liar says:
December 7, 2010 at 1:47 pm
http://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/index.html
The hole was much, much smaller in 2002.
Yes the Antarctic temperature was higher than normal that year. It seems the size of the ozone hole is completely independent of direct solar activity and more reliant on the air temperature where cold air is required to destroy ozone. Global ozone production is totally flat for the last 50 years showing solar output in this area is irrelevant.
So we have been kidding ourselves thinking we had any affect through CFC’s.
Geoff Sharp says:
December 7, 2010 at 8:53 pm
Global ozone production is totally flat for the last 50 years […]
A link to that claim would be handy…
December 7, 2010 at 7:06 pm
And, now that it is there, it will stay there, even if ALL FREON IN THE LOWER ATMOSPHERE DISAPPEARS, for another century or so.”
This does not sound right to me. As you say, it got there by diffusion. But gases diffuse in all directions equally. And unless there is some mechanism by which certain molecules are removed, such as UV breaking certain molecules down, or water vapor condensing, then all gas molecules would be more or less equally distributed in the atmosphere.
The other exception is light molecules such as helium which can reach the escape velocity and go into space. At the same temperature, all molecules have the same translational kinetic energy. Since the formula for kinetic energy is E = 1/2mv2, the lighter molecules go faster at the same temperature and are able to escape.
The post below by jimme seems to support what I say above.
See the following at jimmi says:
December 7, 2010 at 8:02 pm :
http://www.epa.gov/ozone/science/myths/heavier.html
“As the graph above shows, the concentration of CFC-11 is essentially constant at altitudes up to 10 km. The UV radiation needed to break CFC-11 apart is shielded by the ozone layer. Because no natural processes destroy CFCs, it survives to be uniformly distributed, both vertically and horizontally. Concentrations drop off rapidly, however, in the stratosphere. As the molecules rise into and above the ozone layer, they are exposed to strong UV, break down, and release chlorine. These measurements are one link between CFCs, increased levels of chlorine in the stratosphere, and ozone depletion.”
Am I missing something?
I am not sure whether it is correct or not that the rate of production has been constant , but the rate of destruction certainly has not, at least over Antarctica.
http://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/facts/history.html
On the possibility of an Arctic ozone hole – this probably is alarmist – as I recall the atmospheric conditions over the Arctic are not nearly as conducive to ozone depletion as they are over the Antarctic
Werner Brozek says:
December 7, 2010 at 9:23 pm
At the same temperature, all molecules have the same translational kinetic energy. […] Am I missing something?
Your premise [that all molecules have the same kinetic energy for given temperature] is wrong: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%E2%80%93Boltzmann_distribution
This years ozone hole is interesting in so far as its persistence,
2010
http://www.temis.nl/protocols/o3field/o3field.php?Year=2010&Month=12&Day=07
2009
http://www.temis.nl/protocols/o3field/o3field.php?Year=2009&Month=12&Day=07
In the top field sp view we can see evidence of an occurring break off of ozone depleted air in the 3 o clock position,Although not unusual, this migrates into the mid latitudes .In 2006 when the last significant break off occurred with the concomitant 13th December SPE ,there was a significant decrease in NZ surface T around -2.5c.the upper troposphere t were the coldest on the planet outside of the polar zones.
Leif Svalgaard says:
December 7, 2010 at 9:09 pm
Geoff Sharp says:
December 7, 2010 at 8:53 pm
Global ozone production is totally flat for the last 50 years […]
—————-
A link to that claim would be handy
http://junkscience.com/Ozone/ozone_seasonal.html (provided by CodeTech earlier)
The article suggesting the data coming from Mauna Loa (NOAA).
jimmi says:
December 7, 2010 at 9:25 pm
Global ozone production is totally flat for the last 50 years
I am not sure whether it is correct or not that the rate of production has been constant , but the rate of destruction certainly has not, at least over Antarctica.
Production seems level if the data is to be trusted, the Antarctic temps correlating very well with the ozone destruction displayed in the link you supplied.
Geoff Sharp says:
December 7, 2010 at 10:02 pm
Global ozone production is totally flat for the last 50 years […]
I don’t see the ‘global’ ozone production tabulated or graphed over the last 50 years. Please drill down to where you got that information from.
jimmi says:
December 7, 2010 at 8:02 pm
Good comeback. But there are two (actually more) kinds of steady state to consider here. One is homeostatic, which you are thinking of, meaning an absolute steady state that always comes back to the same state in adiabatic systems. What happens in the Antarctic ozone “hole” situation is homeorhesis—the system is always seeking a new steady state when non-adiabatic perturbations occur in order to prevent chaos.
With ozone, the perturbation is magnetically driven. Ozone is one of the molecules that is diamagnetic. This condition drives molecules away from the strongest magnetic field, whereas oxygen is paramagnetic, i.e. attracted to magnetism.
The south pole of earth (and Saturn, for that matter), has strong magnetic lines emanating from the polar region. This tends to reduce the concentration of ozone near the strongest field lines. These wobble, but are in similar positions year round, and vary in strength. So one can expect to find regions where ozone is depleted in discreet areas, that we now call “holes”, although there is still plenty of ozone there arriving by standard diffusion means. So we have a homeorhetic condition that works itself out to form zones of higher or lower ozone.
Because temperature is less at the SP, replenishing of ozone by diffusion is reduced by the 1 1/2 power of temperature according to the Chapman Enskog effect :
http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/b/8/0/b809ab50b5f0fe17ec6bf10b7d763576.png
Leif Svalgaard says:
December 7, 2010 at 10:21 pm
I don’t see the ‘global’ ozone production tabulated or graphed over the last 50 years. Please drill down to where you got that information from.
Perhaps the term global is confusing, this graph shows the ozone data measured closer to the equator at Mauna Loa. It would be a good indicator of the total levels because of the lack of cold air as well as being close to the greatest production area?
Any solar signal should be present if it is a factor.
Leif Svalgaard said (via a link):
“An updated analysis of observed stratospheric temperature variability and trends is presented on the basis of satellite, radiosonde, and lidar observations […] Temperature changes in the lower stratosphere show cooling of ∼0.5 K/decade over much of the globe for 1979–2007 […] The results show mean cooling of 0.5–1.5 K/decade during 1979–2005, with the greatest cooling in the upper stratosphere near 40–50 km […]
Yet that same link also produces this:
“Temperature anomalies throughout the stratosphere were relatively constant during the decade 1995–2005”.
Any ideas why the cooling trend stopped in 1995 ?
The year of 2002 could be an anomaly, but there might be some clues as to why the ozone hole was the smallest since 1988. The polar vortex of that year split in two and was very weak, possibly a result of a major stratospheric warming event earlier. In my research I have noted that 2002 had some major flare activity which saw the sunspot record move away sharply from the F10.7 flux record. Reading Erl Happ’s blog he also mentioned a sudden stratospheric warming event this year which may have contributed to this years polar vortex (need to research that).
The Antarctica temperature record was also influenced in 2002, showing the power of the vortex or sudden stratospheric warming?
Some reading HERE and HERE.
Geoff Sharp says:
December 8, 2010 at 12:50 am
Perhaps the term global is confusing, this graph shows the ozone data measured closer to the equator at Mauna Loa. It would be a good indicator of the total levels because of the lack of cold air as well as being close to the greatest production area?
Any solar signal should be present if it is a factor.
Just trying to make people more precise and to make statements that are less sweeping. Same thing with ‘totally flat’. This could be quantified better. e.g. by a regression line with error bars. But, I agree, there is not a clear solar cycle effect.
Stephen Wilde says:
December 8, 2010 at 1:23 am
“Temperature anomalies throughout the stratosphere were relatively constant during the decade 1995–2005″.
Any ideas why the cooling trend stopped in 1995 ?
Considering the large variability that interval is too short to indicated a significant trend. In any case, the slow decline of CFCs that started in 1995 is likely to be a factor as already noted.
Geoff Sharp says:
December 8, 2010 at 2:15 am
In my research I have noted that 2002 had some major flare activity which saw the sunspot record move away sharply from the F10.7 flux record.
Most of that deviation is caused by the SIDC record being wrong. Other SSN series do not show such a large difference, and then there is L&P beginning to depress the SSN record.
“Leif Svalgaard says:
December 7, 2010 at 9:38 pm
Werner Brozek says:
December 7, 2010 at 9:23 pm
At the same temperature, all molecules have the same translational kinetic energy. […] Am I missing something?
Your premise [that all molecules have the same kinetic energy for given temperature] is wrong: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%E2%80%93Boltzmann_distribution”
Hello,
My comment was not meant to go to that depth, however you are correct about the Boltzmann distribution. So when an outside temperature is measured at say 25 C, very few molecules are actually at 25 C. The huge majority are within one standard deviation but some are within two standard deviations, etc. It could well be that only those helium molecules, for example, that are above a single standard deviation from the measured temperature high up in the stratosphere can actually escape Earth if knocked the right direction.
I said: “At the same temperature, all molecules have the same translational kinetic energy.”
In light of your comments, would you agree with me if I said it this way: “Molecules that have the same translational kinetic energy have the same temperature.”
Or would you prefer “At the same temperature, THE AVERAGE translational kinetic energy of all molecules is the same.”
Werner Brozek says:
December 8, 2010 at 10:20 am
would you agree with me if I said it this way: “Molecules that have the same translational kinetic energy have the same temperature.”
No
The point is that there is a distribution of speeds and the high-end tail is what determines if the molecules escape. Freon [and CO2 for that matter] is too heavy to escape in many billions of years. The decrease in freon since 1995 is of course because of reactions with ozone, slowly eating away at the freon already there.
BillD says:
Of course, the effect of drastically reducing CFC’s on the ozone hole is one of the big success stories of international cooperation on the environment.
Which reduction only BEGAN a few years back ( I still have R-12 in one of my cars, the other 4 having had THEIR R-12 leak out over the years and replaced with R-134A. Production is NOT the same as when it escapes. Oh, and my fridge is still R-12, so that’s yet to be released. Oh, and Mexico and some others kept making R-12 for a while too. Last I bought was about 4 years ago, but it was still available).
But it does look like the price is way up. Last large ‘bottle’ I bought was $200, now it’s closer to $800:
http://www.r12.net/
So before you run out in a self congratulatory glow about banning CFCs in the 1990s, you have to also allow for the time lag in their usage and release. Said usage and release still going on.
However, since CFCs have long half lives in the statosphere (>50years) their decline will be slow, as will be the recovery of stratospheric ozone.
So whatever we’ve done since 1960 is not yet fully lagged into the system, eh? So, exactly what is all this hoopla about the ozone hole changing size, year by year, all about again?
Let’s see, 50 year residency time, a couple of decades lag time to diffuse, a decade or so to leak out, a few more years or decade? for production to tail off and inventory to run down… so the hole changed between 2000 and 2010 because of WHAT again?
It simply can have nothing to do with what we’ve done on the surface, given the time lags and YOUR assertion of a 50 year half life. And in ALL cases, that can’t be driving year to year variations (or even decade to decade variation) as the response times are too fast for the preceding lag times.
None the less, many good scientific studies, largely by physical chemists, show that we can expect CFCs to decline and the ozone hole to decrease very gradually over the next 150 years and more.
So it’s up to 150 year HALF cycle time now… OK… So a decade is 10/300 or 1/30 th of a cycle? And we got HOW LARGE a ‘signal change’? IFF the change is 1/4 then it’s not from a 1/30 th or even a 1/15 th input change, and even less so when that input change is lagged by a few decades until it’s arrival at the reaction point…
This is a topic with essentially no controversy among main stream scientists.
Then the “main stream scientists” are not very good scientists.
We’ve got an ozone hole wobbling around like crazy with order of magnitude 1/4 scale variations year to year, and we’re thinking that’s caused by an input signal that’s dramatically lagged and with a decades scale rate of trivial change? Sorry, but that’s “crazy talk”. Something ELSE is driving that hole to change and wobble on such a fast pace. And that something else is dominating.
My guess would be that, just as we have a circumpolar ocean current, we have circumpolar air currents, and those let the south pole be isolated from having ozone brought in from more ‘sunny’ areas. Thus the depletion and hole.
From: http://oceancurrents.rsmas.miami.edu/southern/antarctic-cp.html
So a nice “blocking wind” to keep things tidy over the south pole… Add in variations in solar input, magnetic lines, galactic particles, stir mightily – but always in place, viola, a hole. No CFCs need apply.
Now if you can show me an Ozone Hole over New York City, you’ll have something.
Leif Svalgaard says:
By diffusion:
“The stratosphere is ‘stratified’, because, being an inversion layer, you cannot have vertical mixing, or convection. HOWEVER, you can have diffusion — a random motion of gas particles, through collisions, back and forth, forth and back, which gradually moves molecules throughout a region. Light molecules diffuse more readily, and heavy molecules more slowly. Freon molecules are very heavy, so they diffuse up into the stratosphere over decades. So, the freon now in the stratosphere is a result of freon gas being released over the last half century, and gradually diffusing into the upper stratosphere. And, now that it is there, it will stay there, even if ALL FREON IN THE LOWER ATMOSPHERE DISAPPEARS, for another century or so.”
From: http://cseligman.com/text/planets/atmospherestructure.htm
So kind of you to provide further evidence that the changes in the ozone hole can have nothing to do with anything CFC, as they are a century scale event, not an annual scale.