Guest essay by Steve Goreham
Another year has passed and that stubborn Ozone Hole over Antarctica refuses to go away. Data from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) shows that the Ozone Hole for the fall maximum season grew 22 percent from 2014 to 2015. World consumption of Ozone Depleting Substances has been reduced to zero over the last three decades, but the Ozone Hole is as large as ever. Did humans really save the ozone layer?
In 1974, Dr. Mario Molina and Dr. Sherwood Roland of the University of California published a paper asserting that chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) pollution from industry was destroying the ozone layer in Earth’s stratosphere. CFCs were gases used in hair spray, refrigerators, and insulating foams. The ozone layer is a layer of atmosphere located between 6 and 25 miles above the Earth’s surface.
The theory of Molina and Roland postulated that human-produced CFCs migrate upward through the atmosphere to the stratosphere, where ultraviolet radiation breaks down CFC molecules, releasing chlorine atoms. Chlorine then reacts as a catalyst to break down ozone molecules into oxygen, reducing the ozone concentration. The more CFCs used, the greater the destruction of the ozone layer, according to the theory.
In 1983, three researchers from the British Antarctic Survey discovered at thinning of the ozone layer over Antarctica, which became known as the Ozone Hole. Their observations appeared to confirm the theory of Molina and Roland. Molina and Roland were awarded a Noble Prize in chemistry in 1995 for their work.
The Ozone Layer is known to block ultraviolet rays, shielding the surface of Earth from high-energy radiation. Scientists were concerned that degradation of the ozone layer would increase rates of skin cancer and cataracts and cause immune system problems in humans. Former Vice President Al Gore’s 1992 book claimed that hunters reported finding blind rabbits in Patagonia and that fishermen were catching blind fish due to human destruction of the ozone layer, but this has not been confirmed.
In an effort to save the ozone layer, 29 nations and the European Community signed the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer in September of 1987. Over the next decade, the Protocol was universally signed by 197 nations, agreeing to ban the use of CFCs. Since 1986, world consumption of Ozone Depleting Substances (ODS) is down more than 99 percent, effectively reaching zero by 2010.
The Montreal Protocol has been hailed as an international success in resolving a major environmental issue. The Protocol has been praised as an example to follow for elimination of greenhouse gas emissions in the fight to halt global warming. But despite the elimination of CFCs, the Ozone Hole remains as large as ever.
During September to October, just after the Antarctic winter, the Ozone Hole is the largest for each year. NASA recently reported that from September 7 through October 13, 2015, the Ozone Hole reached a mean area of 25.6 million kilometers, the largest area since 2006 and the fourth largest since measurements began in 1979. The hole remains large, despite the fact that world ODS consumption all but disappeared about a decade ago.
Scientists are mixed on when the stubborn Ozone Hole will disappear. NASA recently announced that the hole will be half-closed by 2020. Others forecast that it will not begin to disappear until 2040 or later. But the longer the hole persists, the greater the likelihood that the ozone layer is dominated by natural factors, not human CFC emissions.
Originally published in Communities Digital News.
Steve Goreham is Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America and author of the book The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania.
I thought the atmosphere above Antartica was a semi-closed system ???
Yeah but what are we doing to close the ozone holes on Venus? And Mars. And Jupiter. And Saturn. And Titan. And Uranus. And Neptune.
How do you know if a fish is blind? A rabbit you might have a chance with, but a fish???
They use a white cane.
In the case of trout, their camouflage system doesn’t work, in the streams I used to fish they’d stand out clearly (black against the stream bed). One I caught (using a worm, fly wouldn’t work), had white, opaque lenses in the eyes.
He says “dam” when he runs into a wall.
Hold up three fingers?
The dark glasses are a dead giveaway too.
“How do you know if a fish is blind?”
This is easy enough to deduce by its persistant refusal of my Grandson’s hand tied fly.
What it is is a case of the chemistry being 100% right but at the same time completely wrong. Ozone – O3 – is an unstable molecule, it is easily split up by radiation – 2xO3 -> 3xO2 . The aurora are at the polar regions – caused by solar radiation (in conjunction with the earth’s magnetic field) , and the ozone holes are, likewise, at the polar regions.
The thing that bothers me is that we were told by the Scientists that if we didn’t find a way of recovering the ozone layer then the end of the world would occur.
As the depletion seems to be about the same as it was, shouldn’t we all be dead?
“shouldn’t we all be dead?”
In due time,
It takes a while for the affect to kick in.
Strangely, it seems to be taking longer, on the whole…
Insert here by reference my comments and exchange at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/10/30/2014-antarctic-ozone-hole-holds-steady/ .
Current distribution of ozone.
http://es-ee.tor.ec.gc.ca/ozone/images/graphs/gl/current.gif
All that happens with the Ozone Hole is that in starting in August and ending in October each year, the southern polar vortex sweeps the ozone away from the south polar region toward the 40S-60S latitude. At the end of September, this region has the highest Ozone counts anywhere in the world at any time of the year approaching 450 Dobson Units. This map timeline is later into that period.
By November and December, the Ozone moves back into the south polar vortex and the 40S-60S latitude drops back to normal.
Watch the video on this page
http://www.esa.int/spaceinvideos/Videos/2013/02/Antarctic_ozone_hole_2011_and_2012
Bill Illis October 26, 2015 at 5:02 pm
All that happens with the Ozone Hole is that in starting in August and ending in October each year,
This doesn’t happen the O3 peaks at altitude during september, when the depletion occurs it is between 15 and 20km so are you saying that the vortex only operates at that altitude? If it does where does the incoming air come from, both above and below have higher concentrations of O3 than the hole, your mechanism makes no sense.
There have been many knock-on effects from this policy, which have placed people in danger.
Rain repellents sprayed onto aircraft windscreens were banned. In heavy rainstorms pilots used to be able to see the runway clearly, because the repellents were very effective, but now everything is just a blurr.
BCF fire extinguishers are no longer produced and cannot be used. Aircraft are quickly using up the last stocks of BCF, but no pilots since 1995 have been able to train with it to see just how prodigiously effective it is. (It really is a wonder material.) Thus when faced with a fire, the only experience the pilots and crew will have, is of a dribble of water from a fake extinguisher. And what will happen when stocks of BCF are all used up? Do we just let aircraft and their passengers burn?
http://a57.foxnews.com/global.fncstatic.com/static/managed/img/U.S./880/558/vegas-plane-fire-090815.jpg
What a neat idea. And how much jet fuel CO2 it will save. Let’s start immediately. No LeBourget for COP 21. Sailboats, bikes, horses, and a brisk walk. I may get soft and allow trains.
You mean like RainX Ralph?
I have noticed it does not work like it used to.
Like RainX but more powerful. There used to be a button on thenupper pannel, and the repellent was sprayed onto the screen when you needed it. But they have all been disabled because of environmental concerns. So we now land by Braille when it is raining.
We are still using Halon fire extinguishers although it is highly regulated. “Rainboe” the rain repellent was banned due to health concerns (and lawsuits) from leaks in the cockpit and environmental concerns.
Halon is no longer being produced. So when stocks run out, they run out. And there was a bit of a scandal when a recycler was found to be be diluting the Halon, partly because the raw material is so hard to get hold of.
R
Only the population is reason for all that
Steve Goreham,
The world ODS consumption is of no interest here (it may for the future), of interest are the CFC and other ODS chemical concentrations in the stratosphere. Are there any figures/tends of these from balloon and/or stratospheric flights?
Ozone is the result of O2 blocking harmful UV radiation…it is that radiation breaking O2 into OO which allows the formation of O3. Reduce the amount of incoming UV and you reduce the amount of O3….the “ozone hole” gets larger during the antarctic winter when incoming UV is at its least…the “ozone layer” thins and actually develops a hole sometimes over the arctic during the winter there.
Considering how short the lifespan of an O3 molecule is in the wild it would not surprise me to learn that the “ozone layer” thins considerably each day on the dark side of the earth
” …the “ozone layer” thins considerably each day on the dark side of the earth.”
Steve, that is what I was taught in a general studies meteorology class in 1975. The ozone layer nearly disappears on the night side of the earth. I always thought that the hole was a place where it wouldn’t reform every day. I never could figure out how the CFCs could gather at the south pole to block the daily formation, but considered that it must be a global threshold where the usually sparsest region might become completely inactive.
“Dawtgtomis
October 26, 2015 at 3:20 pm
I never could figure out how the CFCs could gather at the south pole to block the daily formation”
And neither could the “experts”. We were told by these “experts” that CFC’s released in the Northern Hemisphere, appeared over the South Pole to create the hole. It was bunkum then as it is now.
It doesn’t because O3 is itself depleted by UV light, there’s no sunlight on the dark side of the earth.
The whole thing appears to the casual observer to be a naivete similar to Roger Revelle’s original CO2 ponderings (which I heard he withdrew publicly before his death).
The problem seems to be that those who latch on to these theories for profit won’t be funded anymore if a non-emergency is determined.
The position of the polar vortex core in the northern hemisphere.
http://oi57.tinypic.com/123sb5e.jpg
The ozone hole depends not on the presence of ozone, which just goes along for the ride, but on atmospheric dynamics which generates a vortex as the Brewer-Dobson circulation approaches the pole and terminates in a descending vortex which when viewed from above appears to contain a high concentration of ozone simply because of the viewing angle. Inside the hole is a region isolated by the vortex (like the eye of the hurricane) in which the ozone has decayed out naturally. The size of the hole has nothing to do with the ozone concentration. Like CAGW a great big nothingburger.
O3 is measured from both below and by sondes directly, no problem of viewing angle there. The size of the hole has everything to do with the O3 concentration! Prior to september each year the O3 over the polar region reaches a maximum in the altitude range 15-20 km and over the next month drops to zero. At altitudes above and below this range the decay doesn’t occur, how does your mechanism account for this?
only it is.not the emissions but the CFC concentrations that make the ozone hole
h/t Richard Telford
https://quantpalaeo.wordpress.com/2015/10/26/cfc-concentrations-not-emissions-affect-ozone/
caught in moderation…
This really isn’t that complicated. CFCs have relatively long atmospheric lifetimes, and are only slowly broken down. The ozone impact is a function of concentrations rather than emissions; despite emissions falling drastically concentrations have only recently began to slowly decline. We can after all measure these things: http://www.rsmas.miami.edu/assets/images/tritium/cfc-sf6-no-hemi-atmosphere.jpg
Here are measured and forecasted atmospheric concentrations given current abatement trajectories:
http://www.theozonehole.com/images/cfc.ht42.jpg
But Halon just happens to be the most effective fire extinguisher ever invented. Erradicate all Halon, and many people will die. Law of unintended consequences.
Which is why halons are allowed for critical applications such as airplane engine fires
Correct. The long lifetimes allow CFCs to eventually work their way up to the stratosphere.
Has no one mentioned the need for ice crystal clouds to provide a platform for the catalytic destruction of ozone? The original theory for the ozone “hole” was that temperatures dropped in winter sufficient to allow the necessary crystal formation inside the polar vortex. When Spring arrives in Antarctica (aka, sunrise) the catalytic reaction can occur until the temperatures rise and the vortex breaks up.
No Zeke it’s not complicated at all. If we look at total column ozone for NH the most obvious changes are in 1982 and 1991 : El Chichon and Mt Pinatubo.
http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/io3col_0-360E_0-60N_na.png
Since both of these events occured near a solar max ( solar UV creates stratospheric ozone ) some of the underlying variation is probably also attributable to solar.
Once you have eliminated both those effects you may start to look for a post 2000 increase and possible attribution to CFCs.
The usual UN “trends” do nothing but hide obvious cause of changes in ozone. Very little to do with UN or Montreal protocol.
Don’t know how long that graph will remain valid : it can be recreated here by entering 0N and 60N as coordinates:
http://climexp.knmi.nl/select.cgi?id=someone@somewhere&field=o3col
Many people blame the loss of the first shuttle on the CFC ban.
There was never a problem with foam peeling off the external tank with the original formula.
However when they switched to a CFC free formula, issues with foam peeling off the tank during launch started immediately.
Um,
First one was Challenger, in 1987.
It was 17 F. at my plant nursery the morning of the Challenger explosion.
Our farm is about 60 miles due West of the Cape.
I left a p. chem lecture that morning and watched the explosion.
The O-rings sealing the joints between the sections of the solid rocket boosters lost their elasticity in the cold, allowing hot gasses to escape and burn a hole in the external fuel tank.
The second one, the Columbia in 2003, was due to foam falling off on launch and dislodging some tiles on the heat shield.
And the *engineers* said don’t launch! The rest is history.
I did not know that about the foam composition.
Interesting.
Tragic.
The ozone hole and for that matter the distribution of ozone in the atmosphere is in large part related to solar UV light activity along with solar CME and solar proton events.
The combination of the above will then regulate the ozone distributions of ozone in the atmosphere in both a horizontal and vertical sense.
My thinking is as the sun weakens the ozone concentrations in the lower stratosphere will decrease causing the ozone hole to grow, or at least remain large.
I think I was the first to say that an active sun needed to reduce ozone at high levels rather than increase it if the observed pattern of global air circulation changes was to be adequately explicable.
The establishment view was (is) that an active sun should increase ozone at all levels.
The most recent iteration of my hypothesis can be found here:
http://joannenova.com.au/2015/01/is-the-sun-driving-ozone-and-changing-the-climate/
Be nice to know what the levels of CFCs have been in Antarctica. If they have been dropping, I would think the ozone later would be closing up.
But it is more complicated than that Salvatore. During solar grand minimums the EUV output of the sun is significantly depleted for decades. It takes a photon with a wavelength less than 241 nano-meters (UVC range) to have sufficient energy to break an O:O bond. whereas a photon with a wavelength of less than 320 nm (UVA range) has sufficient power to split an O:O:O molecule. There is huge less reduction of UVA in a grand minimum than there is UVC and EUV. And yes it is complicated because high energy protons can also react with oxygen and create ozone or with ozone and destroy it and although millions of times more photons than protons there seems to be more protons coming both from the sun due to more coronal holes and very high energy protons (cosmic rays) due to the lower solar magnetic field strength.
“Over the course of a solar cycle the solar wind modulates the fraction of the lower-energy GCR particles such that a majority cannot penetrate to Earth near solar maximum. Near solar minimum, in the absence of many coronal mass ejections and their corresponding magnetic fields, GCR particles have easier access to Earth. Just as the solar cycle follows a roughly 11-year cycle, so does the GCR, with its maximum, however, coming near solar minimum. But unlike the solar cycle, where bursts of activity can change the environment quickly, the GCR spectrum remains relatively constant in energy and composition, varying only slowly with time. (See Forbush decrease for short-term changes of GCR related to space strong solar events)
These charged particles are traveling at large fractions of the speed of light and have tremendous energy. When these particles hit the atmosphere, large showers of secondary particles are created with some even reaching the ground. These particles pose little threat to humans and systems on the ground, but they can be measured with sensitive instruments. The Earth’s own magnetic field also works to protect Earth from these particles largely deflecting them away from the equatorial regions but providing little-to-no protection near the polar regions or above roughly 55 degrees magnetic latitude (magnetic latitude and geographic latitude differ due to the tilt and offset of the Earth’s magnetic field from its geographic center). This constant shower of GCR particles at high latitudes can result in increased radiation exposures for aircrew and passengers at high latitudes and altitudes. Additionally, these particles can easily pass through or stop in satellite systems, sometimes depositing enough energy to result in errors or damage in spacecraft electronics and systems.”
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/phenomena/galactic-cosmic-rays
Current radiation is high. Ozone is destroyed by secondary radiation, according to the magnetic field.
http://sol.spacenvironment.net/raps_ops/current_files/rtimg/dose.15km.png
http://www.geomag.bgs.ac.uk/images/charts/jpg/polar_n_x.jpg
Blind rabbits and blind fish but no blind hunters or fishermen?
How else will penguins get a tan?
What’s black and white and red all over?
A penguin in a blender.
The ozone “hole” was discovered in 1956 and its natural cause was determined few years later.
Not true, the measurements of total O3 over the south pole started in 1957 but the ‘hole’ didn’t appear until the late 70s/early 80s which was when the BAC reported it. Minimum spring levels of O3 in the 50s and 60s were ~300, after 1975 they dropped rapidly to less than 200 and continued to near 100.
So the initial measurement were in a cooling period (lasting from the late 40’s to early 70’s) while the hole appeared in the subsequent warming phase (lasting until the turn of the century). Perhaps a possible connection to the same natural mechanism affecting the temperature?
So the initial measurement were in a cooling period (lasting from the late 40’s to early 70’s) while the hole appeared in the subsequent warming phase (lasting until the turn of the century). Perhaps a possible connection to the same natural mechanism affecting the temperature?
Not really because with cooler temperatures you’d get more PSCs and hence a larger hole, which is why the hole is bigger this year because conditions were more favorable for PSCs. Also the depletion occurs in colder winters in the Arctic for the same reason.
Mt Erebus is a large strato-volcano that regularly pumps out halide and carbon gasses high into the atmosphere; such a similar feature is missing from the north pole region.
Not true, how many more bogus ‘facts’ are we going to get here?