Wednesday
Apr202011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Ozone hole is back
Apr 20, 2011 Greens Rob Schneider reports that the hole in the ozone layer has reappeared:
Is this because the world did not indeed stop using CFC’s to the extent required to stop the hole? Or is there some other cause than CFS’s in making the hole? And if the latter, how come in the mid 1980′s was it protrayed that CFC’s was the only solution?
What does this teach us about other “there is only one answer” to problems?
Update on Apr 22, 2011 by
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill
Several people pointed out that Rob has picked up an old article. Whoops!
Reader Comments (63)
Do keep up!
Now you know *why* the ozone hole is 'reappeared', given that it never went away in the first place.
Or even that there is a problem at all.
This was another case of the developed world having to spend billions to re-engineer refrigeration equipment to utilise a less-efficient refrigerant than R22, when all along it obviously wasn't the cause.
Shame there wasn't the internet for skeptical views to be aired back then...
My understanding was that it has varied in size but has never disappeared. A more interesting question is how long its actually been there.
As I understand it, it was never a hole in the first place, it was a thinning, & it was not just over the South Pole. The other more embarrassingly awkward thing is, how do they know it hasn't always been there? The answer? They don't! Also ozone is being created & destroyed in the atmosphere all the time.
UEA people are thick (cont'd)
In today's news, we have a new survey of UK university quality. From this, I note that the average undergraduate entrant to Cambridge, my old place, had 559 UCAS points.
http://www.thecompleteuniversityguide.co.uk/league-tables/rankings
An A at A-Level is worth 120 points; a B is worth 100; and so on, with an E worth 40. If we divide the average by 120, and treat the remainder as a separate grade, we can, in a crude way, work out what you needed to get into Cambridge, by expressing these scores as number of A grades plus leftovers.
It turns out that 559 UCAS points are equivalent to 4 As and a C.
What is the comparable data comparison for the University of Email Annihilation? The average UEA entrant had 386 points, which is equivalent to 3 As (the remainder of 26 points is worth less than an E, i.e. nothing).
In reality, one suspects that probably very few UEA entrants had any As at all. The tariff to read Climate Science is three Bs. None of the Bs needs to be in Maths and even if it were, Maths A-Level these days no longer includes calculus. How a Climate Science "graduate" from UEA can be equipped to do any kind of statistics, with our without a Maths A-Level, I couldn't say,
The UK used to have 55 universities. This year as last, UEA is right there in the bottom half of the old 55 proper universities.
So, on the basis of the warmists' argument from authority, CAGW is wrong because
1/ I went to Cambridge, where people are smart, and am a sceptic
2/ people at UEA are wamists and are stupid because they have 31% fewer UCAS points than Cambridge entrants.
3/ Climate Science entrants need have only 54% of the A-Levels a Cambridge entrant has.
4/ therefore because I am smarter than them, I must be right.
This is the kind of argument ecofascists can understand.
The science is settled.
Alan, that was essentially my point, and the reason for the scepticism. They only discovered the "hole" when the technology became available to find it (so to speak). For the first 20 years of my life nobody had mentioned ozone or CFCs or holes and then suddenly, bang! We've been up there, discovered there is a hole (oh, all right then, a "thinning"), so it must be our fault.
And right on cue the anti-scientists of Greenpeace or FoE or whichever find a bogeyman to point a finger at.
The message that has never got through to the general public is that the environmental activists don't care about facts or scientific accuracy. All they care about is, and always has been, stopping any development that involves the use of "chemicals". Hence the rush to blame CO2 for global warming and characterise global warming as intrinsically harmful and man as the culprit.
Even for a complete non-scientist like me that has never made any sense at all.
On ur local ITV News (Anglia) today, UEA announced that they would be charging the full £9000/year student fees.
Question: why would anyone want to go to such a Godawful LOOKING university - when its going to be charging the same fees as the likes of Cambridge..?
I mean - have you SEEN it..?? 1960's Soviet architecture looks good by comparison..!
@J4R
Are you serious? How can you become an engineer or a scientist without having studied calculus at school? Much of the principal basis of doing something useful with maths is concentrated on calculus - the first two years of my engineering degree was to degree levels maths in calculus and statistics.
Without my A-Level maths covering calculus I would have been useless...
@ David
Go on - I love it!
after the Arctic 6 Months of darkness we have more Ozone..after 6 months of daylight we have less Ozone... The Arctic is now experiencing daylight and the Ozone is also starting to diminish. Could the " SUN" have something to do with that ? :-)
@ Jiminy Cricket
I was staggered too. But it's true. It was too difficult and was putting the kidz off doing Maths A-LEvel, so they took it out of the curriculum. I don't know what it was doing as part of the A Level curriculum anyway. I did it as part of Further Maths O-Level.
An A-Level in Maths today is about like an O Level in Maths of, say, 30 years ago. It stops at algebra, quadratic equations, matrices, and trigonometry. It's hardly "maths" at all, it's barely beyond arithmetic.
I agree, I can't see how on earth you can do anything that has to do with pattern and trend recognition if you can't do calculus. How, for example, would you know how unusual a given temperature reading was, if you did not know what a normal distribution curve was, nor how to calculate the area under it marked off by the successive standard deviations?
And you don't even need a Maths A Level, feeble though it is, to do Climate Science.
If these people had done foundation courses that brought their mathematical skills up to those of an A-Level student of 35 years ago, and then did a postgraduate course in statistics, then did Climate Science, I might believe them. But they don't and presumably the peer reviewers of what they publish are all just as thick.
Justice4rinka. I left school in 1968 at 16 with 3 O levels, English, maths and physics, First I worked on the farm, then became a truck driver, and finally a mechanic.
In 1981, UEA admitted me as an unqualified mature student to study Environmental Sciences. Subjects included geophysics under prof Fred Vine (Vine and Matthews, the man who came up with sea floor spreading as the key to plate tectonics). Sedimentology under Nick McCave, who later moved to Cambridge as Woodwardian Professor of Geology. Quaternary geology under Geoff Boulton (later took the chair at Edinburgh; didn't like the man but it was a brilliant course). Also geochemistry and hydrology.
After UEA I completed a PhD at Reading, then moved to Australia, ending up as a Senior Research Scientist at the CSIRO. My time at UEA was the best and most challengi time of my life, and I look back with great pleasure. I am mortified by what has happened since I left, but please stick your snotty ad homs where they belong.
The 'ozone hole' never really went away. It was simply ignored. It's a puff piece, nothing more.
The hole in the ozone layer has come back? In truth it never went away; it's just that after the Montreal Protocol the spotlight moved off it to 'Global Warming' - another chance to save the planet.
But you can see here measurements from TOMS ( Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer) which show that the hole never went away and is now bigger than ever.
Even the green guru James Lovelock, originator of the famous Gaia Theory, said in a Guardian interview about supposed Global Warming,
"We should have been warned by the CFC/ozone affair because the corruption of science in that was so bad that something like 80% of the measurements being made during that time were either faked, or incompetently done."
See Guardian Interview here
So, we have wasted billions destroying CFCs in another futile attempt to save the planet from what seems to be a natural phenomenon entirely beyond our control..
I am sorry if the subtlety went over your head, Hector.
My "snotty ad homs" precisely track the argument used to shout down people who don't buy CAGW: "Here is an authority's opinion, you're not an authority, so you have no right to a different opinion."
Any such argument depends on the credibility of the authority. If I'm smarter than the authority, I must be entitled to doubt it. If someone at a third-rate university with third-rate admissions criteria that is in the bottom half of the univeristy table reckons CAGW is real, I don't care and I'm not persuaded. I want to know if anyone really intelligent has studied the matter and agrees. Really smart people tend to study stuff more demanding than Climate Science, however, or to be sceptics.
I remain unimpressed by the academic rigour of Climate Science undergraduate courses. They are aimed at and taken by the bottom half of the class. They may be right about CAGW, but probably only in the same way that a stopped clock is rigth twice a day.
Err, doesn't the ozone "hole" come back every year?
It only appears in the Southern Hemisphere spring when the sunlight returns and releases the chlorine from polar stratospheric cloud store. The "hole" then recovers each year. Here's some info from NASA.
Oddly enough, there was also a news story in Science and a paper in GRL about ozone recovery this week. Might be worth a look.
I have read that it is seasonal and swaps between the North and South poles according to season. It is impossible to say that ozone holes did not exist before someone first drew attention to them. Was it not the same group who were behind the antropogenic global warming scare in the early days?
'UEA people are thick'. Then a list of the list of the league tables for entry requirements bagging UEA students, and finding, of course, that Cambridge comes top. Sorry, the Cambridge subtlety went right over my head.
To criticise the CRU, and current UEA management, no problem, I agree. I fail to see how you come to this: 'So, on the basis of the warmists' argument from authority, CAGW is wrong because' ......
Too subtle for me. Maybe I should have studied Latin, but they didn't teach it at my school.
J4R
Why would you need differential calculus to add up all the temperatures in the whole world and then divide by the number of thermometers? Wouldn't people with extra fingers be more useful?
The UEA was my 5th choice on my UCAS form, back in 1979. Below that and you'd be in Polytechnic country!
I remember arguing with what would become a warmist about 20 years ago in a pub about the 'hole in the ozone layer'. I asked him to prove to me that there wasn't in fact an ozone layer in the hole. He couldn't.
Presumably the Guaridan intelligensia will be sending their bright young things to the UEA - in order to insure the planet's survival, right?
Off topic, sorry...
Not sure what people here think about this:-
http://www.redtapechallenge.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/environment/
I notice that a lot of people have already stated that they think environmental laws should be strengthened rather than repealed. Example: "I am horrified that you are even including environmental issues and regulations in this discussion." Have Greenpeace asked all their activists to respond?
Might be worth putting up a few more counter arguments do you think?
You might be interested in this extract from Lovelock's Homage to Gaia; pp218 paperback - good read.
I had always suspected that there were natural halocarbons in the air. I had found traces of methyl iodide and it seemed likely that there would also be methyl bromide and methyl chloride from natural sources. When I suggested this at scientific meetings on CFCs, I found the idea unpopular with scientists. Many seemed to have accepted uncritically the 'Green' notion that organisms rejected chlorine from their metabolism, and they saw chlorine compounds as the toxic products of industry. To me this was fanaticism, not science, and I prepared a chromatograph specifically for methyl chloride analysis. During September 1976, I made a series of measurements at Bowerchalke and found methyl chloride present at a level close to one part per billion. This was nearly ten times more than the
abundance of fluorocarbon 11 at that time. It is true that FCll carries three times as much chlorine per molecule and releases it specifically in the stratosphere. Even so, the natural chlorine from methyl chloride was comparable as a source of chlorine with the CFCs. Industry scientists told me that there was no significant industrial leakage of methyl chloride and that the abundance together with its short half-life in the air suggested a large natural source. Later, scientists found that methyl chloride came from forest fires, from the ocean, and from fungi living on rotting wood. Nature, it seemed, was also in the business of ozone depletion. I published these findings in a Nature Letter in 1977. Apart from personal enquiries from Peter Liss, Adrian Tuck, and Bob Murgatroyd, other UK scientists expressed little or no interest in the atmospheric abundance of halomethanes. With the exception of the Meteorological Office, the establishment, led by the Royal Society, was clearly interested in the Molina-Rowland theory but disdained my somewhat downmarket researches in rural Wiltshire.
Justice4Rinka, I assume your condescending tone was supposed to me amusing, but you appear to be factually incorrect.
I've just googled the A-level maths syllabus from several different examination boards, and they all list calculus as one of the modules of the course.
Where did you get your apparent misinformation from?
Come one guys, what is the point of panning everyone who is UEA? We have very specific problems with some certain individuals, the point about which is a 'better' university notwithstanding.
I have worked and studied in what are widely considered the 'best' and the 'top of the heap' universities in my area of training, and continue to be in one presently. They are as much afflicted with the malaise that of intellectual laziness as much as the lower ones one would imagine to be. There is a 'general awareness level' advantage that comes with a good institution that cannot be obtained from a lesser place, and this helps breaking out of a provincial mentality, but beyond that, it is the individuals who are sinking their blood and sweat to make the good places what they are. Many a time, it is simply that the top universities are able to afford to retain their expert faculty, thereby sequestered from the rest of the system, and nothing more.
@david
I was going to apply to UEA purely on the strength that Selina Scott used to go there.
That was a long time ago, though....
Thank you shub.
UEA units went exhaustively through sampling problems. We looked at problems from collecting representative data to questioning whether the data were relevant or not to the problem. Coming from a geology background I have never accepted 'unprecedented'. Experience has shown me whenever we look into a dark corner we find something new. Hole in the ozone? No-one had been there before, so we don't know about any significance.
'Professor' Steve Jones did his first degree at Lancaster in the early 70s, so he really is thick. In those days, 2 Ds and an E would have got you in there. And thick people don't get cleverer. They can, like Jones, get to know a lot about a little topic. Doesn't make them clever enough to interpret, to understand, what they know.
.
I must admit I thorough enjoyed J4Rs satire. I had always assumed that the UEA was actually affiliated with the University of Cambridge. (Are they not just a few miles apart and have similar climates?) Is it not the case the that the UEA professors and the Cambridge dons take lengthy bicycle journeys together, prior to punting in the fens?
Baxter 75
'Apart from personal enquiries from Peter Liss, Adrian Tuck, and Bob Murgatroyd, other UK scientists expressed little or no interest in the atmospheric abundance of halomethanes.'
Peter Liss. UEA School of Environmental Sciences.
@ simpleseeker
Yes, but that's just raw data.
If you wanted to understand the unusualness of a given temperature event, or sequence of such events, you'd first need to know how often it was to be expected. You'd need to plot a distribution curve and be able to calculate the area underneath it. If the curve were normally distributed, then 67% of your data points would be within 1 standard deviation of the mean, 95% within two, 99.5% within three, and so on. If the curve you're looking at is not a standard distribution, these values will be different.
Some knowledge of calculus, statistics and probability is needed to understand this stuff. The entrance qualifications to study climate science at UEA are low, do not include a Maths A Level, and even if they did, would not cover the above.
It is therefore reasonable to suppose that climate at UEA is studied ineffectually by average people who aren't equipped for the task. The supposition is borne out by observation. "Hide the decline", indeed.
Any argument from authority in support of CAGW thus runs afoul of the problem that at first and indeed second blush, the climate science discipline lacks anyone who passes muster as a plausible authority.
Professor Phil Jones, I think, Bill.
Steve Jones is a notorious rock and roll guitar player and/or a geneticist noted for his amusing writing (including his forthcoming BBC science reporting review).
J4R
Sorry, thought I had flagged the sarc sufficiently not to need the tag.
So the jury may still be out on Thomas Midgeley.
"Environmental historian J.R. McNeil says that Midgley had a greater impact on the environment than any other single organism in world history."
@ steveta
Two sources. One is a colleague whose daughter is doing a Maths A-Level which doesn't include calculus. The other is a Russell Group graduate I interviewed for a graduate job yesterday, whose knowledge of statistics I tested. She had an A in Maths A Level in 2007.
The question was, if there are 250 daily data points in a year, normally distributed, how many times a year should you expect a 3SD event to occur among them? She had no idea. I asked her what the area under a curve integrated to, and she also had no idea. I asked her what the method was called for calculating the area under a curve and she also had no idea. She then explained that there had been no calculus in her Maths A Level. Differentiation? Integration? What are those?
It may well still be in the syllabus optionally, but it certainly isn't compulsory and you can claim an A Level without it.
All I want is someone who can look at a daily statistic and tell me if it's unusual. It seems I need a maths graduate.
The wider point remains. No knowledge of statistical techniques is stipulated to get onto Climate Science courses, yet a central tenet of climatology dogma is that the climate is altering beyond what is to be expected. How do they know?
As above, with maths O level I knew how to calculate the area under a curve, but I went to school where they taught science. Calculus and statistics were properly covered at 101 level. I suggest, J4R, that you get on the blower to Nick McCave, Emeritus prof at your alma mater, and explain to him that UEA people are thick.
@ shub
UEA in general appears better than its climatology faculty. The average UEA UCAS score is 386 points. The tariff for climate science is 300. Depending on how widely distributed the scores are, it is possible there are people at UEA with as many as 450 UCAS points. You never know.
That said, they don't insist on more than 300 for Climate Science. You can get BBB not including Maths and get in. About 53% of A Level candidates get B or better, so you can be in the bottom half of the class and be fairly innumerate, and still be fit to enter the hallowed groves of the same campus as Phil Jones. And then pontificate aggressively on CiF about the science being settled even though you haven't really done any.
One imagines them all wandering the shady fen cloisters in gown and mortar board, clutching printouts of Michael Mann's hockey stick and conversing in Latin.
"Quomodo decessus operire?"
"Non gnovi....potes forsitan ars Michaeli in Naturam uteri?"
Wait for it!
Any time soon look out for a paper (peer reviewed of course) that blames the hole in the ozone layer on.....
I'm sure you're ahead of me....yes you've guessed.....GLOBAL WARMING.
Simples!
Which university did Nick McCave attend as an undergraduate, and what did he get in his A Levels, Hector?
Are geologists generally pro-CAGW or not? If they are, why were they eliminated from the legendary survey that claimed 97% of psyentists support the consensus?
Google translates J4R's Latin as follows;
"How do I cover the departing was?"
"I did not gnovi .... perhaps you can into the nature of the art of Michael the intimate with him?"
Which is only a slightly worse translation than the instructions that come with some electronic gadgets.
I have no idea what most of the comments in the post are about but the first line in the quote says it all....
"Is this because the world did not indeed stop using CFC’s to the extent required to stop the hole?"
As an electrical engineer who has worked in the 3rd world for the last 25 years I can assure you all that R22 etc has never been out of service and the standard way to clean a system (despite our efforts to educate) is to blast the Freon through to atmosphere!
Its just the same as the West trying to reduce CO2 whilst the rest of the world ignores them! Costs to the West go through the roof buying gear to reclaim the Freon whilst the 3rd world pumps it out and China/India kept on producing an outlawed gas!
Was/is Freon the culprit... I am still unsure but I have today watched R22 being used and flushed through a system today and even sceptics surely would agree that is not on! Why does the UN not slam down on India and China for still releasing it from their stockpiles? One wonders what the IPCC Chairman thinks of India still selling this gas whilst outlawing its use in India!
Doug, you are right. They already speak about it, in the ABC article itself.
Stupid people believe global warming is due to the ozone hole.
Scienctists believe the ozone hole is due to global warming.
Long time lurker here....Calculus is in the A Level maths syllabus. I've been studying AQA A Level maths on and off for the past couple of years and I can tell you it is introduced in C2 and extended in C3 and C4, all of which are compulsory units. We can certainly argue about what level of calculus is taught, but calculus itself is certainly taught.
mmm...someone preaching about scientific qualifications.... my science pals took maths, physics with maths, extra maths, additional maths, extra-special maths...and got loads of A grades in the same subject.
try doing the same tricks with French, Spanish and German?
damn...l'esprit de l'escalier:
I forgot they also did maths and stats, and extra maths, and stats and additional maths with stats....an easy 12 A grade A levels....and those are the "hard" subjects in Worstall talk
I've been keeping an eye for a few years on what is taught at GCSE level, and to a lesser extent A level, in maths and sciences to see if the horror stories that sometimes appear in the media about 'dumbing down' are true (sadly they generally are). As far as I'm aware, calculus hasn't been taught at GCSE level for years (and if memory serves, it was dropped very early on in the life of the GCSE). It is, however, generally included at A level.
What level of complexity they reach at A level if starting from scratch is a separate question. At my comprehensive school in the 1970s we were introduced to differentiation towards the end of the second form (age 12/13), and integration the next year, so we'd already covered the basics before starting O level, in which calculus was quite a big topic. At A level we continued from where we'd left off, the same happened at university (an engineering course). Looking at current GCSE maths it's difficult to spot anything that we hadn't covered by the time we were 13/14. Today's youngsters are no less bright than any previous generation, quite how we've reached a point where so little is expected of them is depressing.
Baxter 75
I remember attending a lecture in the late '70's as part of the analytical chemistry course given by Gordon Kirkbright, then Prof of analytical chem, in which he discussed LiDAR (Light ranging and detection) and he gave a run down of the various applications, including identifying and quantifying the various species present in the upper atmosphere. It's a long time ago, but I remember being amazed at the wide variety of chlorine containing species up there, and the rather complex interactions. I may well go and dig my notes out of the garage!