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)
jb - perhaps we could find out where Kate Silverton went to uni....
Ooooohhh....
Looks like total stratospheric chlorine levels are back to where they were in 1990.
http://www.environment.gov.au/soe/2006/publications/commentaries/atmosphere/stratospheric-ozone.html
Interestingly, most of the drop is due to cuts in chlorinated solvents, with CFCs only leveling off and not dropping, consistent with some of the earlier commenters.
Interesting that the link only shows ozone hole size to 2005, but chlorine levels to 2010.
Looks like the link was too long.
This should work as a copy and paste.
http://tinyurl.com/3gmbcaw
Hmmm....
Looks like that ABC News article (published in early Sept) was a case of premature extrapolation.
The ozone hole over Antarctica last year was actually kinda wimpy.
http://tinyurl.com/3mkx62l
Gosh, what are they to do with the global warming excuse for a big ozone hole now?
Here is a fun piece of memory lane, but kick this dead mule is fun...
http://blog.algore.com/2010/09/a_victory.html
Is that but a little more than 6 months ago? My maths might be a little weak...
@ Kevin
Thanks. I'm not sure if I am relieved or dismayed that calculus is still in the A Level syllabus, having met job applicants with a recently-awarded A in a Maths A Level who cannot do it.
I did read a few years ago that you could pass some GCSE or other while getting 85% of the answers wrong, and could get an A while getting more than half of them wrong. I don't recall what the subject was though.
Maybe you can pass Maths A Level without being able to do it, in the same way that you could probably pass a French A Level without being able to do subjunctives. You'd lose points, but not so many as to fail.
@ coalsoffire: I am pretty sure I wrote
"How to hide the decline?"
"I've no idea...could you perhaps use Mike's Nature trick?"
Google isn't reliable with Latin, there are too many past participles you can confuse with 2nd and 4th declension nouns, and that's before you consider the case endings. Or mediaeval Church Latin.
I think on reflection "non gnovi" should have been "ignovi". IIRC there is a Latin verb meaning "to know" and another meaning "not to know".
Mea culpa, as they say in UEA.
SSAT
"Wouldn't people with extra fingers be more useful?"
Isn't that why UEA is where it is? :-)
WRT the ozone hole, I have a strong suspicion there was one in the Middle Ages...
Bish,
That ABC news article that Schneider references is from Sept 7th of last year.
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=98280&page=1&singlePage=true
Me thinks perhaps you are unintentionally blogging old news as current.
Anthony
The ABC article is from 2001, not last year. Check the page source.
DougS - yep - you're right - Richard Black, the Beeb's pet 'warmist' environmental correspondent, quotes 'research' which indicates that its the ozone hole which has caused a drought in Australia (I thought they were all under floodwater - but I'l let that go...)..
Funny - I thought global-warming/climate-change/this-week's-name-for-it was caused by carbon dioxide...
You learn something new every day, don't you..?
@ Justice
I'd say it was certainly possible to pass A Level maths without being any good at calculus. Whether or not you could get an A I'm not sure - it might depend on how good you are at your optional units. If you did two stats modules (1 for AS and 1 for A2) and, owing to knowing the programming for stats functions on your calculator got 90+% on both, as well as 90+% on the ridiculously easy C1 paper, then, as all papers are weighted equally, you probably could get an A. Not an A*, as you need over 90% on C3 and C4, the harder pure papers for that.
I should point out that this only applies to AQA. I don't know anything about OCR or Edexcel maths, except that OCR maths is generally thought to be harder than AQA.
J4R,
Oops, deminutionem.