Archive for the 'ozone layer' Category

Not the Hole Story?

Published on October 20, 2006 in environment and ozone layer. 5 Comments

NASA ozone layer 24th sept 06The hole in the ozone layer over Antartica was recently the biggest it has ever been, I learned from this Reuters article:

“From September 21 to 30, the average area of the ozone hole was the largest ever observed, at 10.6 million square miles ,” said Paul Newman of
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center outside Washington.

If the stratospheric weather conditions had been normal, the ozone hole would be expected to reach a size of about 8.9 million to 9.3 million square miles, about the surface area of North America, NASA said in a statement.

(NASA image top right. More about it here.)

This immediately reminds one of the other story on the hole I mentioned not so long ago. There was good news there, since it was supposed to be stabilizing, as a result Continue reading ‘Not the Hole Story?’

International Cooperation Can Work

Published on August 23, 2006 in energy, energy policy, environment, global warming and ozone layer. 3 Comments

nasa ozone hole pictureApparently the hole in the ozone layer above Antartica is stabilizing. Some of you will remember the late 80s, when the hole was discussed a lot in the popular press. It was a huge problem. The hole we made meant that we were losing our protection from the sun’s ultraviolet rays. We identified that chloroflourocarbons -CFCs- which at the time were used everywhere (such as propellants in aerosol cans, refrigerator coolants) were the chief ozone-depleting substances that we produced.

What did we do? We sat down in Montreal and decided -as a global society- to change our behaviour. International agreements were arrived at to stop producing CFCs (and a range of other related molecules), to serve the greater good.

It seems to have worked. See the article I spotted on the BBC’s news site. Quoting:

Continue reading ‘International Cooperation Can Work’