Greenies Still Orbiting Uranus

Remember that scourge to humanity, however many humanity destroying scourges before called the Hole in the Ozone Layer™®©? The n-th thing that was supposed to prove to the the poor misguided children with running water and flush toilets that everyone in humanity was wrong about the way they live, and that environmentalist who live no differently weren’t? Well ¡No Pasarán! Reader and commentator Papertiger writes:

Do you remember way back when you wrote up this about the ozone hole?

As it turns out, you were right. Chemists poke holes in ozone theory.
The Montreal Protocol, agreed in 1987 and ratified two years later, stopped the production and consumption of most ozone-destroying chemicals. But many will linger on in the atmosphere for decades to come. How and on what timescales they will break down depend on the molecules' ultraviolet absorption spectrum (the wavelength of light a molecule can absorb), as the energy for the process comes from sunlight.

So Markus Rex, an atmosphere scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute of Polar and Marine Research in Potsdam, Germany, did a double-take when he saw new data for the break-down rate of a crucial molecule, dichlorine peroxide (Cl2O2). The rate of photolysis (light-activated splitting) of this molecule reported by chemists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California1, was extremely low in the wavelengths available in the stratosphere - almost an order of magnitude lower than the currently accepted rate.
The rapid photolysis of Cl2O2 is a key reaction in the chemical model of ozone destruction developed 20 years ago.
If the rate is substantially lower than previously thought, then it would not be possible to create enough aggressive chlorine radicals to explain the observed ozone losses at high latitudes, says Rex. The extent of the discrepancy became apparent only when he incorporated the new photolysis rate into a chemical model of ozone depletion. The result was a shock: at least 60% of ozone destruction at the poles seems to be due to an unknown mechanism, Rex told a meeting of stratosphere researchers in Bremen, Germany, last week.

In the course of investigating global warming, I have discovered that the other planets you would expect, the ones with atmospheres, also have their analogs of "ozone holes". It seems that they are a feature of planetary rotation rather then a defect.

Here are some pictures: Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Venus, and Mars, and finally Earth.

Note: The Martian ozone hole is barely visible due to the thin atmosphere. The only reason it is viewable at all is because of a planet wide dust storm in 2002.

Good on ya, PT – and thank you. The one thing that’s obvious about the things that greenies always seem to find so pressing, urgent, risk-laden, around the corner, and so forth, have far more to do with a need to be liked while they act on their urge to dismantle any available pillar of a civilization they had no part in building.

After all, who really wants to go back to the days where we were all worse off: less healthy, lived shorter and uncomfortable lives because the economy and society as a whole depended heavily on human and animal manual labor, and didn’t have the advantage of energy and material resources that are affordable enough for everyone in society (and not just an elite,) could benefit from – which ultimately where the “green” movement is leading us away from, whether they know it or not.

Imagine that: a slow dissolution of individual rights over how they conduct themselves and what they do with their property for the sake of an abstraction which is supposed to be for our own good, regardless of the fact that a majority wouldn’t agree... sounds mighty familiar.

As if a bunch of lit majors could even tell you what ozone even is. All they know is that someone told them that you aren’t allowed to disagree with them.