Steady and Improving..Doctor...
Remember the Ozone Hole.. remember how scary it was.. like that guy in high school who seemed so intimidating.. what's he up to now, now that you have gotten your life together and faced some significantly bigger challenges, kind of can't wait to see him at Reunion to stare him down, ha.. Ozone Hole.. what a prick he was!
Well, I'm proud to report he is kind of what you expected.. he's gone nowhere...sure he got worse for a while, but now he's kind of stuck.. it's the equivalent of him staying at home and becoming an overly friendly rental car salesman now with a bit of a paunch and a widows peak.. he drinks when he feels guilty about high school, and just smiles a lot and tries to make jokes when you talk to him...he's gone from being Freddie Kruger to that Pixar Monster in the imagination of your soul compared to the new challenges you are facing with global warming and it's 3 horsemen buddies, Glacial Melt, Ocean Acidification, and interruptions to the Food Supply when the world's population is peaking.. you'll be eating him for Soylent Green in a few years..
So really, what's he up to, in the 80's and 90's he was such a big deal, back when only egg heads and college professors were squawking about global warming?
Seriously!?
He peaked in 2006, later than you might have imagined.. you know, the equivalent of a bully playing some college ball, or moving to a city that is actually desirable and dating the hottest girl in your high school,
http://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/Scripts/big_image.php?date=2006-09-24&hem=S
but for 7 years, nothing, flat, gonzo...
http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2012/oct/HQ_12-371_2012_Ozone_Hole.html
http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/10/ozone-layer-hole-smallest-its-been-in-20-years.php
it's how the mechanisms of the chemistry worked that the CFC's had to work themselves through the atmosphere, but we seem to have successfully halted the production of CFC's, so as refrigerators die say in a place like India, are thrown into a landfill or recycled, and the CFC's leak out and make their way to the South Pole through the normal movements of the atmosphere,where in the extreme colds of the southern polar spring, with sunlight however increasing, they combine with hundreds of ozone molecules to tear them from the sky... but the rate of destruction has not increased, the hole never got bigger, our bully seems to have stopped getting meaner and bigger, and enviously more successful. And one thing that's true, we are making more ozone to replace it one old car at a time, and I wonder, not knowing enough about the mechanisms,if this might not be working in our favor as well..as we age and start to take the position of the bully, learn perspective taking, we ask ourselves "hmm, I wonder what his home life was like?" and things like that, I start to wonder why it never was a factor in the North Pole. was it the lack of altitude of any land mass below it? I have no idea, but obviously we have moved on to bigger and worse things, but we do keep an eye on it.. that satellite I guess hangs out up there watching, and some office at NOAA or the UN keeps adding up the numbers, like that other guy you went to high school with, that ally, who never quite left town, but does cool stuff, owns a bar and hosts parties, he keeps you up on it, satisfies your sceidenfreund by helping you make fun of the bully by telling you how he gets drunk now and complains about how his life has gone nowhere for 7 years.. and you can't help but see it as, well, hopeful..
Today's Hole Size:
http://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/
Wikipedia, of course, has all the answers..luckily it has no sense of humor, otherwise I would just post a damn wikipedia link, but it says some interesting things.. were it not for the Montreal Protocols, which banned CFC's in 1987 (celebrated, no doubt, by the celebration of another type of hole on St.Catherines Street..), the whole earth would have been as depleted as the hotle above Antractica by 2060, but they are now calling for a statisticallysignificant recovery by 2024, and pre 1980 levels, where they set the bar, by 2068 worldwide.. the Hole in the South Pole During spring.. gone around 2050...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion
Whew..glad that's over with.. now we have nothing to worry about atmospherically.. wait.. what!?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion
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