
Ozone: The Earth's protective shield is repairing - pseudolus
https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-46107843
======
A2017U1
If only we could get such swift global action on greenhouse emissions. Both
problems are essentially the same yet the difference in action couldn't be
wider.

~~~
pseudolus
One of the significant differences is that in the 1980s when the issue of
ozone depletion was being confronted, politics was not as polarized. One of
the great successes of those arguing for action was recruiting Conservative
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, a trained chemist, as an advocate

[https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/energy/2016/10/will-
ma...](https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/energy/2016/10/will-margaret-
thatcher-and-ronald-reagan-be-unlikely-saviours-world-climate)

~~~
hyperpallium
_Dr._ Margaret Thatcher

EDIT I must apologise to my parent, and to HN in general. Her thesis was
undergraduate:

> ... four-year Chemistry Bachelor of Science degree, specialising in X-ray
> crystallography under the supervision of Dorothy Hodgkin. Her dissertation
> was on the structure of the antibiotic gramicidin.
> [https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Thatcher](https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Thatcher)

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Surely the Prime Minister title wins out?

Actually, that’s an interesting question: since “Dr” usually replaces “Mr” for
a man, would a male president with a doctorate be “Dr President”?

~~~
jedberg
Probably not. President would take precedent. See Chancellor Merkel for a good
example (she has a PhD).

~~~
thaumasiotes
I was under the impression that German titles stacked up rather than
overriding one another, like "Herr Professor Doktor". Is that wrong?

~~~
thg
Generally that's correct, albeit pretty much only used in writing. There are,
however, political titles for which, to my knowledge, that does not apply.
Minister, Chancellor and President (of the BRD) should all supersede a PhD
title.

~~~
ralfd
Bundeskanzlerin Dr. Angela Merkel is the official formal title.

See the header here: [https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-
de/service/bulletin/rede...](https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-
de/service/bulletin/rede-von-bundeskanzlerin-dr-angela-merkel-1122448)

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jillesvangurp
During the eighties, when I was young, the river Rhine in the Netherlands was
a very polluted river where fish had all but disappeared. Trees in forests
were dying because of acid rain. The ozone layer was shrinking and exposing
people to lethal levels of UV. Those were scary problems. Now the Rhine has
salmon swimming in it. Trees seem to have mostly recovered and the ozone layer
is also recovering.

People argued that these problems couldn't be fixed, that they would be too
expensive to fix, etc. But now there is good progress. That gives me hope
about other problems on this planet.

My view of addressing climate change because of global warming is that it is
going to require a bit more effort but that it is fundamentally just as
doable. Better still, we are actually doing it. The question is are we doing
it fast enough and are going about it as efficient as we could. People sure
seem to waste a lot of time defending the status quo, arguing for inaction, or
questioning whether there even is a problem to solve.

The core problem as I see it is addressing our energy needs and kicking off a
second industrial revolution in the process. That's exactly what is happening
right now. For me that prospect is the main goal. Saving our planet is a nice
side effect though.

If we solve the technical problem of producing as much clean energy as we
could possibly need, we could all have air-conditioning in our houses, terrace
heaters in our gardens in the winter, irrigate our deserts with desalinated
water from the sea, supply our industries with clean carbo hydrates produced
straight from the air, etc. These things are all very energy intensive.

Demand for energy is outstripping our ability to conserve it. Therefore
solving clean plentiful energy is key. It's the only thing that will get us
results.

------
delibes
But the BBC reported earlier this year that somebody is cheating and making
CFC-11 - banned by the Montreal Protocol.

[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-
environment-44138984](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-44138984)

~~~
kaybe
It's home insulation production in China. The culprits are fully aware it's
illegal, but China has some problems in getting compliance to its own laws.

[https://content.eia-
global.org/posts/documents/000/000/761/o...](https://content.eia-
global.org/posts/documents/000/000/761/original/Blowing-
It_CFC11_Report_EIA.pdf?1531089183)

~~~
EGreg
You would think China with all that control over businesses and their
population could prevent people from polluting their rivers with plastic and
spewing it into the Pacific Ocean!

~~~
Retric
Systemic corruption makes the rule of law "difficult" to enforce. And by
difficult I mean this is a feature not a bug for the huge interconnected web
of power that actually runs the country.

PS: The fact China is not a democracy which has some unpleasant results:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs)

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
All it takes is one party member (out of 80M) lodging a complaint with the
central committee.

~~~
jessaustin
Just like USA would be a very different place if 300M people had a vote that
mattered, China would be a very different place if 80M people had a complaint
mechanism that mattered. We'll never hear of the city clerk who complains
about the excesses of the latest giant project imposed upon local citizens.
There are probably hundreds of those people, and they have all been taken care
of. (Most of them in standard bureaucratic politicking fashion: "she said this
terrible thing about Xi" "there is corruption in his office" etc. Kicking down
is a great way to move up, when an official a couple rungs up approved the
project and wants the complaints to go away.)

------
dqpb
I'm not an expert, but repairing/healing seems like a misleading analogy for
what's happening

~~~
InclinedPlane
Ozone is produced naturally, the ozone layer will return itself to pre-
industrial ozone concentrations simply by leaving it alone. You can call it
regeneration or repair or healing or whatever you like.

------
mohaine
Ok, now that refrigerates are ozone safe can we get all the regulations
removed from them? At least for the safe ones?

Right now if you don't reclaim the R-134A from your car AC or fridge it is a
$27k fine while you can buy cans of it to blow out your keyboard. Same goes
for propane. This makes the new fridges that use propane almost impossible to
work on since nobody has the reclamation equipment for R290.

~~~
tolien
R-134A has a global warming potential of 1550 over 100 years [1], i.e. about
45 times more effective than methane, so while it's not eating the ozone layer
you probably shouldn't be spraying it around by the tonne either.

Edit: and CO2 has a GWP of 1 (as the reference point for GWP), so R-134A is
_way_ more effective than that.

1:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential#Value...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential#Values)

~~~
mohaine
In a perfect world, requiring reclamation would help. In the real world it
just pushes this off to gray market recycler. They will come by and pick up
your broken fridge for free for the recycle value but most will just vent the
refrigerant no mater what. They just claim it was zero pressure when they
found it. Hooking up a reclamation machine and paying for the refrigerant
disposal would take all the profit out of this service.

So the fine mostly just stops the fridge from being worked on by qualified
professionals. Perfectly fixable items are going in the trash because nobody
wants to buy dedicated equipment for every refrigerant used. R134A is common
enough to make the equipment worthwhile to own but not so much for propane and
other less common refrigerants.

~~~
tolien
Agreed down thread that after the fact enforcement action doesn’t seem like a
sensible way to do this but political reality is what it is and I expect most
of these regulations were intended to encourage people to use non-ozone
depleting refrigerants with their global warming potential a problem for
another day.

> Hooking up a reclamation machine and paying for the refrigerant disposal
> would take all the profit out of this service.

Fixing this (Make it cheaper to reclaim? Make the refrigerant more valuable?
Some combination of the two?) seems like the way to go rather than just
removing all the regulations and hoping for the best.

------
patrickg_zill
Any truth to the theory that the banned refrigerants were about to lose patent
protection while the "better" ones still had plenty of years left on their
patent?

------
eximius
But let's not mess it up again, please?

------
xavierstein
My father-in-law firmly believes that the hole in the ozone was caused by
space shuttle reentry, and that's why it's patching now, and also that CFCs
couldn't possibly make the hole because they are heavier than air. Does anyone
have the data to refute these claims?

~~~
decebalus1
Ideally the person who claims something needs to provide the data to back it
up.

My father-in-law doesn't believe that the moon landings took place. All the
data in the world cannot convince him otherwise. The only good strategy in the
face of these types of claims is to go up the crazy scale. For example when he
tells me that the moon landings didn't happen, I tell him he's naive it he
thinks the moon exists. The moon was blown up in the 50's due to a nuclear
test gone wrong and what we're seeing now is an artificial projection.

~~~
mrfusion
Does that strategy work?

~~~
flukus
Considering the amount of "moon hoaxer" videos on youtube (no I'm not joking,
go look) I think it might be counter-productive.

