
Whatever Happened to the Hole in the Ozone Layer? - jaybol
http://www.livescience.com/environment/Whatever-Happened-to-the-Hole-in-the-Ozone-Layer-100505.html
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JeffJenkins
Articles like this remind me of a website idea I had: web-wide mostly human
curated collections of articles on something, tracking the progress of
something over time and giving a summary. I feel like it's too easy to see
something interesting that you'd like to follow but then not have any
reasonable way to do so. You can do things like Google Alerts, but you need to
choose the right keywords and would probably get a lot of false-positives.

(My example is always an article I read about a decade ago about mouth
bacteria which caused no or minimal cavities but could also overpower the
normal bacteria, which if introduced would make it so you virtually never
needed to go to the dentist)

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tocomment
I'd like to take this one step further and actually hold people who make big
claims accountable. So part of the proposed website could have members
actually contact the scientists (or journalists) every 5 years and find out if
they're meeting they're predictions and if not, why not.

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ihodes
That's what Long Now's <http://www.longbets.org/> is for :)

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thefool
I'm pretty sure people just don't know what to do about it. Those tons of
aresoles that people released in the past decades are now in the ozone layer,
and they act as catalysts for the decomposition reaction from ozone to o2,
changing the equilibrium constant while essentially not being affected.

Unless people figure out some way to eat up whats already been released, there
really isn't anything about it that merits news, other than the idea that as
many people as possible should know.

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DrSprout
>Those tons of aresoles

I initially read that as "those tons of arse-holes." Sort of half a Freudian
slip?

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rm-rf
"Closing the ozone hole actually speeds up the melting of the polar ice caps,
according to a 2009 study from Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research."

Unintended consequence?

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compay
Down here in Argentina we haven't forgotten about it at all. Tourists heading
to the far south in the summer are often cautioned to wear lots of sunblock
because it's so easy to get sunburned there.

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tokenadult
Really? An article I read back when the ozone hole was a big news story
pointed out that at high latitudes, the sun angle is so low that sunburn is
quite unlikely, ozone or no ozone. What are ultraviolet radiation measurements
in populated places in the extreme south of Argentina compared to, say,
measurements in tropical Central America?

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compay
Well, I don't know about the measurements - I'm just an ignorant programmer,
not a climatologist. :)

But AFAIK you can get sunburnt in extreme latitudes, ozone or no ozone in
fact.

[http://arcticglass.blogspot.com/2006/04/bedroom-
view-938-pm_...](http://arcticglass.blogspot.com/2006/04/bedroom-
view-938-pm_13.html)
[http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/10/dayint...](http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/10/dayintech_1009)

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chancho
Not sure but it probably involves Christopher Lambert, Sean Connery, Virginia
Madson, Michael Ironside and John C. McGinley, i.e the greatest movie cast
_ever assembled._

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jacquesm
You forgot Bruce Willis.

