Ozone and climate change in the southern hemisphere: Is this further cause for alarm?

Question

http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080429/full/news.2008.787.html

The climate system of the planet is nonlinear. Unfortunately the nonlinearities are not in our favor, as it appears that the nonlinear feedbacks are all amplifying, rather than damping, climate change.

oh well.

http://www.theonion.com/content/magazine/a_statement_followed_by_a

Answer 1

whats alarming me is that most people have trouble understanding non linear behavior or feedback in any system, even stuff that directly affects them (e.g. mortgage 'crisis').

ho hum.

Answer 2

Nature

As the world marks 20 years since the introduction of the Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer, Nature has learned of experimental data that threaten to shatter established theories of ozone chemistry. If the data are right, scientists will have to rethink their understanding of how ozone holes are formed and how that relates to climate change.

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.

“This must have far-reaching consequences,” Rex says. “If the measurements are correct we can basically no longer say we understand how ozone holes come into being.” What effect the results have on projections of the speed or extent of ozone depletion remains unclear.

Other groups have yet to confirm the new photolysis rate, but the conundrum is already causing much debate and uncertainty in the ozone research community. “Our understanding of chloride chemistry has really been blown apart,” says John Crowley, an ozone researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Chemistry in Mainz, Germany.

“Until recently everything looked like it fitted nicely,” agrees Neil Harris, an atmosphere scientist who heads the European Ozone Research Coordinating Unit at the University of Cambridge, UK. “Now suddenly it’s like a plank has been pulled out of a bridge.”

Answer 3

The ozone hole at the poles is the way the magnetic field is formed ,so there is a hold at the poles as all the magnetic lines pass through. The particle flow is in toward the earth. The CFC has nothing to do with it.

About climate change and I am 77 and we get closet but it always balanced out.

Answer 4

The usual suspects will stop ignoring this latest warning and be galvanized to action: because?

We live in a fractal world, man: chaos?

Eventually we'll flip to a new attractor: what will we do then?

Hey, this is fun!

Answer 5

Lets all go back to CFC's and see if we can blow the ozone hole open again.

I do miss good old Freon.