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Levels of banned CFCs rising

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Re: Levels of banned CFCs rising

#81

Post by silisili »

londons_explore wrote: post #54
hammock wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The collective annual warming effect of these five chemicals on the planet is equivalent to the emissions produced by a small country like Switzerland. Why is warming effect what matters here? During the original CFC crisis, it was the hole in the ozone layer we were more worried about.

People have become used to the thin ozone layer. In much of the world, you now can't stay outside all day without getting sunburn. There are not many reports of sunburn from 100 years ago. I haven't managed to find any measurements or even estimates of what UV levels at ground level were before we started making CFC's - it seems we didn't think to measure it! Feel sorry for all the animals and plants for whom suncrea…

I'm going to politely call bullhicky on this statement. Sunburns have existed for much longer than 100 years - in fact, the first modern/commercial sunscreen was invented almost 100 years ago. Cursory searching shows that Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, etc had different methods of attempting sunscreen.

Is the sun worse now than then? Maybe, probably. But it's borderline alarmist to just declare sunburns are a recent phenomena.

Re: Levels of banned CFCs rising

#82

Post by pasabagi »

I seem to remember the last time this happened the culprit was discovered to be people stealing CFC-containing waste tars from the factories they worked at, then selling them on for use in bitumen roads.

Iirc, CFCs are a unintended byproduct of a lot of industrial organic chemistry that uses chlorine - so there's an unfortunate mismatch of incentives between factories, which wish to reduce costs, politicians that want to reduce costs, and thus regulation and/or regulatory enforcement, and people who don't want a nice new melanoma.

Re: Levels of banned CFCs rising

#83

Post by anonym29 »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #68
rcme wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's pretty clear that the only two outcomes of this scenario are societal destruction via climate catastrophe or we find a way to cleanly 1000x our energy production.

> find a way to cleanly 1000x our energy production. Have you heard of our lord and savior Nuclear Fission? We should build a shitload of restores all over the place.

We're making important strides on fusion too, which makes fission look like a waste of radiological material, in comparison.

Re: Levels of banned CFCs rising

#84

Post by outworlder »

londons_explore wrote: post #70
outworlder wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People have become used to the thin ozone layer. In much of the world, you now can't stay outside all day without getting sunburn. There are not many reports of sunburn from 100 years ago. So are you saying we evolved skin melanin production from UV radiation for no reason whatsoever? People that live in the desert used to (and still do) cover themselves with clothing just because of fashion standards? Sunburn has…

Romans were believed to have a 'pale white' skin. They lived in Rome, and while there are records of sunshades (Velarium), it doesn't seem they were common. For example, the colosseum, a place people might stay many hours, had only 30% coverage. I don't think someone with similar skin would last long in Rome in the sun today...

> A strong distinction in skin color is frequently seen in the portrayal of men and women in Ancient Rome. Since women in Ancient Rome were traditionally expected to stay inside and out of the sun, they were usually quite pale; whereas men were expected to go outside and work in the sun, so they were usually deeply tanned

Those commoners sometimes wore hats (pileus)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_in_ancient_Roman_...

There are also descriptions of treatments for sunburn.

There's no doubt that the ozone layer depletion increases the amount of UV light that we receive. Sometimes dramatically(very location dependent). But it's not like people could just toast in the sun all day without protection and not get burned.

Re: Levels of banned CFCs rising

#85

Post by barkingcat »

londons_explore wrote: post #70
outworlder wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People have become used to the thin ozone layer. In much of the world, you now can't stay outside all day without getting sunburn. There are not many reports of sunburn from 100 years ago. So are you saying we evolved skin melanin production from UV radiation for no reason whatsoever? People that live in the desert used to (and still do) cover themselves with clothing just because of fashion standards? Sunburn has…

Romans were believed to have a 'pale white' skin. They lived in Rome, and while there are records of sunshades (Velarium), it doesn't seem they were common. For example, the colosseum, a place people might stay many hours, had only 30% coverage. I don't think someone with similar skin would last long in Rome in the sun today...

People also had much lower life expectancies. I don't think it's useful to say that because the people in antiquity didn't have sun protection they were stronger or somehow immune to sunburns ... maybe they just died before living long enough for it to matter.

Or maybe they all died from cancers of all kinds, just not categorized as such, or died by murder / wars before cancer became an issue.

Re: Levels of banned CFCs rising

#86

Post by eloff »

morsch wrote: post #76
eloff wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but the point is the danger from the warming contribution is less than the danger from an ozone hole, so why focus on the warming? Unless the ozone depletion is below the recovery rate.

The combined emissions of CFC-13, CFC-112a, CFC-113a, CFC-114a and CFC-115 increased from 1.6 ± 0.2 to 4.2 ± 0.4 ODP-Gg yr-1 (CFC-11-equivalent ozone-depleting potential) between 2010 and 2020. The anticipated impact of these emissions on stratospheric ozone recovery is small. However, ongoing emissions of the five CFCs of focus may negate some of the benefits gained under the Montreal Protocol if they continue to ri…

Thanks, that makes sense now.

Re: Levels of banned CFCs rising

#87

Post by anonym29 »

VLM wrote: post #72
nluken wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean what do you propose western nations do? Nothing? Yeah stupid measures like removing straws from restaurants make 0 difference, but pushing for more fuel efficient vehicles and cleaner sources of electricity seems like a worthwhile effort without much QoL sacrifice. Green infrastructure (i.e. reducing car dependence) also seems to improve quality of life in many places, so I would argue we should be trying to d…

Not every culture values virtue signaling as much as the current regime in the west; performative acts are not necessarily going to influence other cultures such as China, etc.

I agree. China is either going to require us to find a real diplomatic solution, or get so good at producing technology that removes carbon from the environment sustainably, at scale, that we can simply suck up other countries' excess carbon. Either way, these will be expensive and the political will for such solutions is probably not here in our current political system. I commented further down about needing to address political corruption first and foremost (removing "lobbyists", overturning CU, etc) - I think this will be an important step in producing a political system that will even allow us to effectively address climate change in the first place.

Re: Levels of banned CFCs rising

#88

Post by tzs »

anonym29 wrote: post #12
brianwawok wrote: post #3

Why can it not be countries that don't care just using CFCs still?

China is mentioned as having been a likely culprit in the past. I don't understand why Westerners are so keen to make major sacrifices to quality of life in the name of fighting climate change when nothing we do will make a statistically significant impact in the long run with major population centers like China, India, and Nigeria continuing to grow more wealthy with rapidly increasing demand for reliable, 24/7 ener…

For whatever upper limit we finally decide we must keep warming under there will be a corresponding total amount of greenhouse gases that can be in the atmosphere without pushing warming past that limit.

Since the atmosphere does not care about arbitrary man-made boundaries it makes no sense to do an unweighted comparison of the emissions of different countries when trying to decide which countries are emitting too much and need to cut back and which countries are using less than their fair share and can still expand.

One way to see this is to look at what happens when a country splits in two. With an unweighted comparison for determining shares any country that is using more than its share could split into smaller countries. The union of those smaller countries would still be emitting at least as much as before but it would move the finger to point at someone else.

The sensible comparison is to weight by population, with adjustments for trade to account for countries outsourcing their emissions to others.

India is around #130 in emissions per capita. Nigeria is around #170. They are both currently way below their fair share. If India and Nigeria as part of growing more wealthy needed to increase their emissions to the same level as Brazil, that could be offset by the US cutting emission by a mere 10%.

Re: Levels of banned CFCs rising

#89

Post by scythe »

anonym29 wrote: post #12
brianwawok wrote: post #3

Why can it not be countries that don't care just using CFCs still?

China is mentioned as having been a likely culprit in the past. I don't understand why Westerners are so keen to make major sacrifices to quality of life in the name of fighting climate change when nothing we do will make a statistically significant impact in the long run with major population centers like China, India, and Nigeria continuing to grow more wealthy with rapidly increasing demand for reliable, 24/7 ener…

>China has been infamous for decades for not even having reliable currency data, what on earth makes us think they're even collecting (let alone honestly sharing) reliable data on CO2, let alone HFCs and CFCs, beyond willful naïvety, irrational optimism, and quasi-religious climate dogma demanding ideological conformance?

IR spectroscopy from satellite data.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030147972...

Re: Levels of banned CFCs rising

#90

Post by anonym29 »

jjoonathan wrote: post #64
anonym29 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that pointing out problems in complex systems without proposing a solution is ultimately indifferent from eloquent bitching, which I can certainly be fairly accused of. That said, what the west is currently doing to address climate change - analogous to cheering for the people trying to push a derailed 130-ton freight car back onto the rail tracks with unassisted manpower alone - is not a solution either…

If you think that nothing we are doing could possibly help, you are ignoring the power of exponentials and economies of scale. Besides, a planet with colossal amounts of solar/wind/battery/nuclear production capacity left over from a developed world ramp is in a much better place to help the developing world than one without. > stop wasting energy and thought on that and start diverting it to actual solutions I thoug…

To be clear, it's not that I think nothing we're currently doing helps, it's that I think everything we're currently doing is grossly insufficient.
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