CFCs

“Whatever happened with the ozone layer panic, if scientists are so smart?”
We listened to the scientists, and the problem went away.
- Didn't go away, just stopped getting worse at an alarming rate.
  
  Didn't the hole above Australia close again?
  
  No, also the massive SO2 that Mt Pinatubo put into the atmosphere slowly went away. And the CFCs.
  Pinatubo created more sulfur emissions during its eruption than 10 years of all human coal burning.
  And also on top of that we were also wrecking the Ozone.
  Nature can always make our mistakes much much worse.
- It's the same as people using the example of the Y2K bug being a non event. Yeah, because globally trillions of dollars were spent fixing it before it became an event.
- thanks for the tldr
- No
  
  Get that marble brain Reddit-style bs outta here. If you wanna deny, you’re gonna have to come up with a reason that you could be right. Otherwise, we’re just gonna point al laugh at your dumbassery.

Similar with Y2K --- it was only a nothingburger because it was taken seriously, and funded well. But the narrative is sometimes, "yeah lol it was a dud."
- All this hysteria over nuclear weapons is overblown. We've known how to build them for 75 years yet there hasn't been a single one detonated on inhabited American soil. They're harmless
  
  You even dropped a few accidentally and nothing happened! Complete duds these things really
  
  Yeah but not all people live on American soil...
  
  WTF?
  Unless that was sarcasm that I missed... 100's of weapons have been tested on US soil..
- The question is, what will happen in 2038 when y2k happens again due to an integer overflow? People are already sounding the alarm but who knows if people will fix all of the systems before it hits.
  
  It's already been addressed in Linux - not sure about other OSes. They doubled the size of time data so now you can keep using it until after the heat death of the universe. If you're around then.
  
  2038 is approaching super fast and nobody seems to care yet
- I can't remember the name but I think this is some kind of paradox.
  Like the preventative measures we're so effective that they created a perception that there was no risk in the first place.
  
  It's called the prevention paradox: It's when an issue is so severe that it is prevented with proactive action, so no real consequenses are felt so people think it wasn't severe in the first place.
- I wasn't working in the IT field back then, as I was only 16, but as I knew that it'd most likely be my field one day (yup, I was right), I followed this closely due to interest, and applied patches accordingly.
  Everything kept working fine except this one modem I had.
  
  I kinda wish I knew what it was like working on Y2K stuff. It sounds like the most mundane bug to fix, but the problem is that it was everywhere. Which I imagine made it pretty expensive 👀
  
  Most of the y2k problem was custom software, and really old embedded stuff. In my case, all our systems were fine at the OS, and I don’t remember any commercial software we had trouble with, but we had a lot of custom software with problems, as did our partners
  
  And that modem was handling the nuke codes, right?
- “Lol Elon rocket go boom, science isn’t real” is also happening
  Stupid people just think they’re the smartest ones in the room now
  
  Elon musk isn't a scientist, he's a scammer who got lucky. That, and an asshole.
  
  Well considering Elon situation I wouldn't blame anyone for making fun of his idiotic ventures. Also starship is actually dumb and saying "you expected for it to blow up" is something no real scientist would've said unless they were making a bomb.
- Y2K specifically makes no sense though. Any reasonable way of storing a year would use a binary integer of some length (especially when you want to use as little memory as possible). The same goes for manipulations; they are faster, more memory efficient, and easier to implement in binary. With an 8-bit signed integer counting from 1900, the concerning overflows would occur in 2028, not 2000. A base 10 representation would require at least 8 bits to store a two digit number anyway. There is no advantage to a base 10 representation, and there never has been. For Y2K to have been anything more significant than a text formatting issue, a whole lot of programmers would have had to go out of their way to be really, really bad at their jobs. Also, usage of dates beyond 2000 would have increased gradually for decades leading up to it, so the idea it would be any sort of sudden catastrophe is absurd.
  
  The issue wasn't using the dates. The issue was the computer believing it was now on those dates.
  I'm going to assume you aren't old enough to remember, but the "only two digits to represent the year" issue predates computers. Lots of paper forms just gave two digits. And a lot of early computer work was just digitising paper forms.
  
  You're thinking of the problem with modern solutions in mind. Y2K originates from punch cards where everything was stored in characters. To save space only the last 2 digits of the year because back then you didn't need to store the 19 of year 19xx. The technique of storing data stayed the same for a long time despite technology advancing beyond punch cards. The assumption that it's always 19xx caused the Y2K bug because once it overflows to 00 the system doesn't know if it's 1900 or 2000.
  
  With an 8-bit signed integer counting from 1900...
  Some of the computers in question predate standardizing on 8 bits to the byte. You've got a whole post here of bad assumptions about how things worked.
  
  a whole lot of programmers would have had to go out of their way to be really, really bad at their jobs.
  You don't spend much time around them, do you?
  
  You do realize that "counting from 1900" meant storing only the last two digits and just hardcoding the programs to print"19" in front of it in those days? At best, an overflow would lead to 19100, 1910 or 1900, depending on the print routines.
  
  Oh boy you heavily underestimate the amount and level of bad decision in legacy protokoll. Read up in the toppic. the Date was for a loong time stored as 6 decimal numbers.
  
  And then there is PIC 99 in Cobol. In modern languages, it makes no sense, but there is still a lot of really old code around and not everything is twos complement, especially if you do not need the efficiency in memory and calculations.
  
  Look some info on BCD or EBCDIC.

When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
- Y2K is similar. Most people will remember not much happening at all. Lots of people worked hard to solve the problem and prevent disaster.
  
  Was there ever really a threat to begin with? The whole thing sounds like Jewish space lasers to me.
  Edit: Gotta love getting downvoted for asking a question.
- I wonder how many people will see this and not know its a quote from Futurama
- The sysadmin curse (and why you document your actions in a ticketing system).

I literally had this exact exchange with someone last year, when they tried to cast doubt on global warming by comparing it to the ozone. Another person did the same , using acid rain, and I pointed out that the northeast sued the shit out of the Midwest until they cut that shit with the coal fire power plants.
- The Conservative Party led Canadian Government and the Regan-era Republican US Government started working on the US-Canada Air Quality Agreement, which was signed by the George H.W. Bush administration into law in the US (and the Brian Mulroney led Government of Canada).
  That’s right — two Conservative governments identified a problem, listened to their scientists, and enacted a solution to acid rain. And now the problem has virtually disappeared.
  Oh how low Conservatives have fallen on both sides of the border since those days.
  
  I use talking points like these a fair amount with Republicans. Try to get them to think back to when they were leaders in environmental policy. Get back to their roots of environmental stewardship. It seems to have moved the needle slightly.

There were goddamn Nickelodeon phone-a-thons where you pledged to not use cfc products. This shit was serious.
Edit: I just remembered ,they talked about how bad the sun was for kids in Australia, or something.
- Australia and New Zealand do not fuck about with sun safety. Even with the improvements in the ozone layer, our skin cancer rates are still way higher than the rest of the world
  
  New Zealand do not fuck about with sun safety.
  Except we were kicking the can with sun screen regulation until 2022.
  https://comcom.govt.nz/business/your-obligations-as-a-business/product-safety-standards/sunscreen
  https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2022/0004/latest/whole.html
  Until this law, sun screen lotion didn't have to prove that they actually provided the SPF that they claimed.
  
  I'd argue that while we are much more diligent than other countries, and regulations are much stronger. The average person doesn't pay nearly enough attention, and the fact the UV index isn't required to be mentioned on weather reports, or as prominently or more prominently than the temperature, is a big oversight in my opinion.
  I check the UV every time I go outside (other than when it's died down over winter), just as you'd check the temperature, and I think it's wild barely anyone else does.
- The sun is still awful here, the ozone hole is still a thing.
  But thanks world, at least I can go out for a solid 4.5 months of the year without worrying about the sun at all, and 6 of only needing to be somewhat careful. Not too shabby :)

Ah but the Ozone hole is increasing again in no small thanks to China!
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2019-05-23/mystery-ozone-depleting-gas-tracked-to-china/11137546
https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Copernicus/Sentinel-5P/Ozone_hole_goes_large_again
- I don't think it's only thanks to China. I think it is thanks to the whole world, a huge chunk of big companies' manufacturing is outsourced to China.
  
  No.
  The rest of the world’s doing a great job at following through on CFC bans.
  This is entirely on China and China alone. No one is forcing their factories to cut corners and use them. Just the same as plastic rice, gutter oil, poison baby formula, etc.

Imagine if we did this with climate change. Imagine if we tried to switch to renewable energy en masse 20 years ago.
- Problem with that is that in comparison the alternative to CFC was not that more expensive and then a cheaper one was invented shortly after.
  For climate change you basically can double our energy costs and therefore double the cost of almost everything.
  
  Not to seem callous, but the first world could learn to live off of a little less.
  
  But that isn't true anymore, right? Renewables are now way cheaper per produced Watt. And still, we're stuck with people pretending that's not true.
  
  The cost of everything would double?
  ... Oh no...
- like as if we wanted to live

This has since been determined to have tack on benefits in the fight against the climate crisis as well, it's halved the potential growth in global average temperatures by 2100, which cannot be overstated in just how fantastic that is.
We went from everyone being baked alive and having 20 kinds of skin cancer to boot to merely dealing with catastrophic climate change and society changing people migrations the likes of which haven't been documented since the successive eras of steppe invasions into Europe, China, India, and the Middle East.
Out of the fire and into the frying pan.
- I might just be drunk, but that was a very poetic turn of phrase.

#transcription
Matt Walsh
@MattWalshBlog
Remember when they spent years telling us to panic over the hole in the ozone layer and then suddenly just stopped talking about it and nobody ever mentioned the ozone layer
Derek Thompson
@DKThomp
What happened is scientists discovered chlorofluorocarbons were bad for the ozone, countries believed them, the Montreal Protocol was signed, and CFC use fell by 99.7%,l eading to the stabilization of the ozone layer, perhaps the greatest example of global cooperation in history.
- I can read it fine thanks
  
  I’m not sure what your intent was, but you’re coming off as “I don’t want online spaces to be welcoming to people who are visually impaired.”
  
  Do you go around carving stairs into ramps, too?
  
  Believe it or not I don't do it for you
  
  Most programs, such as search features, can't.

And didn't they find a bunch of Chinese factories pumping them out again not long ago?

Imagine that... Believing what scientists say? Who does that?
Grinds teeth and silently screams inside his head
- Same same 😔

Just to be clear, are we sure that the ozone holes are still shrinking?
- As far as im aware the hole in the ozone layer is basically gone
  
  Actually there are signs it's been growing again. Because we forget history so quick.
- The ozone hole size is influenced by the strength of the polar vortex, the Antarctic temperature, and other things in addition to the concentration of CFC molecules. It's barely shrunk, but CFCs are so long-lived that was expected - the critical point is it stopped growing over 20 years ago. I believe they expect to start seeing shrinking within the next decade.
  https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/topics/in-depth/climate-change-mitigation-reducing-emissions/current-state-of-the-ozone-layer
- Looks like it had been expected to heal by 2040, but might also be affected by by climate change - reminder that even when we fix climate change, CO2 stays in the atmosphere over a century. We can only stop making things worse, but it’s your great grand children who stand to really benefit
  
  I was thinking of this paper from 2018:
  ACP - Evidence for a continuous decline in lower stratospheric ozone offsetting ozone layer recovery
  Abstract. Ozone forms in the Earth's atmosphere from the photodissociation of molecular oxygen, primarily in the tropical stratosphere. It is then transported to the extratropics by the Brewer–Dobson circulation (BDC), forming a protective ozone layer around the globe. Human emissions of halogen-containing ozone-depleting substances (hODSs) led to a decline in stratospheric ozone until they were banned by the Montreal Protocol, and since 1998 ozone in the upper stratosphere is rising again, likely the recovery from halogen-induced losses. Total column measurements of ozone between the Earth's surface and the top of the atmosphere indicate that the ozone layer has stopped declining across the globe, but no clear increase has been observed at latitudes between 60° S and 60° N outside the polar regions (60–90°). Here we report evidence from multiple satellite measurements that ozone in the lower stratosphere between 60° S and 60° N has indeed continued to decline since 1998. We find that, even though upper stratospheric ozone is recovering, the continuing downward trend in the lower stratosphere prevails, resulting in a downward trend in stratospheric column ozone between 60° S and 60° N. We find that total column ozone between 60° S and 60° N appears not to have decreased only because of increases in tropospheric column ozone that compensate for the stratospheric decreases. The reasons for the continued reduction of lower stratospheric ozone are not clear; models do not reproduce these trends, and thus the causes now urgently need to be established.
  and this paper from 2023:
  Potential drivers of the recent large Antarctic ozone holes | Nature Communications
  The past three years (2020–2022) have witnessed the re-emergence of large, long-lived ozone holes over Antarctica. Understanding ozone variability remains of high importance due to the major role Antarctic stratospheric ozone plays in climate variability across the Southern Hemisphere. Climate change has already incited new sources of ozone depletion, and the atmospheric abundance of several chlorofluorocarbons has recently been on the rise. In this work, we take a comprehensive look at the monthly and daily ozone changes at different altitudes and latitudes within the Antarctic ozone hole. Following indications of early-spring recovery, the October middle stratosphere is dominated by continued, significant ozone reduction since 2004, amounting to 26% loss in the core of the ozone hole. We link the declines in mid-spring Antarctic ozone to dynamical changes in mesospheric descent within the polar vortex, highlighting the importance of continued monitoring of the state of the ozone layer.

Like he even read the response
- The problem is not if he reads the response, it's that the followers won't or if they do, will just fight it.

TBH “The whole world agreed on something” narrative doesn’t really reflect what happened.
Actually, The Industry dropped using CFC after a cheaper and luckily safer alternative has been discovered right around that time.
- The fact is, most companies are fine to let an existing system run rather than replace it with one that has a cheaper consumable thing, provided they can still get that consumable and the cost of replacing that system is high.
  Basically, corps would have kept buying and using CFCs because replacing the refrigeration system is too costly.
  Not only was an alternative found that was cheaper and safer and almost as good (as effective), but scientists and engineers put in the effort to find ways to adapt existing systems to the new working fluid. All for significantly less than replacing the system.
  Not only was a replacement found, but it was made economically viable for widespread deployment in a very short timeframe; not just having a short development time, but also a very short duration to deploy the new solution to an existing system.
  You're right, that it was cheaper and everything, but most of the time changing the working fluid of a refrigerator/air conditioning unit, will require that the system is replaced. They worked around that. Additionally, you're correct that it was industry that made the change and pushed it to their clients.
  I just want to make sure we recognise the efforts put in by the scientists and engineers that enabled the rapid switch to non-CFC based cooling systems. It's still an amazing achievement IMO, and something that required a remarkable amount of cooperation by people who probably don't cooperate often or at all (and are, in all likelihood, fairly hostile to eachother, most of the time).
  IMO, that's still one of the best examples of global cooperation that anyone could possibly point to. Rarely do we have a problem where there's almost universal consensus on the issue and how to fix it. In this case, there was. That level of cooperation among the people of earth is borderline unparalleled; the only other times we cooperated this well that people would know about are usually negotiations done with the barrel of a gun. Namely the world wars. One group said that we're going to do a thing, another group said nope. It was settled with lives, bullets and bombs, and nearly every person alive was on one side or the other.... Except Sweden, I suppose... And maybe smaller countries that didn't have enough of an army to participate. (I'm sure there's dozens of reasons, but I'm not a historian)
  Without guns, bombs, or even threats, just a presentation of the facts and a proposal for a solution, everyone just .... went along with it.
  To me, that's unprecedented.
- There was a necessary round of nearly all governments on Earth agreeing to fine and extinguish business or even throwing executives on jail if they insisted on using the more expensive alternative.
  Only after that people stopped using CFCs.
  Honestly, some times I wonder if we live in an episode of Captain Planet. Some people look like plain childish cartoon villains.

Conservatives aren't used to the concept of "Problems go away when you do something about them."
They are stuck in the mindset of "The problem will always be with us, so just shame those suffering from it and isolate them so we don't catch their problem."
- To be honest, this is not just conservatives.
  
  Naw, this is literally the conservative mind set. Even if someone doesn't vote for republicans, thinking like this is conservative thinking.

Wtf was that dumbest posting about? He never learned about CFCs in 8th grade high school? Embarrassing
- Matt Walsh is literally the dumbest person on the planet. Most of the people involved with The Daily Wire are cynical little freaks playing a part, Walsh is just a moron.

Matt Walsh be like "What is an Ozone?"
- Must be near the R-Zone.
- It's that one band the numa numa guy got famous for dancing to: https://youtu.be/YnopHCL1Jk8?si=Eaky3c_aYaKBjN0j

There are no stupid takes, just stupid people.

Tell me you are dumb without telling me you are dumb
- Right? Stupid science bitch making up things like "chlorofluorocarbons" and "global cooperation."
  
  the science bitch that invented CFCs also invented Tetra Ethyl Lead fuel additive, "leaded gasoline" was also cleaned up,.. mainly.
  
  But you people will believe anything that science guy says. All he has to do is say stuff like "chloroflurocarboins" and you get a hardon.
- Respectfully, the word should be stupid. Not dumb.They surely did not have a lack of words. They're stupid lol
- I dunno man. Does believing the popular narrative really make you smart? Does disbelieving it really make you dumb? I don't think so.
  
  He doesn't disbelieve, he just doesn't know

Remember when cavemen unga bunga'd about dinosaurs? Whatever happened to those dinosaurs! It's like the Flintstones wasn't actually the ground breaking documentary it was or something!

Remember when everyone was so scared of polio and then all of the sudden we stopped talking about it?🤔
- I remember when no one talked about measles, and now suddenly everyone is. 🤔

Of course it’s Matt Walsh

Matt Walsh, Nazi moron and overall creep, fuck that guy.

You mean, listening to the science and actively working in tandem with that science works? Who knew?

I've always hated this comparison because the two problems are just not the same, at all. CFCs were nowhere near as ubiquitous as fossil hydrocarbons, and CFCs had an essentially drop-in replacement, which fossil fuels do not. There's no non-hydrocarbon fuel that we can just replace for coal, natural gas, gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel, etc. None that I'm aware of, anyway.
- Shame we haven't had an entire century to deal with the problem.
  At least we're taking it seriously, and all agree that it's real.
- If we cared at all about solving the problem, a lot more work would have been spent on developing hybrids/fuel cells, electric vehicles, electrolytic Hydrogen and renewable energy like solar.
  We (chemists) can produce fossil fuels using renewable Hydrogen and a Carbon rich feedstock. Hell the nazis were doing it because of supply issues. Our excuse is that it is harder to do that than it is to drill for oil not that we cant do it.
  We are limited by the amount of renewable energy which again, isnt being ramped up as fast as it could be and needs to be for lack of economic and political willpower.

Good god this psychopath needs to be in hospice, drugged out of their mind.

Okay why the fuck has this been top of my front page for two days
- Lack of new content on lemmy. Go post.
- Because Lemmy is still 1/100th the size of Reddit.
- Lemmy auto sorts by "active" so my responding to you will now keep it at the top of your page for day 3 lol
- Reasons.

Tell me you don't live in NZ without telling me you don't live in NZ

Misleading post, it seems to imply that it helped significantly.

Turns out, that the hole in the ozone layer didn't get repaired. In fact, it's larger than it's ever been and above the Antarctic. Antarctica is currently experiencing a mass die-off of animals. We didn't do shit. This is pure climate change copium.
- Is this true? An article from 2022 indicates things are getting better, just slowly
  Today, the ozone hole still exists, forming every year over Antarctica in the spring. It closes up again over the summer as stratospheric air from lower latitudes is mixed in, patching it up until the following spring when the cycle begins again. But there’s evidence it’s starting to disappear – and recover more or less as expected, says Solomon. Based on scientific assessments, the ozone layer is expected to return to pre-1980 levels around the middle of the century. Healing is slow because of the long lifespan of ozone-depleting molecules. Some persist in the atmosphere for 50 to 150 years before decaying.
  https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220321-what-happened-to-the-worlds-ozone-hole
  
  It's not. I'm guessing they did a Google search, looked at a few misleading article titles, and then decided they were a scientist.
  On average, the hole has been shrinking, but 2023's hole was the 12th biggest on record. The eruption of Hunga-Tonga was thought to be the main factor.
  The mass die-off reference likely refers to penguin chicks dying because climate change is causing sea ice to melt earlier than before. The poor little guys are falling into the ocean and drowning. It's not ozone layer related, though
- Citation: Rectally Sourced Science.
  
  Here you go: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/world-of-change/Ozone
- We definitely did something. It just would have been a lot worse if we didn't. In fact so bad that BBC says the planet would have been "uninhabitable."
  According to some models, the Montreal Protocol and its amendments have helped prevent up to two million cases of skin cancer yearly and avoided millions of cataract cases worldwide.
  Had the world not banned CFCs, we would now find ourselves nearing massive ozone depletion. "By 2050, it's pretty well-established we would have had ozone hole-like conditions over the whole planet, and the planet would have become uninhabitable," says Solomon.
  https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220321-what-happened-to-the-worlds-ozone-hole

Woow it’s impressive how you all follow the narrative. Here is your bone. Good doggie. My god
- Has it occurred to you that sometimes there's actual evidence backing up the things you ridicule?
  You can go measure the acidity of rain in your back yard if you want.
  The sunlight in NZ is far, far harsher than if you go a few thousand kilometres towards the equator, where it should be hotter. We have some of the world's highest rates of skin cancer. Are you implying that crisis actors are faking having skin cancer?
- You don’t think that listening to subject matter experts is a wise way to determine truth? By all means, enlighten us with a more consistent strategy.
- Dunning Kruger
- Yeeeaaahhh its everyone else that’s wrong
- Says the guy who just believes whatever bullshit climate deniers make up. Imagine being so ignorant that you're not aware we stopped using CFCs decades ago and that's why there's no hole in the ozone layer anymore. Fucking moron.
- Do you know what science even is?