Religulous

[iceaura]

Just picking one bit of flack out of the cloud:

CFC molecules are 4 to 8 times heavier than air. You can pour the stuff on the ground, where it will "pool" in the lowest depression and be eaten up by soil bacteria. A very small fraction will find their way on eddies, and comprise a minor, minor fraction of the chloride in the atmosphere.

That is almost irrelevant to the behavior of CFCs as released by evaporating refrigerant and other sources.

That is not how mixtures of gases at ordinary atmospheric temperatures behave. Your intuition about "heavier" overlooks thermal energy, viscosity, and density considerations, and presumes very small things immersed in a heated gas will behave according to naive intuition about larger things subjected to the pull of gravity - a comparatively weak influence at that scale.

CO2 is heavier than air. Oxygen is heavier than air. Quartz is heavier than air. Sulphur dioxide. Nitrogen dioxide. All heavier than air. Molecules of all these things will mix with the air column and disperse from point sources in the Southern Hemisphere into the upper atmosphere over the North Pole. They will not simply drop out and be eaten by soil bacteria, and neither will CFCs.

But we need not depend on intuition or argument. Direct measurements in the stratosphere of the Southern Hemisphere found CFCs in significant quantity - enough to explain the newly enlarged and severe ozone depletion also observed.

Continuing:

This "hole" is an annual occurrence and was first noted in 1956. Before CFCs were in common use.

Bullshit. The particularly severe and startling reduction now referred to as a "hole" was not observed prior to the 1970s. http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/met/jds/ozone/history.html

The oceans provide 600 million tons of chloride annually. Volcanic activity produces several more million, depending on severity of periodic eruptions (One eruption in 1813 spit out 213 million tons). At the height of CFC production we were contributing 1.1 million.

So? Chloride is not CFCs. All chloride compounds are not created equal, and most have little chance of surviving long enough to get into the stratosphere over Antarctica. CFCs were created in the first place because they are very durable - they don't break down quickly in the presence of water, etc. That's how they end up so high and so far from home, and why they make such dangerous catalysts- they can break down hundreds of ozone molecules while remaining themselves unharmed.

But all of this is merely to illustrate something: there's a consistent difference between the environmentalists and the religionists (considered separately), and that difference is respect for factual reality. If an environmentalist discovers that there are no CFCs way up in the air, they will look elsewhere for explanations of ozone depletion. What are we to say of people who accept a naive argument that CFCs are heavy, conclude they cannot be floating up into the stratosphere, and then simply reject the findings of people who sampled the upper atmosphere and found them?

Thisis what Maher complains of, in his low-key movie - not spirituality, not passion, not depth of feeling, but rejection of discovery, denial of circumstance, willful ignorance of a wonderful world.

btw: for a more technical analysis (and further sources) of every one of swivel's points about CFCs, as first compounded in a book published in IIRC '93, here: http://home.att.net/~rpuchalsky/sci_env/dixy_1.txt

 

[swivel]

Continuing: Bullshit. The particularly severe and startling reduction now referred to as a "hole" was not observed prior to the 1970s. http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/met/jds/ozone/history.html

You have your facts wrong. The "hole" was first discovered by Gordon Dobson of Oxford University. Probably why the unit of measure for ozone is a "Dobson Unit". His first report was in 1956 and he released his findings. When he noted the same "anomaly" in 1957 he concluded that it was actually a natural phenomenon.

In 1958 Rigaud and Leroy described the "hole" in their own paper and attributed it to Polar Vortex's. They also noted that the recovery of the "hole" is "sharp and complete".

Just as a Christian usually does not know the Bible very well, you do not seem to know the very first thing about environmental sciences. This is not meant as an insult, just an observation. To get something this critical wrong calls into question every other argument you bring up, for instance comparing the weight of CO2 to CCl2F2.

You also seem to be making what I like to call the "Google Fallacy". By searching for what you wish to prove, you are only presented with the things that confirm your bias. There are tens of thousands of websites that proclaim CFC's to be "ozone killers" and millions that say Jesus gave his life to absolve our sins. Every one of them are wrong.

Go look up Dobson. Learn something about the Ozone layer. Peace.

 

[iceaura]

You have your facts wrong. The "hole" was first discovered by Gordon Dobson of Oxford University. Probably why the unit of measure for ozone is a "Dobson Unit". His first report was in 1956 and he released his findings. When he noted the same "anomaly" in 1957 he concluded that it was actually a natural phenomenon.

What Dobson discovered in 1956 was not the severe depletion first identified in the mid-1980s, but simply lower levels of ozone in the Antarctic as compared with the Arctic at that time of year.

The Arctic has also suffered serious and seasonal ozone depletion, btw, from its 50s and 60s levels. The cause appears to be CFCs and related compounds.

You have your facts wrong

Not as wrong as someone who asserts CFCs are too heavy to mix in the air column, and cannot travel to the Southern Hemisphere's stratosphere, and are in any case too small in quantity (compared with other, natural chlorines) to have much effect.

Because there they are, y'know? In significant quantity.

You also seem to be making what I like to call the "Google Fallacy". By searching for what you wish to prove, you are only presented with the things that confirm your bias

And how is it that I persuade Google to present only confirmation of my biases? I Google on your suggested keywords (Gordon Dobson ozone hole) and what pops up but this:
http://www.wunderground.com/education/ozone_skeptics.asp

- - - For example, numerous critics of the ozone hole discovery (e.g., Singer, 1989, Bailey, 1993; Bast et. al., 1994) claimed that Professor G.M.B. Dobson had measured an ozone hole in 1956 in the Antarctic, and thus an Antarctic ozone hole was a normal natural occurrence. This myth arose from a misinterpretation of an out-of-context quotation from a review article (Dobson, 1968), where he mentioned that when springtime ozone levels over Halley Bay were first measured, he was surprised to find that they were about 150 Dobson Units below springtime levels in the Arctic. The skeptics repeatedly refer to "an ozone hole 150 Dobson Units below normal" that was discovered in 1957, when in fact the levels discovered in 1957 were normal for Antarctica. A trip to the British Antarctic Survey's web site will confirm that no such ozone hole was measured in the 1950s. Another myth the skeptics repeat states that a French scientist found an Antarctic ozone hole in 1958 (Bailey, 1993). There were measurements in 1958 that found large ozone loss in the Antarctic, but these measurement have been found to be false, due to instrument error. A study in Science magazine (Newman, 1994) concluded, "There is no credible evidence for an ozone hole in 1958."

The internet is full of garbage. That does not mean the garbage can't be filtered, in various ways. For example, if I ran into a Google reference site that informed me evaporating CFCs would fall to the ground and not mix with the air column, or that long-lived gases released into the air in the Northern Hemisphere would not travel to the Southern Hemisphere, I would dismiss that site as unreliable based on prior knowledge of gas mixing and some familiarity with global wind and weather patterns.

And that's where the large difference between the fundies in general and the environmentalists in general comes in. Facts derail environmentalists. They have little or no effect on fundies.