Mr/Ms Topless, do you actually have any information to add other than "I don't believe it"? Because you've already said that. There was no particular reason to say it again.

 

My personal belief that a healthy dose of cynicism is essential in all forms of life and climate science isn't any different.
It is even more important when watching anything on the news these days.
A steady state condition is not news, only a transition is reported.
so your right, the ozone hole is still there.

and now that you've thrown the teaser out there, please elaborate.

 

The "Ozone Hole" phenomenon has been one of the great success stories of science, policy, and public acceptance of the past 50 years or so.

Research (by many of the same individuals who are working the science problem now -- one of the most prominent of whom, Susan Solomon, was the lead author on the science part of last summer's IPCC report) showed that CFCs were acting as catalysts on cloud ice particles to destroy ozone in the Antarctic stratosphere. The Montreal Protocol outlawed CFCs, and other, replacement chemicals (some of which, it turns out, weren't much better; but those have now been replaced as well) were invented; the situation is in the process of healing itself. The time scale for these processes is decades, though, so it's not yet fixed, but it's getting better and there's not the concern about its growing that there was before.

To suggest that it "has become the bastard child of scientists and environmentalists alike" is not only uninformed and ignorant, it's obnoxiously insulting to the people who fixed the problem -- again, many of the same people who are working the climate problem now.

For me, it's time to use the "Ignore" button. HPH

 

Dr. Cloud, by all means, please hit your ignore button. I don't know how you can come up with a stupid statement that my statement was ignorant and uninformed and obnoxiously insulting. I have been part of building much of the equipment responsible for much of what has been done in the area of ozone measurement equipment. My point is that why is there no follow up on an ongoing basis being published by the mainstream media?I would think that if the problem was solved they would be blowing the horn that you are now that it is a great success. I can't believe how ridiculous when people get offended over comments that are not being made to be offensive. Here is a link to an article I found online that makes me question the findings of man-made climate change. I have not purported to be an expert such as you in this area. If this article is hogwash, as it very well might be, please let me know why so I can rethink my position. In other words, I am looking for someone to convince me. Take a chill pill buddy.
Here is the link:
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/ne...se,176495.shtml

 

[QUOTE=Budman05,May 8 2008, 05:06 AM]I believe it is only logical to try to be "green" whenever reasonable, but not if the pain outweighs the gain.

 

1) Mainstream media is not where one should look for science reporting.
2) Hole is expected to be there for decades as it slowly heals. What are you expecting, a story every week: "Ozone hole still there"?
3) You can monitor the Antarctic ozone at NASA's TOMS site if you like. http://toms.gsfc.nasa.gov/
4) How was this supposed to be relevant to climate change anyway?

 

The ozone hole still happens most years. Here's a NASA site with pictures for this past winter:

http://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/

I would guess the reason it's not being reported in mainstream press any more is because it's not growing any more - likely because of the CFC ban - so it's not sensational enough to be worth publishing.

As for global warming, you can find a bunch of temperature charts over various time scales here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record

To me, the fact that the rate of increase over the past century has been so much faster than ever before is what's convincing, but look at them and decide for yourself. Be careful when reading them - the first three have the present day on the right, and the others have the present day on the left.

 

There's a new paper in Nature with simulations focusing on the next couple of decades that suggests (despite continuing greenhouse-gas increases) that warming will slow down (or maybe level off or even reverse a little) for a few years. This has to do with internal "natural" variations in oceanic circulation and heat storage. Because the global oceanic circulation has time scales of several decades, its effects can be felt for years and years.

Of course, there will be a hue and cry about how the science of global warming is all wrong, etc., etc.; what will really be interesting, though, is whether this prediction verifies. If so, it will be one of the first ever climate forecasts on the scale of several years, and it has the potential to be quite exciting. HPH

 

as a hardware geek in the supercomputing space the part that I think is kind of cool is the computational load that goes into creating those simulations.
How many petaflop/months go into to generating that data?

 

^ Climate "modeling" (which was what we called in its early stages) was always at the forefront of supercomputer usage, along with the nukes at the weapons labs and a few other esoteric things. Now, it's "simulation" (because there are fewer compromises and more computer power), and it's still at the forefront.

I haven't kept up with what's required to do the runs these days, but they've begun using ensemble simulations not only of one model run several times (with varying initial conditions) but of different models using the same forcing scenarios, all at much higher resolution. The newer computers allow this. NCAR in Boulder just installed a 75 teraflop/s machine that will be for climate almost all of the time, but it's no where near #1 (which, as of last November, is the IBM Blue Gene system at Livermore, 478 T-flop/s or so).

The petaflop/s machine that's going in at NCSA (which might make the June list) will undoubtedly be used for a variety of things, including climate simulations -- as big computing has matured, more applications have arisen. But climate is still a big consumer. HPH

[teraflop/s = Trillion Floating Point Operations per Second;
petaflop/s = 1000 teraflop/s -- this is the next big threshold and will make headlines. A high-end home system can make perhaps a gigaflop/s, or a billion.]