I recently read an article on ozone depletion and wondered if by reducing our carbon footprint would assit the curing process we need to repair ozone damage? I see the line between ozone damage and global warming as blurred, but that is because I don’t understand the separation.
Mulligan
They’re basically two completely separate problems. We’ve stopped most of the things we were doing that caused the ozone hole, and it seems to be slowly but surely getting better. We have not yet solved the carbon dioxide problem, though.
I remember in the early nineties, the two subjects were often confused. They were usually discussed together and it was common that people thought they were related. The CFC’s are greenhouse gases, but are in such small concentration that I doubt they have much effect.
You might also have heard intentional confusion between the two.
In the case of the coal industry, there was a lot of negative publicity generated by the acid rain problem caused mostly by sulfur in the coal. More recently, with the carbon footprint problem, which is entirely separate, the coal industry has been putting out advertisements making the point that they know how to eliminate THE (sulfur) PROBLEM. It looks to me like they are trying to confuse people, in a sort of bait-and-switch scheme, making people think that whatever the problem was with coal it’s fixed now. Note that getting the carbon out of coal is a much uglier problem than getting the sulfur out; coal is mostly carbon, which is why people burn it in the first place.
Global Climate Change is presumably simply associated with radical changes in local rainfall (etc.) / sea level / storm intensity. Whether or not Man is the ultimate cause of the changes.
Ozone Layer Depletion is simply associated with increased UV-B arriving at Earth’s surface. Several contaminants have been tied to such depletion, primarily water vapor and chlorine / bromine. Some Man-sourced molecules have been detected in the upper atmosphere with the expected payload of chlorine and / or bromine, which the Sun will sever and put to work.
Carbon Footprint is indicative of having a Green source of fuel, so that there is net zero effect on oxygen reduction. Ozone is made from oxygen, as you’ll recall. Additionally, plants tend also to reduce water vapor in the air (or at least meter it out more slowly).
Emissions of water vapor, and reductions in oxygen at Earth’s surface has a fairly minor effect, since there are a lot of other processes that have similar and / or competing effects. Much more direct effects for aircraft, since they fly very close to the ozone layer. Be interesting to see what reduced air traffic has on UV-B transmission for these several months…:dubious: