On Fri, Dec 07, 2012 at 06:48:15AM -0500, Roger Clough wrote: > > I'm just as eager to clean up the atmosphere of pollution > by the products of fossil fuel burning, as well as to stop global warming or > climate change as the next guy, but there is considerable doubt > by many (including me) that these changes are due to man. > The Vostok ice corps data shows that there have been periodic > changes in CO2 for the last quarter or half million years. > > Now the union of concerned scientists is raising a ruckus > about depletion of the ozone layer over the (south) pole. > > Ozone absorbs ultraviolet light, so its size is monitored. > The ozone hole can cause skin cancer etc - but ozone > only absorbs 1 % of the sun's energy, so it is unlikely to > contribute much to global warming.
Who said the ozone layer problem has anything to do with global warming? This is a persistent myth that arose simply because both problems were brought to the public attention around the same time (late 80s). The only link between the two is that CFCs, not only destroy the ozone layer, but are also potent greenhouse gases. Nevertheless, at the concentration they are in the atmosphere, they make negligible contribuition to global warming when compared with CO2, water vapour and methane. > And the ozone hole > still occasionalloy gets smaller (as it is these days). That's the whole point of banning CFCs - to make the Ozone hole smaller. > > Remember back in the 60s when chlorofluorocarbons were > thought to deplete ozone (at the poles) ? So laws were passed > to ban CFC's ? Well that now appears to be nonsense, because the > hole occasionally gets smaller even though we don't use CFCs. That's the whole point of banning CFCs - to make the Ozone hole smaller. > Just as in IMHO banning the burning of fossil fuels will do > anything more than raising gas prices. > By "gas", do you mean natural gas, methane or petrol (gasoline in American English)? If any of these, then banning them would mean they simply become unavailable, and people will need to turn to other technologies to power their lives. It may well mean a price drop, as there would no longer be any significant demand. Of if you mean gas as in air, or oxygen, or nitrogen, I don't see that banning fossil fuels would have any impact on those prices, other than any general effect on energy price - except in the case of helium, for which the only terrestrial source is from fossil fuel reservoirs. Helium would get very expensive. But of course banning fossil fuels would be totally ineffective anyway, so nobody is proposing to do that! Cheers -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
