Now that they have few trees to hide under. Not well.
As to us. Good time for the ozone layer to break down more quickly thus
giving those solar flares even more power to damage DNA.
I may be seeing a reaction to the increase in flare activity in the
gardens I tend. Some of the non-native fruit trees and shrubs appear to
be quite stressed. As most other elements are the same as prior years,
the stress may be due to no proper symbiotic fungi in the soils to
assist the plants health. Just a thought.
Darryl
On 26/07/2012 12:48 PM, Ray Harrell wrote:
Here's some more science to be politicized and ignored until some
billionaire's child dies of melanoma from the beach at the Hamptons.
It's a GOP cancer cell. I wonder how the elephants out of doors in
Africa will tolerate the sun?
REH
July 26, 2012 Science Times
Storms Threaten Ozone Layer Over U.S., Study Says
ByHENRY FOUNTAIN
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/f/henry_fountain/index.html>
Strong summer storms that pump water high into the upper atmosphere
pose a threat to the protective ozone layer over the United States,
researchers said on Thursday, adding that the risk of damage may
increase as the climate warms.
In a studypublished online
<http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2012/07/25/science.1222978>by
the journal Science, Harvard University scientists reported that some
storms send water vapor well into the stratosphere --- which is
normally drier than a desert --- and showed how such events could
rapidly set off ozone-destroying reactions with chemicals that remain
in the atmosphere from CFCs, the now-banned refrigerant gases.
Ozone helps shield people, animals and crops from damaging ultraviolet
rays from the sun. Much of the concern about the ozone layer has
focused on Antarctica, where a seasonal hole, or thinning, has been
seen for two decades, and the Arctic, where a hole was observed last
year. But those regions have almost no population.
A thinning of the ozone layer over the United States during summers
could mean an increase in ultraviolet exposure for millions of people
and a rise in the incidence of skin cancer, the researchers said.
"This problem now is of deep concern to me," said James G. Anderson,
an atmospheric scientist and the lead author of the study. "I never
would have suspected this."
The findings were based on sound science, he and other experts said,
but direct measurements of the impact of water vapor on ozone
chemistry are lacking, and much more research is needed.
While there is conclusive evidence that strong storms have sent water
vapor as high as 12 miles --- through a process called convective
injection --- and while climate scientists say one effect ofglobal
warming
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>is
an increase in the intensity and frequency of storms, it is not yet
clear if the number of such injection events will rise.
"Nobody understands why this convection can penetrate as deeply as it
does," said Dr. Anderson, who has studied the atmosphere for four decades.
"It's the union between ozone loss and climate change that is really
at the heart of this," he said, adding that for years he and other
scientists had always been careful to keep the two concepts separate.
"Now, they're intimately connected."
Mario J. Molina, a co-recipient of aNobel Prize
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/nobel_prizes/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>for
research in the 1970s that uncovered the link between CFCs and damage
to the ozone layer, said the study added "one more worry to the
changes that society's making to the chemical composition of the
atmosphere." Dr. Molina, who was not involved in the work, said the
concern was "significant ozone depletion at latitudes where there is a
lot of population, in contrast to over the poles."
The study, which was financed by the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration, focused on the United States because that is where the
data was collected. But the researchers pointed out that similar
conditions could exist at other midlatitude regions.
Ralph J. Cicerone, an atmospheric scientist and the president of the
National Academy of Sciences, who reviewed the study for Science, also
called for more research. "One of the really solid parts of this paper
is that they've taken the chemistry that we know from other
atmospheric experiments and lab experiments and put that in the
picture," he said. "The thing to do is do field work now --- measure
moisture amounts and whether there is any impact around it."
"The connection with future climate is the most important issue," Dr.
Cicerone said.
Large thunderstorms of the type that occur from the Rockies to the
East Coast and over the Atlantic Ocean produce updrafts, as warm moist
air accelerates upward and condenses, releasing more heat. In most
cases, the updrafts stop at a boundary layer between the lower
atmosphere and the stratosphere called the tropopause, often producing
flat-topped clouds that resemble anvils. But if there is enough energy
in a storm, the updraft can continue on its own momentum, punching
through the tropopause and entering the stratosphere, said Kerry
Emanuel, an atmospheric scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.
When Dr. Anderson produced data about five years ago clearly showing
these strong injections of water vapor, "I didn't believe it at
first," Dr. Emanuel said. "But we've come to see that the evidence is
pretty strong that we do get them."
At the same time, he added, "we don't really understand what
determines the potential for convection in the atmosphere," so it is
difficult to say what the effect of climate change will be.
"We're much further along on understanding howhurricanes
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/h/hurricanes_and_tropical_storms/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>respond
to climate change than normal storms," Dr. Emanuel said.
CFCs, or chlorofluorocarbons, were banned in the mid-1980s by the
international treaty called the Montreal Protocol, but it will take
decades for them to be cleansed fully from the atmosphere. It is
chlorine from the CFCs that ultimately destroys ozone, upsetting what
is normally a balanced system of ozone creation and decay. The
chlorine has to undergo a chemical shift in the presence of sunlight
that makes it more reactive, and this shift is sensitive to temperature.
Dr. Anderson and his colleagues found that a significant concentration
of water vapor raises the air temperature enough in the immediate
vicinity to allow the chemical shift, and the ozone-destroying
process, to proceed rapidly.
"The rate of these reactions was shocking to us," Dr. Anderson said.
"It's chemistry that was sitting there, waiting to be revealed."
Dr. Anderson said that if climate change led to more events in which
water was injected well into the stratosphere, the effect on ozone
could not be halted. "Because it's linked to the inexorable addition
of CO2 and methane," he said, "it's irreversible."
If CFCs had not been banned, the ozone layer would be in far worse
shape than it is. But by showing that CFC-related ozone destruction
can occur in conditions other than the cold ones at the poles, the
study suggests that the full recovery of the ozone layer may be
further off than previously considered.
"The world said, 'Oh, we've controlled the source of CFCs; we can move
on to something else,' " Dr. Anderson said. "But the destruction of
ozone is far more sensitive to water vapor and temperature."
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