Annoyingly you'll see this brought up as a "false alarm by environmentalist" by climate change deniers when it's really a time we absolutely succeeded.
As a kid we learned about the hole in the ozone layer as well as acid rain in LA, and how it was reversed by changes in human behavior. Talking to younger kids today, they act shocked at the concept of acid rain as if they no longer discuss it. I'm sure that's as designed by the climate deniers in government positions. I can only imagine it getting worse over the next 4 years
The change in LA from the EPA's and cali's strict emissions rules is incredible.
I remember visiting in the 90s as a kid and seeing how incredibly smoggy it was. It was just as bad as pretty much any place out there and all from burning gas in cars.
Now it's very often crystal clear. It's really stunning how much policy changes can impact the air.
I grew up in LA. In the late 80s the joke was that you had to chew your air before breathing it. The sky was brown most days.
> Now it's very often crystal clear. It's really stunning how much policy changes can impact the air.
I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say that the air is often clear. There is still the natural geography that traps all particles in the air over the basin. But the policy changes absolutely made a huge difference.
Interesting to note however that during the first couple of days of COVID lockdown, when almost no one was driving in LA, LA had the lowest AQI on the entire planet (it was just 4). So the next thing they have to do is solve traffic to get the air cleaner. :)
What I would like remote working advocates to say more for the benefits of this arrangement is not only the time saved, being with families, but also these things regarding pollution: by not driving to the offices co-located in the same districts, people not only stop emitting themselves, they also reduce the emissions of those who must drive by reducing or eliminating traffic jams.
Also, expanding and living in suburbs, I believe in contrast to the general consensus, reduces emissions as well. Though people still need cars to get somewhere just because the distances are larger, the use of cars is much more efficient.
I would recommend all in this thread give "Cheaper, Faster, Better" by Tom Seyer a read.
This book has a liberal air, while I am a fiscal conservative republican (not a "Trumpian" 'flat-earther', nationalist, or handmade tale dreamer - never have been or will be... not all 'Republicans' are the same. These days I generally don't vote republican due to lack of sane options. F'ing painful and horrific).
[Just wanted to provide context for who was making this statement]
Disclosure aside, as anyone with two brain cells can see, the world has been snookered by the oil and gas industry and their kickback Trumpian-like Lackies for decades (old puppets same as the new). Seyer discusses the history of all of these topics, and additional similar ones, raised above fairly well (acid rain, LA smog, UK smog, etc.).
The biggest idea Seyer conveyed to me, that I wish was just a leaflet air-dropped accross the US is that Climate Change activists are preaching to the choir when they state that we need to reverse climate change because it's irreversibly harming the planet. They need to instead focus primarily on the human harm due to extreme weather (towns, societies, crop lands, god forbid ocean front property) that polution/carbon emissions are causing. I couldn't agree more.
It's like you have to point out how it's going to affect 'these people' directly, specifically, in their lifetime, for it to even register.
We are North American Scum. Unfortunately, common sense is a rare commodity these days. The internet gave too many selfish ding dongs a podium to preach to and 'unionize' other selfish ding dongs.
OK, this ding dong is off his podium. Sorry (but do check the bood out)
My aunt vividly remembers not being able to see across the street in Pasadena, and how much better it is now.
What is, I think, very telling about human nature is that they self-identify as Orange County Republicans and feel the pressure to deny climate change. They’ll talk about how acting will destroy the economy and you can almost see the struggle when someone points out that the exact same arguments were made back then and California’s economy is famously un-destroyed.
like the change from somewhat polluted air (even in a semi-rural area where I was then) to much less polluted, in India, during Covid lockdown time. I had read then, that the same had happened in other parts of India too.
it was almost like living in pristine nature for a while, in terms of cleaner air.
only lasted until the end of the lockdown, some number of months later, sadly.
"If a problem was fixed, it wasn't a problem" is a really, really difficult cognition problem to crack. And unlike a lot of other fallacies it tends to affect the hyper-rationalist HN set worse than other demographics (who generally don't have a problem with the idea that someone fixed something).
We saw the same thing on the front page here just last week in the Bald Eagle thread, pointing out that it wasn't particularly endangered and that even if it was it was never so in Alaska. This in a discussion about how it was not listed as endangered in the continental US anymore precisely because of the success of the conservation effort under the Endangered Species Act.
Back then? Can't say but my guess is it wasn't assumed we would actually manage to do anything about it I imagine. CFC is one of the few times we've managed to win an environmental fight.
I'm not even sure it has a particularly strong effect, a quick search [0] shows that a depleted ozone would have a moderate cooling effect and a full layer would be slightly warmer but it's swamped by the effects of more direct green house gases.
Now the current and some variation of the future state of the ozone layer is definitely accounted for in the models, we just have so much more compute to throw at the modelling we can try many more scenarios but even then by [0] it looks like it's a minor effect.
> CFC is one of the few times we've managed to win an environmental fight.
Go back to 1950 and try to breath in LA. Go to your local gas station and ask for leaded fuel. To measure the PH of the next rain fall. There are been many environmental wins over the decades.
I remember visiting LA in the late 80's and having my eyes water due to the pollution. I can't imagine what the 60's and 70's must have been like. Unfortunately it is only easy to be an environmentalist in this country only when lakes are burning and the air is so bad you choke on it. We should have national pollution park where companies are allowed to do whatever they want but it is also a national park that has guides to show how bad things are just so people can understand what life is like without environmental controls.
The problems would be the same they were in the early 20th century. Pollution doesn't stay contained in neat little political boundaries and half the major contributors will be bankrupt when you finally want to clean up the mess. It also ends up being a shitty situation for the workers who have to endure the environment through no particular fault of their own.
The idea was, of course, 95% tong-in-cheek but I think there is merit to environmental tourism of superfund sites. There are enough places in the US, and the world, that have been destroyed that we can, and should, bring people to them to show how bad things were. There are probably a lot of chunks of cities that could be used too. Hunter's Point in SF maybe?
> Go back to 1950 and try to breath in LA. Go to your local gas station and ask for leaded fuel. To measure the PH of the next rain fall. There are been many environmental wins over the decades.
Your parent might mean by "we" the people who are living now, in the era when environmental concerns have become politicized, so that victories can't be bipartisan and so have become much less common. (It's inconceivable to me these days that the EPA was founded by Nixon!)
Environmental policy has always been political. That you are surprised the EPA was founded by Nixon show how little you understand how political it always has been, and how common compromise has been in all policies.
Certainly all policy matters are political, in at least the sense that politicians want to be seen to be pursuing the policies that are supported by those who votes they expect or want, and to be seen to be fighting against the policies that those voters oppose. But the idea that even acknowledging the existence of environmental concerns is a political position, systematically embraced by one major US political party and denied by the other, is new, even if the specific policies for addressing the (acknowledged) environmental concerns, and the wrangling of votes to accomplish those policies, is and always has been with us.
True I forgot about smog and acid rain, never been to LA that I remember much less during the height of the smog covering. London also had times when the entire city was covered in super dense smog that cut visibility incredibly short.
Wasn't the concern about the ozone layer primarily about the UV shield it provides? That has a much more significant direct effect on human health than it does on the climate.
"they" for some value of they knew of the properties of sulphur compounds in advance.
The minor shade advantages didn't count much against the billions of tonnes of additional insulating gases added each and every year, and the decision was made to remove sulphur compounds because of the downsides of using them - acid rain and other consequences.
That said there are private groups that collecting money as credits and putting sulphur back into the atmosphere as we type .. they're here on HN and may or may not be doing a good thing.
Acid rain was all over the news in the UK in the early 80s, when I was in infant school - we must have been covering it, at school as I remember we as small kids we were pointing out pollution on some farm visit (a load of small kids on a farm trailer pointing at something burning chanting "pollution pollution pollution").
It’s crazy to me that after studying the ozone hole for 75 years, this is the first and only paper that confirms the hole healing was primarily caused by human interventions.
Also, an important caveat is made by the authors: “The forced response in this study considers GHG and ODS only, and does not include known forcings from important volcanoes and major wildfires after 2012”, which are the top non-human factors that ozone hole deniers always point to when trying to debunk stuff like this.
It only happened because the solution was cheap and worked well.
The "magic" of the Montreal Protocol wasn't any kind of sympathy or joint cooperation to save the Earth. No one had to sacrifice anything so it breezed through no problem.
"Eliminating CFCs and other ozone-depleting chemicals by switching to alternatives could cost as much as $36 billion between now and 2075, according to the Environmental Protection Agency."
"Substitutes have drawbacks compared to the industrial perfection of CFCs, however, he said. Turpines are flammable. In addition, its toxicity in high concentrations has yet to be determined, so 'we use it with caution,' he said. 'It all comes under the grand scientific principle of no free lunch.'"
For that matter, fixing LA's smog wasn't cheap either.
I am often reminded how similar the discussion around global warming and the one around CFCs were. There was much shouting about destroying the economy, and how the cold chain was a remarkable invention that ensured we did not die from food poisoning and did we really want to go back to medieval times? Maybe sell ice from a lake?
Sure there are alternatives but they are both expensive and with sub par performance. We need to have alternatives that both cheaper and better before we can do anything?
But no, rich countries showed that they could actually get together and ban harmful chemicals, and by sheer economic force alone turn the whole world around. Research was let loose when there was economic incentives, mass production effects set in and over time the expensive and bad alternatives was cheap and good enough.
Let’s hope that now that Europe needs to focus on more important issues, they stop hindering our productivity with environmental artificial limits so that China can keep increasing their pollutants and industry.
Thank you for posting this, this is a very important follow-up to the parent's linked paper.
I'm a stratospheric scientist. Back when the reports were written, that CFC's were still being emitted in China, our community was pretty bummed and weren't very hopeful, but we were very happily surprised when China got those emmissions under control so quickly.
To be clear… are you suggesting that b/c one party started doing something damaging that we should all forgo trying and continue doing something that is a clear and present danger to our atmosphere’s ability to provide UV protection?
I’m also curious what issues you suggest Europe focus on that would require abandoning these straightforward, if slightly more costly, manufacturing efforts.
It’s not like the west didn’t benefit massively from it initially. Just like with carbon emissions where China will likely never emit as much as say the US will cumulatively, despite a much larger population too.
As a New Zealander who's had skin cancer, and lives under constant high UV rates because of the lack of an ozone above my country (and Australia, South America, South Africa), I'd really like it if Europeans continued to reduce/stop ozone harming emissions.
Annoyingly you'll see this brought up as a "false alarm by environmentalist" by climate change deniers when it's really a time we absolutely succeeded.
As a kid we learned about the hole in the ozone layer as well as acid rain in LA, and how it was reversed by changes in human behavior. Talking to younger kids today, they act shocked at the concept of acid rain as if they no longer discuss it. I'm sure that's as designed by the climate deniers in government positions. I can only imagine it getting worse over the next 4 years
The change in LA from the EPA's and cali's strict emissions rules is incredible.
I remember visiting in the 90s as a kid and seeing how incredibly smoggy it was. It was just as bad as pretty much any place out there and all from burning gas in cars.
Now it's very often crystal clear. It's really stunning how much policy changes can impact the air.
I grew up in LA. In the late 80s the joke was that you had to chew your air before breathing it. The sky was brown most days.
> Now it's very often crystal clear. It's really stunning how much policy changes can impact the air.
I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say that the air is often clear. There is still the natural geography that traps all particles in the air over the basin. But the policy changes absolutely made a huge difference.
Interesting to note however that during the first couple of days of COVID lockdown, when almost no one was driving in LA, LA had the lowest AQI on the entire planet (it was just 4). So the next thing they have to do is solve traffic to get the air cleaner. :)
> the first couple of days of COVID lockdown
To me, this was the clearest example of how much human activity truly is causing issues, and how it can be reversed.
What I would like remote working advocates to say more for the benefits of this arrangement is not only the time saved, being with families, but also these things regarding pollution: by not driving to the offices co-located in the same districts, people not only stop emitting themselves, they also reduce the emissions of those who must drive by reducing or eliminating traffic jams.
Also, expanding and living in suburbs, I believe in contrast to the general consensus, reduces emissions as well. Though people still need cars to get somewhere just because the distances are larger, the use of cars is much more efficient.
I would recommend all in this thread give "Cheaper, Faster, Better" by Tom Seyer a read.
This book has a liberal air, while I am a fiscal conservative republican (not a "Trumpian" 'flat-earther', nationalist, or handmade tale dreamer - never have been or will be... not all 'Republicans' are the same. These days I generally don't vote republican due to lack of sane options. F'ing painful and horrific).
[Just wanted to provide context for who was making this statement]
Disclosure aside, as anyone with two brain cells can see, the world has been snookered by the oil and gas industry and their kickback Trumpian-like Lackies for decades (old puppets same as the new). Seyer discusses the history of all of these topics, and additional similar ones, raised above fairly well (acid rain, LA smog, UK smog, etc.).
The biggest idea Seyer conveyed to me, that I wish was just a leaflet air-dropped accross the US is that Climate Change activists are preaching to the choir when they state that we need to reverse climate change because it's irreversibly harming the planet. They need to instead focus primarily on the human harm due to extreme weather (towns, societies, crop lands, god forbid ocean front property) that polution/carbon emissions are causing. I couldn't agree more.
It's like you have to point out how it's going to affect 'these people' directly, specifically, in their lifetime, for it to even register.
We are North American Scum. Unfortunately, common sense is a rare commodity these days. The internet gave too many selfish ding dongs a podium to preach to and 'unionize' other selfish ding dongs.
OK, this ding dong is off his podium. Sorry (but do check the bood out)
My aunt vividly remembers not being able to see across the street in Pasadena, and how much better it is now.
What is, I think, very telling about human nature is that they self-identify as Orange County Republicans and feel the pressure to deny climate change. They’ll talk about how acting will destroy the economy and you can almost see the struggle when someone points out that the exact same arguments were made back then and California’s economy is famously un-destroyed.
>seeing how incredibly smoggy it was.
>Now it's very often crystal clear.
like the change from somewhat polluted air (even in a semi-rural area where I was then) to much less polluted, in India, during Covid lockdown time. I had read then, that the same had happened in other parts of India too.
it was almost like living in pristine nature for a while, in terms of cleaner air.
only lasted until the end of the lockdown, some number of months later, sadly.
then things were back to (ab)normal.
>acid rain in LA
i remember reading about acid rain happening in Germany, years ago.
I googled acid rain germany.
one result:
https://www.gmfus.org/news/acid-rain-lessons-germanys-black-...
Is the reason we don't talk about manure piles on street corners because of manure deniers in government positions?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_horse_manure_crisis_of...
"If a problem was fixed, it wasn't a problem" is a really, really difficult cognition problem to crack. And unlike a lot of other fallacies it tends to affect the hyper-rationalist HN set worse than other demographics (who generally don't have a problem with the idea that someone fixed something).
We saw the same thing on the front page here just last week in the Bald Eagle thread, pointing out that it wasn't particularly endangered and that even if it was it was never so in Alaska. This in a discussion about how it was not listed as endangered in the continental US anymore precisely because of the success of the conservation effort under the Endangered Species Act.
I always wondered why the climate impact of a recovering ozone was not taken into account when forecasting climate change?
Back then? Can't say but my guess is it wasn't assumed we would actually manage to do anything about it I imagine. CFC is one of the few times we've managed to win an environmental fight.
I'm not even sure it has a particularly strong effect, a quick search [0] shows that a depleted ozone would have a moderate cooling effect and a full layer would be slightly warmer but it's swamped by the effects of more direct green house gases.
Now the current and some variation of the future state of the ozone layer is definitely accounted for in the models, we just have so much more compute to throw at the modelling we can try many more scenarios but even then by [0] it looks like it's a minor effect.
[0] https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/research/ozone-uv/moreinfo?view=...
> CFC is one of the few times we've managed to win an environmental fight.
Go back to 1950 and try to breath in LA. Go to your local gas station and ask for leaded fuel. To measure the PH of the next rain fall. There are been many environmental wins over the decades.
I remember visiting LA in the late 80's and having my eyes water due to the pollution. I can't imagine what the 60's and 70's must have been like. Unfortunately it is only easy to be an environmentalist in this country only when lakes are burning and the air is so bad you choke on it. We should have national pollution park where companies are allowed to do whatever they want but it is also a national park that has guides to show how bad things are just so people can understand what life is like without environmental controls.
The "national pollution park" is actually a pretty good idea. Currently we outsource that to China.
The problems would be the same they were in the early 20th century. Pollution doesn't stay contained in neat little political boundaries and half the major contributors will be bankrupt when you finally want to clean up the mess. It also ends up being a shitty situation for the workers who have to endure the environment through no particular fault of their own.
The idea was, of course, 95% tong-in-cheek but I think there is merit to environmental tourism of superfund sites. There are enough places in the US, and the world, that have been destroyed that we can, and should, bring people to them to show how bad things were. There are probably a lot of chunks of cities that could be used too. Hunter's Point in SF maybe?
> Go back to 1950 and try to breath in LA. Go to your local gas station and ask for leaded fuel. To measure the PH of the next rain fall. There are been many environmental wins over the decades.
Your parent might mean by "we" the people who are living now, in the era when environmental concerns have become politicized, so that victories can't be bipartisan and so have become much less common. (It's inconceivable to me these days that the EPA was founded by Nixon!)
Environmental policy has always been political. That you are surprised the EPA was founded by Nixon show how little you understand how political it always has been, and how common compromise has been in all policies.
Certainly all policy matters are political, in at least the sense that politicians want to be seen to be pursuing the policies that are supported by those who votes they expect or want, and to be seen to be fighting against the policies that those voters oppose. But the idea that even acknowledging the existence of environmental concerns is a political position, systematically embraced by one major US political party and denied by the other, is new, even if the specific policies for addressing the (acknowledged) environmental concerns, and the wrangling of votes to accomplish those policies, is and always has been with us.
True I forgot about smog and acid rain, never been to LA that I remember much less during the height of the smog covering. London also had times when the entire city was covered in super dense smog that cut visibility incredibly short.
Wasn't the concern about the ozone layer primarily about the UV shield it provides? That has a much more significant direct effect on human health than it does on the climate.
Well, they didn't expect the cleanup of container-ship emissions to exacerbate global warming either.
Makes you wonder if we really couldn't attempt some kind of man-made "pollution" in the atmosphere to mitigate warming.
"they" for some value of they knew of the properties of sulphur compounds in advance.
The minor shade advantages didn't count much against the billions of tonnes of additional insulating gases added each and every year, and the decision was made to remove sulphur compounds because of the downsides of using them - acid rain and other consequences.
That said there are private groups that collecting money as credits and putting sulphur back into the atmosphere as we type .. they're here on HN and may or may not be doing a good thing.
Is it not?
Acid rain was all over the news in the UK in the early 80s, when I was in infant school - we must have been covering it, at school as I remember we as small kids we were pointing out pollution on some farm visit (a load of small kids on a farm trailer pointing at something burning chanting "pollution pollution pollution").
Haven’t seen that personally, which is a good thing
on the nature of ontology :)
[dead]
Full paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/383293168_Fingerpri...
It’s crazy to me that after studying the ozone hole for 75 years, this is the first and only paper that confirms the hole healing was primarily caused by human interventions.
Also, an important caveat is made by the authors: “The forced response in this study considers GHG and ODS only, and does not include known forcings from important volcanoes and major wildfires after 2012”, which are the top non-human factors that ozone hole deniers always point to when trying to debunk stuff like this.
Some credit must go to Dr. Allan Neyman. 2024 marked 25 years under the shield.
Executive Order: We must dramatically increase the use of CFCs wherever possible!
I thought this recovery has been well-known for quite a few years.
It really is proof that concerted effort can bring about worldwide change, for little sacrifice.
Only happened because Ronald Reagan got skin cancer on his nose. [0]
Classic GOP: it’s not a problem until it affects me, personally, and then we absolutely have to fix it.
Until then? Liberal fear mongering, special interests, etc. etc.
[0] https://time.com/5564651/reagan-ozone-hole/
It only happened because the solution was cheap and worked well.
The "magic" of the Montreal Protocol wasn't any kind of sympathy or joint cooperation to save the Earth. No one had to sacrifice anything so it breezed through no problem.
Neither claim is true. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1991/09/29/t...
"Eliminating CFCs and other ozone-depleting chemicals by switching to alternatives could cost as much as $36 billion between now and 2075, according to the Environmental Protection Agency."
"Substitutes have drawbacks compared to the industrial perfection of CFCs, however, he said. Turpines are flammable. In addition, its toxicity in high concentrations has yet to be determined, so 'we use it with caution,' he said. 'It all comes under the grand scientific principle of no free lunch.'"
For that matter, fixing LA's smog wasn't cheap either.
Imagine the fix for global warming was $500M a year for 75 years.
$36 billion is the cost to the US. Yes, it's not nearly as much as the cost to fix global warming, but the usual suspects opposed it using cost arguments at the time. https://www.lpl.arizona.edu/sites/default/files/resources/gl...
Give republicans the coast line and see them go!
I am often reminded how similar the discussion around global warming and the one around CFCs were. There was much shouting about destroying the economy, and how the cold chain was a remarkable invention that ensured we did not die from food poisoning and did we really want to go back to medieval times? Maybe sell ice from a lake?
Sure there are alternatives but they are both expensive and with sub par performance. We need to have alternatives that both cheaper and better before we can do anything?
But no, rich countries showed that they could actually get together and ban harmful chemicals, and by sheer economic force alone turn the whole world around. Research was let loose when there was economic incentives, mass production effects set in and over time the expensive and bad alternatives was cheap and good enough.
Ok. CFCs done. CO2 next.
"Burr, it's cold in here ..."
Of course that, as usual, this was due to the West taking the hit, and China continuing doing pollution as usual:
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48353341.amp
Let’s hope that now that Europe needs to focus on more important issues, they stop hindering our productivity with environmental artificial limits so that China can keep increasing their pollutants and industry.
> they stop hindering our productivity with environmental artificial limits so that China can keep increasing their pollutants and industry.
This is a strange take to me. We've had a great positive environmental impact and your take away is "but China is bad so we should also be bad!"
Why not instead use tarrifs and international pressure for what it's good for. "Goods linked to CFC emissions get an automatic 25% tarrif".
In fairness China did crack down on that[0]. Some limits are excessive, but here the minor hit was worth it.
[0]
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03277-w
https://www.dw.com/en/ozone-layer-recovery-back-on-track-aft...
Thank you for posting this, this is a very important follow-up to the parent's linked paper.
I'm a stratospheric scientist. Back when the reports were written, that CFC's were still being emitted in China, our community was pretty bummed and weren't very hopeful, but we were very happily surprised when China got those emmissions under control so quickly.
To be clear… are you suggesting that b/c one party started doing something damaging that we should all forgo trying and continue doing something that is a clear and present danger to our atmosphere’s ability to provide UV protection?
I’m also curious what issues you suggest Europe focus on that would require abandoning these straightforward, if slightly more costly, manufacturing efforts.
> the West taking the hit
It’s not like the west didn’t benefit massively from it initially. Just like with carbon emissions where China will likely never emit as much as say the US will cumulatively, despite a much larger population too.
As a New Zealander who's had skin cancer, and lives under constant high UV rates because of the lack of an ozone above my country (and Australia, South America, South Africa), I'd really like it if Europeans continued to reduce/stop ozone harming emissions.
I second this. No skin cancer yet but 40 years of exposure.
I third, as someone who hasn't had skin cancer yet, but potentially deserves it due to being lax with sunscreen too often.