Way Off Topic – Oil Spills & Freon

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I could Google this, but I’ll let you tell me, because that’s more entertaining.

So, now that there’s no more photo-ops of muck on beaches to be had, how has the Gulf Coast fishing industry recovered from the “worst ever in the history of the universe” BP oil spill?

While we’re at it, whatever happened to the ozone hole that caused idiots to ban the only useful refrigerant a car’s AC unit can use? Are we done pretending there’s a hole now?

3 Comments

  1. The Population Bomb
    Misleadingly implying that women earn less than men — If they do the very SAME same job, and have the SAME experience, and have worked at it the SAME number of years.
    “Ban Paper Bags! – But then, on the other hand, No! Ban Plastic Bags!”
    Acid Rain
    Radon Gas
    SARS
    Swine Flu
    Bird Flu

    Alarmists. I’ve learned to take them with a grain of salt.

    Some internet comments on the ozone question:

    Pretty simple. Ozone is 3 oxygen atoms bound together which is not a stable molecule. The normal configuration is 2 oxygens bound together.

    It takes energy, in this case sunlight, to build these unstable molecules.

    Less sunspots, less energy, less ozone.

    .

    50 years ago they didn’t even know that there was a hole in the ozone layer at the poles, much less that it would form and heal in a cyclic manner.

    How do they even know the lack of healing isn’t just an instrumentation issue? After all, the ozone layer that they are so worried about is only 3 mm thick (less than 1/8 inch). Who went up and measured the thickness of this transparent gas? Also, the ozone layer is about 8 miles up. What kind of accuracy can they get measuring a 1/8-inch layer of a transparent gas that is 8 miles away?

    .

    Of course it wasn’t CFCs. They started looking at the ozone hole during its expanding phase. They said it would take a hundred years for the ozone hole to “heal,” but it turned around and started contracting in just a few years—as part of its natural cycle, apparently.

    .

    The only reason this ‘ozone hole’ was noticed in the first place is that a new satellite had been sent into orbit and it detected a ‘thinning’ of ozone over the antarctic region. Everyone got all panicky and they quickly decided that chlorofluorocarbons were at fault. That meant that the most common refrigerant in use at the time, the patent for which was about to expire, had to be banned. Luckily Dow Chemical had a new freshly patented refrigerant on hand to take its place, so we were all saved. [Coincidence?]

    Now, here’s the interesting thing IMO… (besides how convenient this all was to certain corporate entities)… The reason this ‘ozone hole’ had never been seen previously was because we’d not had instrumentation in space capable of detecting it previously. So, we have no idea if this was a normal cycle (I recall there being correlation to sunspot cycles) or if this was something that was actually abnormal. The fact that it seems to be self-repairing during a time of historic low sunspot activity is interesting.

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  2. So long as you remember that Green Science is neither you’ll do okay.

    The reason we don’t hear about the hole in the ozone anymore, I’d guess, is because Green Scientists (who are also neither ), don’t want people to see so blatantly how much they lie.
    That and we’d want our freon and aerosol cans back.

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  3. One of the first thing we learned in an HVAC class that we took is that refrigerants are heavier than air. so the first question asked was “if cfcs are heavier than air, how does it get into the ozone layer?”

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