United Nations says ozone layer is slowly healing, hole to mend by 2066

January 10, 2023 11:22 AM

United Nations says ozone layer is slowly healing, hole to mend by 2066. A United Nations report says the Earth's protective layer is healing at a pace that has the potential to fully mend the hole over Antarctica within about 43 years.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries (16 comments total)

This news is good enough to make even a recluse like me say: AWESOME! I could use some good news in general and some climate optimism in particular.
posted by reclusive_thousandaire at 11:46 AM on January 10, 2023 [11 favorites]

Sensible policies and collective action can lead to healthy and positive outcomes that benefit everyone? Crazy.
posted by mhoye at 12:19 PM on January 10, 2023 [18 favorites]

Thanks Reagan and Thatcher! You saved the world!
posted by mittens at 12:20 PM on January 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'd love for this example to be the flag of, "Yes, we have made changes for climate reasons, no the world did not fall apart, yes it made a difference."
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 12:22 PM on January 10, 2023 [22 favorites]

I would like to thank the short-lived 90s cartoon Rocko's Modern Life for making this all possible via a song whose lyrics have been indelibly fused to my brain for nearly 30 years now.
posted by phunniemee at 12:48 PM on January 10, 2023 [4 favorites]

I would like to apologize for my raging addiction to Aqua Net when I was a child in the 80s. I still don't know what the hell I was thinking.

Also it would have been cool if someone - anyone at all - told me I was parting my hair on the wrong side and it probably would have used a lot less hair gel and hair spray to shellac my whole head into the perfect spiky wave that was always a soggy, crunchy mess before lunch anyway.

Though there was that one time in junior high when I was forced to wrestle during PE and I used my spiky plastic head like a porcupine all up in his face to break out of a hold, so that was... something.

If the early 90s grunge and rave scene accomplished anything good at all it was making too much hair product and big hair uncool, and that's one thing that I'm very thankful that the current gen y/z kids aren't picking up with their ongoing case of 80s nostalgia and retconning. Y'all have cooler hair than we ever did.
posted by loquacious at 1:00 PM on January 10, 2023 [3 favorites]

Just in time for the ice cap to be gone!

(… and presumably the resulting minerals rush)
posted by sixswitch at 2:03 PM on January 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'd love for this example to be the flag of, "Yes, we have made changes for climate reasons, no the world did not fall apart, yes it made a difference."

Kind of, but forward movement only really started once the big chemical companies got more profitable alternatives to CFCs worked out, then the governments of those companies (US, UK, FR, DE) bought into replacing the CFCs and that underpinned change. So Reagan and Thatcher indeed. A market solution that hasn't scaled up for climate change as yet.
posted by biffa at 3:08 PM on January 10, 2023

In fifty years, conservatives will be saying there was obviously never a problem and we spent a lot of money and effort for nothing when our grandparents could have had a LOT more hairspray. Source: in the last decade or two I have come across plenty of people who declare that all those COBOL programmers working for years in the nineties was obviously a scam because nothing bad happened at Y2K.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 4:24 PM on January 10, 2023 [10 favorites]

It wasn’t entirely a market solution and it’s not a problem of scale—-the incentives for getting rid of CFCs were entirely different than the current problem.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:04 PM on January 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

Just fyi, James Anderson says climate change shall create a wetter stratosphere that destroys the ozone layer (via XR Cambridge, whose video cuts out around 36s now).

We won't have criticism of saving the ozone layer in 50 years, except maybe eventually some historical fiction with a plot like "We'd have so many more survivors if those idiots had killed the ozone layer 100 years ago, almost destroying their society, stopping travel, trade, etc. and saving us their decedents."

I do agree CFCs provide a good example of environmental legislation working, even if some profit motive existed. We need much heavier environmental legislation now, but with the motivation of people being happier, even though the economy must shrink dramatically. As an example, we'll avoid many night shifts, and have happier workers, if solar power means many factories only run during daytime.
posted by jeffburdges at 7:19 PM on January 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'll take any good news I can find these days, thanks!
posted by Harald74 at 3:13 AM on January 11, 2023

In fifty years, conservatives will be saying there was obviously never a problem and we spent a lot of money and effort for nothing when our grandparents could have had a LOT more hairspray.

People have been been saying the problem was overblown for ten or fifteen years already, basically from the moment that it was publicly reported that ozone loss was stabilizing and that environmental messaging started focusing on climate change.
posted by atoxyl at 9:33 AM on January 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

jeffburdges: I do this stuff for a living and don't understand the mechanism by which Anderson is saying a wetter stratosphere would lead to ozone depletion. Do you know of an actual source for this besides a YouTube video?
posted by hydropsyche at 2:32 PM on January 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

Anderson's name above links his Harvard page, which singles out three publications discussing ozone, below a prominently placed youtube video giving more details.
posted by jeffburdges at 5:15 AM on January 12, 2023

(I'm not going to comment on the Anderson stuff because I'm definitely trying to inject less doom into the stratosphere, but here is a link.)
posted by mittens at 5:39 AM on January 12, 2023