Controversial study suggesting ozone hole isn't recovering is skewed by bad data, experts say
There seems to be no dispute that the ozone hole has fluctuated a lot in recent years and that it has often been large. The fluctuations are alone troubling to the accepted theory as they are not predicted by it but the prevalence of large holes is directly contradictory to the theory. The record is much more suggestive of random fluctuations than of systematic shrinking.
So the issue is WHY. Critics of a recent heretical paper say that the larger holes are explainable by special factors and thus do not call the conventional understanding into doubt.
There is a philosophical problem here, though: When do you stop explaining the failure of a theory by special factors? We are getting into the realm of unfalsifiability here. I would submit that the large deviation from the projected trajectory of the hole is sufficient to resist explanation by special factors. I suggest that that there is a large reality we should accept rather than keep explaining it away
A controversial new study has sparked concerns that the ozone hole above Antarctica is not recovering as fast as we thought it was, and may even be getting bigger. However, many experts who were not involved in the study have rejected those claims, criticizing the quality of the research.
The ozone layer is a section of Earth's atmosphere between 9 and 22 miles (15 and 35 kilometers) above the surface, where there is a high concentration of ozone — an oxygen molecule variant with three atoms instead of the usual two. This layer blocks out harmful levels of ultraviolet rays from the sun that could otherwise cause serious damage to life, including humans.
In the mid-1980s, scientists began to notice that large holes in the ozone layer were appearing above the North and South poles as a result of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which break down and react with ozone, thus splitting the molecules and decreasing ozone levels. In 1987, world governments united to sign the Montreal Protocol, which would ban the use of CFCs that had, until then, been used heavily in aerosol cans, packing materials and refrigerators.
The ozone holes have persisted, particularly above Antarctica, due to lingering CFC levels and increasingly erratic climate conditions. However, they are smaller than they used to be and scientists have long expected that the holes will eventually fully recover. In January, a United Nations report on ozone depletion revealed that ozone levels are on track to return to pre-1980 levels by 2045 in the Arctic and 2066 in Antarctica.
However, the controversial new study, published Nov. 21 in the journal Nature Communications, suggests that the concentration of ozone in Antarctica's ozone hole is decreasing. The new paper sparked a wave of stories from major news outlets claiming that the "ozone hole may not be recovering at all" and may even be growing. However, many experts have argued that the study's findings are dubious and that the resulting coverage is very misleading.
The study analyzed the concentration of ozone at the center of Antarctica's ozone hole between 2001 and 2022 and found that the concentration of ozone at the heart of the hole had decreased by an average of 26% during this time.
However, other ozone experts are not at all convinced by the results or the methods used to get them.
Parts of the paper are "terribly unclear" and "wildly speculative," and despite the researchers' claims, the study "tells us nothing new," Susan Solomon, an atmospheric scientist at MIT who was part of the team that first linked ozone holes to CFCs in 1986, told Live Science.
The biggest problem with the new paper is that it does not properly account for why ozone concentrations have decreased in recent years, Solomon said.
Since 2020, the size of the ozone hole has increased year over year, with the largest gap occurring this year. These unusually large holes are the result of a number of known factors, including three successive years of La Niña from 2020 to 2022, which created colder air around Antarctica, making it harder for ozone to form; and the massive wildfires in Australia during 2020, which released particulates that depleted ozone. This year's extremely large hole has also been attributed to water vapor injected into the upper atmosphere from Tonga's underwater eruption in January 2022.
A simulation of an ozone hole opening up
This year's ozone hole was unusually large but that does not mean that ozone hole recovery has stalled, experts say. (Image credit: ESA/Copernicus Sentinel data (2023)/processed by CAMS/ECMWF)
But the authors do not explain why the "past few years have been quite unusual," which makes it seem like there is some unknown factor that is limiting ozone recovery when, in reality, there is not, Solomon said. "This is a big, big deal" and is "very disappointing," she added.
The researchers also chose to omit data from 2002, when ozone levels were unusually high, and 2019, which had one of the smallest ozone holes on record. The researchers argue that these anomalies would unfairly skew the results, but other scientists have criticized this decision, especially considering that the recent anomalous years were still included.
"It is questionable how the authors can remove 2002 and 2019 from the record but not 2020-22, given that all of these years have been shown to be dominated by very special and rare events," Martin Jucker, an atmospheric scientist at the University of New South Wales in Australia, said in a Scimex statement. "Including those events would probably have nullified any long-term negative trend in ozone concentrations."
Both Solomon and Jucker also believe that the time period analyzed in the new study is too short, which has given too much weight to recent years and produced unrealistic results.
In addition, the new study also focuses only on the ozone concentration at the heart of the ozone hole and not on wider ozone concentration levels, which do not tell the whole story, Solomon said. Without providing any models for how these central concentrations affect wider ozone concentrations, the study provides little information that other researchers can follow up on, she added.
The time of year the ozone hole data comes from is also problematic, Solomon said. The researchers focused on data from October and November, when ozone holes reach their maximum size, which is influenced by a range of factors. If the team wanted to study ozone recovery, then using data from September would have been a better point of comparison, Solomon said.
As a result of these oversights and omissions, the paper cannot be relied upon to infer much about global ozone recovery trends, Solomon said.
https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/weather/controversial-study-suggesting-ozone-hole-isnt-recovering-is-skewed-by-bad-data-experts-say ?
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Cooking oil won’t help the aviation industry reach net zero
Two decades ago, motorists in South Wales realised that they could power their diesel cars with used cooking oil, thereby cutting their fuel bills substantially. They were fined for trying to avoid road fuel duty, but perhaps they should have been bunged £1 million by the government for demonstrating a greener future.
£1 million is the sum the government handed Virgin to enable today’s pioneering transatlantic flight using 100 per cent sustainable airline fuel (SAF). SAF is a blend of 88 per cent hydroprocessed esters and fatty acids (HEFA), manufactured from waste cooking oil, and 12 per cent synthetic aromatic kerosene, made from plant sugars from waste vegetable material.
Running a jet on low-carbon fuels would only reduce its total ‘climate impact’ by between 30 and 60 per cent
The attraction of SAF for airlines is obvious. As today’s flight will demonstrate, it is a ‘drop-in’ fuel which can be used in existing aircraft. Other suggested ways in which aviation might be decarbonised have serious problems of practicality. Try to stuff a Boeing 777 with enough batteries to supply the power needed to cross the Atlantic and the plane would become as heavy as the Eiffel Tower – it wouldn’t get off the ground at all. It would require a couple of magnitudes of improvements in battery technology to make long-haul electric jets a possibility. Hydrogen, by contrast, has a high energy-to-mass ratio but a low energy-to-density ratio, meaning that it would require a wholesale redesign of planes, which would become bulkier, slower and generally less useful.
SAF will do the job – albeit at a current cost of around four times that of normal jet fuel. However, it is also something of a dead end, as there are only so many chip shops producing so much waste oil. Using waste plant material to generate energy makes sense from a waste disposal perspective, but how much is actually potentially available?
Look beyond waste cooking oil, claims the US Bioenergy Technologies Office, and the US could, just about, power its current fleet of jets entirely with SAF – if it could harness every last twig and leaf of available biomass. It calculates that if you could collect all waste food from households and businesses, forestry residues, solids from sewage plants, algae from rivers and lakes, agricultural waste and add it to some dedicated biomass crops it would be enough to produce between 50 and 60 billion gallons of fuel. In 2021 alone, US airlines between them used 57 billion gallons of fuel.
All of this would involve a hugely dispersed supply chain which would have to be brought together. Moreover, woody biomass does not exactly come in as convenient a form for conversion into liquid fuels as used cooking oil – so the costs are going to be substantially greater.
There is another potential – and possibly even more expensive – solution involving making synthetic fuels from hydrogen and carbon. Hydrogen is extracted via electrolysis of water and carbon extracted from carbon dioxide in the air. But that is a technology which is some way into the future, given the problems encountered in scaling up the production of hydrogen via electrolysis.
But would sustainable and synthetic airline fuels allow the airline industry to reach net zero in any case? There’s the rub. Neither solution avoids water vapour emissions via the con-trails spewed out of the back of jet engines, which contribute a substantial proportion of a jet aircraft’s greenhouse gas emissions. According to a study by McKinsey&Co in 2020, running a jet on low-carbon fuels would only reduce its total ‘climate impact’ by between 30 and 60 per cent.
That might be a useful contribution, but it gets the airline industry nowhere near the holy grail of net zero. Trouble is, this is the target we have legally committed ourselves too, and we still have no idea of how industries like aviation can get there.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/11/cooking-oil-wont-help-the-aviation-industry-reach-net-zero/ ?
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Biden Admin and Eco Groups Strike Secret Deal
A group of House lawmakers representing the Pacific Northwest have revealed a confidential mediation agreement between the Biden administration and environmental groups, which aims to remove four hydroelectric dams in Washington to protect salmon.
The document, which was drafted on November 2nd as part of an agreement to pause litigation against the federal government, has been made public by lawmakers led by Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers and her colleagues Reps. Dan Newhouse, Cliff Bentz, and Russ Fulcher. The agreement was made between the activist groups and the federal government, who were in favor of breaching the federally-managed dams due to declining salmon populations in the lower Snake River.
In a letter to President Biden, the lawmakers expressed their concern about the impacts of this agreement on the region, stating that it is their duty to ensure that any action taken does not bypass congressional authorization. They also questioned the Biden administration’s intentions and demanded to know which scientific reports the government has used to come to its conclusions.
The Biden administration is quietly discussing a potentially far-reaching settlement with environmental groups that advocate for tearing down four hydroelectric dams in Washington to protect salmon.
The confidential mediation document states, “the science is clear, and now so must be our path forward,” and argues for quick deployment of green energy to compensate for the lost power if the four dams are removed. However, multiple government and private reports have concluded that breaching the dams would have a devastating effect on energy production, climate goals, and transportation in Washington.
The dams, built in the 1960s and 1970s by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, were primarily constructed to facilitate barge transportation on the Snake River. However, they now provide reliable clean energy, generating about 8% of the state’s electricity and having a total capacity of 3,000 megawatts. Removing these dams would not only impact energy and climate goals but also damage the regional economy and agriculture exports, which heavily rely on the Columbia River system.
Industry groups, including Northwest RiverPartners, Public Power Council, and Pacific Northwest Waterways Association, have expressed their concerns about being excluded from the negotiations and the potential harm to millions of residents who were not represented in the process. According to Northwest RiverPartners, the mediation document goes beyond breaching the four Snake River dams and could jeopardize the entire Federal Columbia River Power System.
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‘Net Zero’ Fails the Cost-Benefit Test
The Left’s real climate agenda is green on the outside, red on the inside. It’s totalitarian control over virtually every aspect of our economic lives. Bjorn Lomborg is a longtime critic of that agenda, though he isn’t averse to taking some measures to mitigate climate change. In light of the beginning of the UN’s COP28 climate summit — minus Joe Biden — he explains a basic economic lesson.
World leaders are gathering in Dubai for another climate conference, which will no doubt yield heady promises along the lines of the 2015 Paris climate agreement to keep the global temperature’s rise “well below” 2 degrees Celsius and pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5 degrees. But they’d be wiser not to. New research shows how extravagant climate promises are far more wasteful than useful.
A new special issue of the journal Climate Change Economics contains two ground-breaking economic analyses of policies to hold global temperatures to 1.5 degrees and its practical political interpretation, mandates to reach net zero, usually by 2050. Though more than 130 countries, including most of the globe’s big emitters, have passed or are considering laws mandating net-zero carbon emissions, there’s been no comprehensive cost-benefit evaluation of that policy — until now.
Lomborg proceeds to briefly unpack this research. The first one presents an “underwhelming” case for restrictions to maintain lower temperature increases, and Lomborg says even the “substantial” are likely underestimated by as much as half. “In real life,” he says, “climate policy has been needlessly expensive, with a plethora of inefficient, disconnected measures such as electric-vehicle subsidies.”
This is borne out in the second Climate Change Economics study. The peer-reviewed paper from MIT economists identifies the cost of holding the temperature’s rise below 1.5 degrees as well as that of achieving net zero globally by 2050. The researchers find that these Paris policies would cost 8% to 18% of annual GDP by 2050 and 11% to 13% annually by 2100.
Climate economic models all show that moderate policies make sense — initial carbon cuts are cheap and prevent the most damaging temperature rise — but net zero doesn’t. Averaged across the century, delivering the Paris climate promises would create benefits worth $4.5 trillion (in 2023 dollars) annually. That’s dramatically smaller than the $27 trillion annual cost that Paris promises would incur, as derived from averaging the three cost estimates from the two Climate Change Economics papers through 2100.
In other words, each dollar spent will avoid less than 17 cents of climate damage. The total, undiscounted loss over the century is beyond $1,800 trillion. For comparison, global GDP last year was a little over $100 trillion. Although well-intentioned, current climate policy would end up destroying a sizable fraction of future prosperity.
He concludes that although this research and the track record of climate intervention is persuasive, “a serious cost-benefit discussion isn’t likely to make the Dubai agenda.”
Wall Street Journal subscribers can [read the whole thing here[(https://www.wsj.com/articles/net-zero-fails-the-cost-benefit-test-paris-climate-accord-cop28-748ae52d).
https://patriotpost.us/articles/102536-in-brief-net-zero-fails-the-cost-benefit-test-2023-12-01
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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