Whatever Happened to the Hole in the Ozone Layer? | Hacker News Reader

Whatever Happened to the Hole in the Ozone Layer?

livescience.com

31 pointsjaybol15 comments

Articles like this remind me of a website idea I had: web-wide mostly human curated collections of articles on something, tracking the progress of something over time and giving a summary. I feel like it's too easy to see something interesting that you'd like to follow but then not have any reasonable way to do so. You can do things like Google Alerts, but you need to choose the right keywords and would probably get a lot of false-positives.

(My example is always an article I read about a decade ago about mouth bacteria which caused no or minimal cavities but could also overpower the normal bacteria, which if introduced would make it so you virtually never needed to go to the dentist)

What you're describing looks like Google Living Stories. http://livingstories.googlelabs.com/

The code is open-source and there is even an Wordpress plugin.

BTW: I always wanted a website or newspaper that covered stories that made the headlines to investigate it years later, to see how these people are doing now or how events shaped their lives. Would be interesting to read.

I'd like to take this one step further and actually hold people who make big claims accountable. So part of the proposed website could have members actually contact the scientists (or journalists) every 5 years and find out if they're meeting they're predictions and if not, why not.

That's what Long Now's http://www.longbets.org/ is for :)

So sort of a logical view of Wikipedia with RSS?

I've always wanted this product too. That may actually be workable, simple solution. If you see an interesting technology that you want to track, just subscribe to its wikipedia article's RSS.

I'm pretty sure people just don't know what to do about it. Those tons of aresoles that people released in the past decades are now in the ozone layer, and they act as catalysts for the decomposition reaction from ozone to o2, changing the equilibrium constant while essentially not being affected.

Unless people figure out some way to eat up whats already been released, there really isn't anything about it that merits news, other than the idea that as many people as possible should know.

>Those tons of aresoles

I initially read that as "those tons of arse-holes." Sort of half a Freudian slip?

"Closing the ozone hole actually speeds up the melting of the polar ice caps, according to a 2009 study from Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research."

Unintended consequence?

Down here in Argentina we haven't forgotten about it at all. Tourists heading to the far south in the summer are often cautioned to wear lots of sunblock because it's so easy to get sunburned there.

Really? An article I read back when the ozone hole was a big news story pointed out that at high latitudes, the sun angle is so low that sunburn is quite unlikely, ozone or no ozone. What are ultraviolet radiation measurements in populated places in the extreme south of Argentina compared to, say, measurements in tropical Central America?

Well, I don't know about the measurements - I'm just an ignorant programmer, not a climatologist. :)

But AFAIK you can get sunburnt in extreme latitudes, ozone or no ozone in fact.

http://arcticglass.blogspot.com/2006/04/bedroom-view-938-pm_... http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/10/dayint...

Not sure but it probably involves Christopher Lambert, Sean Connery, Virginia Madson, Michael Ironside and John C. McGinley, i.e the greatest movie cast ever assembled.

You forgot Bruce Willis.

People will downvote you for that comment, but man I laughed.

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