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Comment by nashashmi | Hacker News Reader

I always wondered why the climate impact of a recovering ozone was not taken into account when forecasting climate change?

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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.

> 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.

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?

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?

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