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Comment by bolangi | Hacker News Reader

Satellites have many chlorinated and florinated chemicals, so being vaporized means introducing large volumes to the upper atmosphere where they can catalyze the destruction of ozone molecules. I'd be interested how the volume compares to other sources of atmospheric halogens. They could hardly match the quantity of refrigerant gases released, but being deposited directly in the upper atmosphere may make them more potent.

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Good catch. I doubt it's even a rounding error right now, but with the space market undergoing a rather rapid growth (good thing!), it's a good time to start tracking this and hopefully address before it turns into a problem.

>hopefully address before it turns into a problem.

Ron Howard's voice "They didn't."

But in all seriousness, there will be zero stomach for limiting launches for the ozone layer. I'm calling it now. Group 1 won't believe it's a problem. Group 2 will say it's just lefty elitists trying to ruin the economy. Group 3 will say there's no such thing as satellites.

Check back in 40 years. I bet I'm right.

New Zealand will be back to the top of the skin cancer list. We'll be getting the 10 minute exposure sunburns in winter too!

Well… did they or didn’t they?

It's funny, one of the benchmarks I've used when trying to decide when things went off the rails was that banning CFCs was a relatively uncontroversial thing in the 1990s. Now, I agree with your pessimism.

The same rails that failed to ban coal power in the 1990s? That controversially both did and didn't ban nuclear power? And what about satanic rituals? People rightly disagree on decisions that have unknown consequences in either direction. It's not off the rails, it's just different from your personal opinion.

I strongly recommend Merchants of Doubt [1], it's fairly clear what happened: learning from the "mistake" of the tobacco industry financing research, the oil industry understood that producing their own honest science was a liability, not a defense. The only way to avoid being held accountable for climate change was to sneakily but relentlessly attack science to discredit it. Keep the controversy alive. Seed doubt in the mind of people.

Not just regarding climate, virtually all of science. Science itself is the target. The overlap between climate change denial and COVID denial (for instance) is documented: same think tanks, same commentators. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchants_of_Doubt

[2] https://www.desmog.com/covidenial-executive-summary/

You seem to assume it'll be a problem. My bet is group 1 is right and everyone agrees with them except a few nutters on the internet who like to fantasize about environmental damage from everything good.

I'm moving my timeline up from 40 years now.

During the peak something like a million metric tons of refrigerants were making their way into the atmosphere yearly.

Maybe one or two tons of vaguely related chemicals are making their way into the atmosphere in the form of deorbited satellite materials and there's no 1:1 guarantee they're having anything like similar effects.

So it's a number measured in parts per million of the problem we were having in the 80s.

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