Well May 21, 2011 wasn’t as epic as everyone had thought was going to be, you know the world rupturing, the earth splitting in two, the second coming of Jesus, and even Zombies eating our brains. Instead of the world ending, we got a second chance at life, and a second chance for our atmosphere.
CFCs were amazing when they came out, low toxicity levels, they had low reactivity levels, and pretty much were non-flammable. Only problem… when you use them, they float up into the ‘heavens’ and eat away at the ozone bye “reacting” with the molecules and splitting them up for a hundred years or so, tearing up more molecules apart and making a hole even bigger than it was before. The ozone protects us against ultraviolet radiation, and against deadly solar rays that cause cancer.
And for the last 20 years many scientist thought it was going to take years to repair the damage and amazingly they were “wrong” Australian researchers have just recently been able to accurately model a bunch of the complicated seasonal weather patterns over the pole, with this information. They were happy to announce that the ozone levels are rising, and they actually have improved by over 15% since they tested the hole back in the late 1990s. This is amazing, but it’s a slow process we still have another sixty plus years to get back to normal speed.
But now we reach the fork in the road… if the ozone hole fixes up… the temperatures will start to go up, meaning that it will melt the Arctic poles. Well… damn, we can’t seem to do anything right with the environment anymore… We make ozone holes, and we all burn up by radioactive solar rays, we seal up the holes, and we start burning up because it keeps all the temperature inside. So I guess this is a bitter sweet set of news, maybe 30 years from now we’ll have to start using CFC’s again to cool the planet down, then repeat the process all over again.
Via: Dvice & Scientific American
