[lug] Anyone else hate to get rid of old equipment?

[Bear Giles]

Does anyone know if the ozone hole observations match the models?  Ozone
does wash out of the atmosphere, after all, so you would expect the hole to
heal as this happens.  The problem was that we were dumping a lot more freon
into the atmosphere than could be naturally washed out.

BTW, addressing an earlier point, there's a huge difference between
first-year ice (what you see approaching every winter) and second- and
third-year ice (what's there from year to year).  First-year ice is a
navigational pain but is fairly fragile and is easily broken up by warming
weather.  Older ice is thicker and much more resilient.  It's already
survived a summer or two, after all.  This is the ice that keeps the north
pole nice and shiny during the endless summer day.

I've read that the amount and quality of older ice is plummeting.  It's also
a self-reinforcing effect since less summer ice means much warmer waters
which in turn means less of the ice makes it into the next year.  This is
the cascade that can leave the arctic ice-free within the near future -- and
with it a dramatic change in circumpolar weather.

(Aside: there was a news story a few weeks ago about a polar expedition
being caught on the ice by rain, and I think they even heard a nearby
thunderstorm at the base camp.  This is a very serious danger since there's
no real way to dry your clothes when standing on an ice pack.)


On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 12:02 PM, <stimits at comcast.net> wrote:

>
> > There was scientific consensus that freon was destroying the ozone
> > layer.  So they outlawed it.
> > IFF that was proved wrong,
>
> What is IFF? For what I know this has never been proved wrong (at
> least not more reasonably as smoking has been proved not causing
> cancer).
> ...
>
> "If and Only If". I once wrote some game software though, for a shoot-em
> up,
> it had an IFF system...Identify Friend or Foe. I suppose that although this
> was not the intent, this form of IFF is true for the conversation as well.
>
> D. Stimits, stimits AT comcast DOT net
>
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