The Ozone layer will fix itself.

[Sci-Fi]

From the Australian:

Ozone hole to mend by 2040
By Stephen Lunn, Tokyo correspondent
May 29, 2002

THE hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica will disappear by 2040, Japanese scientists forecast yesterday, offering a far more hopeful timeframe than previous research predictions.

Using a supercomputer to model future global atmospheric conditions, scientists Tatsuya Nagashima and Masaaki Takahashi from Tokyo University predicted that the next 15 years will see little or no change in the size of the ozone hole before a slow improvement begins in the late 2030s.

From that point there will be a sudden increase in the amount of ozone in the stratosphere, leading to a full recovery by about 2040.

The pair said the scientific community now accepted that legal restrictions on chlorofluorocarbons, previously found in products such as aerosols and refrigeration products, had been effective in undoing the decades of damage done to ozone levels, including the creation of a massive hole in the ozone layer in the 1980s.

But the Japanese modelling differed from other research in that it predicted global warming would not heat up the planet as fast as others anticipate.

"In other models, the amount of greenhouse gases is shown to warm the atmosphere, leading to a consequent radical cooling of the stratosphere (which slows the recovery process)," Professor Nagashima told The Australian yesterday.

"Our model suggests there won't be such a radical impact by the greenhouse gases on the cooling of the stratosphere, so the reduction of fluorons over the next 40 years will correspond almost exactly to the recovery of the ozone levels."

The ozone layer is crucial to the limitation the exposure of the earth to harmful ultraviolet rays, and its degradation has been of particular concern for Australia and other southern hemisphere nations.

International laws have banned the use of CFCs in the manufacture of new products, and obsolescence has resulted in a gradual decline in the amount of CFCs reaching the atmosphere.

The Japanese team said the recovery of ozone levels in the southern hemisphere could be accurately predicted using its powerful computer modelling, but that unknowns such as the strength of a stratospheric jet stream in the northern hemisphere made predictions north of the equator a harder proposition.

At the North Pole, where destruction of the ozone layer is not as serious as in the south, the team predicted the amount of ozone will decrease until 2010 and then mostly remain unchanged.

The findings will soon be published in the academic journal, American Geophysical Union.

Previous studies have been more pessimistic about the recovery rate of the ozone layer. Most published work, including research by the US space agency NASA, has predicted the ozone layer will not begin to recover until 2050 at the earliest.

[MX-5]

So let me get this straight........

They spent a buttload of someone else's money to figure all this......

and if they're wrong, they won't have to pay it back?!

I want that job!!!!

[PTCruzr]

I say we're all doomed. DOOMED I tell you, DOOMED!!!!!

[QuicksilverDon]

Originally posted by PTCruzr
I say we're all doomed. DOOMED I tell you, DOOMED!!!!!

AND - Any women who want to experience the best sex of their life before the world ends - please call me!

[PTCruzr]

Originally posted by QuicksilverDon

AND - Any women who want to experience the best sex of their life before the world ends - please call me!

Yeah, I've heard that Don will give you the best 30 seconds you've ever had.

[Juicy]

oh oh oh...Don, that's quite a rip!

[MonkeyBoy]

does that include the drive over?