Yes, it usually doesn’t pose a danger anymore. But it’s a natural process. It took time to damage it, it takes time for it to heal. It will close again in 2040 (back to 1980 levels of ozone)
One possible reason for the higher-than-normal growth is the Hunga Tonga volcanic eruption in January 2022, which introduced massive quantities of water vapor into the air. “The water vapor could have led to the heightened formation of polar stratospheric clouds, where chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) can react and accelerate ozone depletion," said Inness.
China did increase CFCs… in the past. This is one of the reasons why the hole in the ozone is bad. There are already natural processes that can affect it, we don’t want to be piling on.
Finding a clean top-down photo was also surprisingly difficult, but I chose this one because it’s laying fairly straight, and there’s a visible prominence of its hip bone and spine. I don’t want to count fur-fluff in the width, so multiplying the hip to spine count by two gets us a hip-to-hip count of 56 pixels, which is 0.209% of its 268 pixel length. Multiplying wiki’s length average by 0.209 gets us a width of: 25.08 cm, x 120 cm gives us an area of 3,009.6 cm² (3.24 sq ft), or to make our units the same, 0.030096 km²
8,515,767 km² (Brazil) / 0.030096 km² (capybara) = 282,953,448.96 capybaras per Brazil
x 3 = 848,860,346.88 capybaras per 1 antarctic ozone hole!
It is, but it ebbs and flows over time, with the seasons. Lots of natural processes can interact with the ozone levels. It should be back to 1980 levels by 2040.
Yeah, that’s what I heard too. And it was because of CFC’s and wasn’t related to climate change. Once CFCs were outlawed, I heard the hole in the ozone was fixing itself (and ultimately fixed).
They signed the Montreal protocol, which is what banned cfcs internationally.
But that doesn’t stop them from either using existing stockpiles, although I don’t know how they still have a significant amount of either, or ignoring the treaty altogether.
CFCs are actually amazing refrigerants. They are low pressure and were fairly cheap to manufacture compared to modern refrigerants. The low pressure is nice, because it means the systems that work with those don’t need to be designed to withstand 400+ psi like you need for 410a for example. That also means installers on lower pressure systems only need to soft solder joints most of the time, instead of brazing the lines together. That’s the only reasons I can think of that they’d still be using damn CFCs.
We show that emissions from eastern mainland China are 7.0 ± 3.0 (±1 standard deviation) gigagrams per year higher in 2014–2017 than in 2008–2012, and that the increase in emissions arises primarily around the northeastern provinces of Shandong and Hebei. This increase accounts for a substantial fraction (at least 40 to 60 per cent) of the global rise in CFC-11 emissions. We find no evidence for a significant increase in CFC-11 emissions from any other eastern Asian countries or other regions of the world where there are available data for the detection of regional emissions.
The hole is healing, it isn’t healed. It no longer poses a threat to most populations, but it ebbs and flows. Estimates for total healing (pre-1980 levels) are 2040.
One possible reason for the higher-than-normal growth is the Hunga Tonga volcanic eruption in January 2022, which introduced massive quantities of water vapor into the air. “The water vapor could have led to the heightened formation of polar stratospheric clouds, where chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) can react and accelerate ozone depletion," said Inness.
Yet despite experiencing large seasonal growth this year, the ozone hole is still decreasing in size overall. “Based on the Montreal Protocol and the decrease of anthropogenic ozone-depleting substances, scientists currently predict that the global ozone layer will reach its normal state again by around 2050,”
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