confucius

Much has been made of the apparent 'holes' in the stratospheric polar ozone layer and the increased risk to people and animals of increased exposure to harmful solar ultraviolet radiation in the regions immediately beneath the 'holes'. Well let me see if I understand this. The ozone layer protects the Earth from a significant amount of harmful UV radiation. Ozone is a gas O3 composed of dimeric oxygen and free radical oxygen that is produced by... well by UV light acting on dimeric oxygen. So presumably the photons of UV light that hit oxygen molecules provide energy to disrupt the molecular bond and produce free radical atomic oxygen. This is pretty reactive stuff so I guess it links up rapidly with oxygen molecules to form good old ozone the protector. Okay so we know 20% of the atmosphere is oxygen and that oxygen reacts with UV radiation, or ozone would not form right? So this ozone is pretty amazing stuff in that even relatively small amounts in the tenuous stratosphere provide protection from UV radiation that a full thickness atmosphere can not do. And my point is? Well is ozone not the by product of oxygen molecules reacting with harmful UV rays. So are ozone molecules really big like the Queen Mary 2 or am I missing the point completely (again).

No your not convincing me guys (nice planetary neb Phi). Didnt quite get the pirate thing. We mere mortals will not be informed whether there is or is not enough oil to keep our four wheel drives going for the next 10, 50 or 250 years because it involves making lots and lots of money. One of the cleanest and cheapest forms of green electricity is hydro-power but even that can cause enviromental problems. Some of the newer technologies like hydrogen fuel cells just seem plain daft to me. I mean what cost to the enviroment in obtaining both the energy and materials for manufacture of the cell and then energy for hydrogen? Or hybrid vehicles carrying lead acid batteries around that need electricity to charge up - how efficient is that? Its all just window dressing to me. Yes my original question was set tongue in cheek but as an example I see computers now requiring 400 plus watt power supplies and processors that you can boil a kettle on, and all that wasted power used (mainly) for browsing the web. The greenhouse gas thing may or may not be a reality in terms of global warming (if its a real phenomenom). As we in the West have become more affluent we have tolerated greater wastage of energy. For goodness sake can't we start doing constructive audits of energy and resource use to allow us to make realistic cuts of our dependency on fossil fuels.

The measured increase in rate of global warming seems to me to be related to the expansion of the internet and specificly the explosion in the World Wide Web. Okay, but there does appear to me to be a case of many decapitated poultry in rapid motion (and I aint talking H5N1). Copernicus showed us that we are not the centre of the Universe. Why have we retreated back to placing ourselves there again. When I were a lad every schoolboy worth his salt knew about the 'greenhouse effect'. That was back - well almost to Copernicus actually. Yes our planetary twin Venus with its atmosphere of carbon dioxide (mainly). Now we measure increases in our tiny, tiny amount of carbon dioxide (plus anything else we can think of that could conceivebly be a greenhouse gas) and hey presto - we're all going to fry (well apart from Western Europe apparently - sorry). So where was that science that says an increase of X in our tropospheric greenhouse gases leads to a change of mean global temperature of Y?? And even if the measured increase in carbon dioxide is due to combustion of fossil fuels, we know little enough of the carbon cycle and the oceanic heat sink to be doing a chicken licken routine. If there is sound science out there in respect of climate change / global warming, it must be thin on the ground.. Cos I aint seen much of it yet!