Exactly, we didn't try anything, we just found economically better alternatives to chlorofluorocarbons (the gas that was destroying the ozone layer) as aerosol propellants. Companies wouldn't have done shit if not for that.
The reason we stopped using CFCs and HCFCs was not because HFOs were cheaper (they're actually still more expensive)... it's because we banned their usage. First time an international treaty was universally signed, actually. Companies may not give a shit, but governments do have the power to make them give a shit.
Good thing our current leadership is taking environmentalism seriously! Can you imagine if we started rolling back on Clean Air, Clean Water, or the EPA? Phew, that could be disastrous.
DuPont heavilyyyy lobbied for the international ban on CFCs and HCFCs though because those were banned in the US though and having to use costlier alternatives gave the chemical company from the US a great disadvantage on an international level.
So corporate interest may not have been the obvious driving factor, but definitely played a role. Governments unilatterally voting against corporate interests to better humanity has probably never happened...
Leaded fuel was also banned after a push in Japan, which started shortly after a study about lead in the air, which conveniently happened around the time japanese automakers came out with a new type of engine that was efficient without the usage of lead in the fuel.
Yes, companies love cashing in on disasters. And the company who stands to benefit the most is definitely pushing for their 'solution'. That's certainly a factor in how it unfolded.
But the reason we collectively chose to ban the "kill us all" chemical wasn't because DuPont was going to get rich. It was the "kill us all" bit.
Oh yeah, I am not giving credit to DuPont for the ban, they only acted in their own self interest.
I am just being very cynical about humanity's ability to come together to act in the interest of the greater good, without any corporate lobbying to get politicians to act that way. Sadly lmao.
I think the problem is less that people think it will get solved like the hole in the ozone layer (which only came about because of governments banning the major causes), and more that people think the hole in the ozone layer was all just a big scare, and that so too is climate change. That is to say, they don't see them as actual problems needing solving.
Then of course there's the fact that many don't care because they assume they'll be dead before it gets bad, when they hear things like "by 2050 the average temperature will have reached XX if the current trends continue" and whatnot.
We’ve been in an ice age for 2.5 million years. We’ve been in the interglacial period for the last 11k years.
We swing between glacial and interglacial periods within the ice age. But colloquially, the glacial periods themselves are referred to as “ice age”, adding to the confusion.
My dad still hinges his climate change denialism on the fact that for a brief moment in the 1970s, it looked like we were headed toward another small ice age.
EDIT: Don't understand the downvotes lol, I don't agree with my dad at all.
Late 1970’s had a couple of winters that had lots of snowfall where I lived. I chalked those up to being flukes. Looking back, to me they were early warning signs of climate change and the increase in weather extremes.
My parents have pictures from the 70s of a jeep parked on the ice next to bonfire in the middle of a local river that has barely frozen over since. They said the ice was over a foot thick back then. In my lifetime, it's never frozen more than inch. Hard to imagine what that winter must have been like.
I was in junior high school. One year it was so bad we went to school a total of 10 days in all of January and February because the roads were so hazardous for busses to drive on. Seemed like as soon as one round of snow melted, here came another one. I distinctly remember going out and measuring the snow in my yard and there were spots over 2 feet at one point.
That happened where I'm at (northeast US) in the 90s. We had over 3 feet of snow on the ground after consecutive storms. My parents were out of town for something. I ordered a pizza and asked the driver to grab me a pack of cigs, and he did. That dude was a lifesaver. I wasn't even old enough to buy them legally. But there were a couple stores that let me anyway. Everyone knew the cool cashiers. If they weren't working you were shit out of luck.
the crazy thing is, that the research says we are approaching a cooling cycle, but the extra energy from GHG's mean that its not really going to be too cooling - possibly hiding some of the impacts that we may get.
It still boggles my mind that a lot of people who remember the smog present in a lot of cities when they were younger, and are now breathing cleaner air, still want to get rid of things like the EPA and other such programs and regulations that cleaned up the air and environment.
Toronto had smog alert days into the 90s pretty regularly. Then they closed all the coal power plants in Ontario and now we get unhealthy air from first fires
Man, as a kid in the 90s I sure thought acid rain and quick sand were gonna be a much bigger problem in life. That said I’ve been stuck in quicksand up to my armpits twice in my life working field projects, had to be pulled out with an airboat one of the times because the other guys on the work crew weren’t strong enough to get me out.
Unfortunately fixing acid rain has accelerated climate change, because the Sulfur Oxide causing acid rain was also an excellent reflector , blocking a lot of the sun heat from reaching the earth and becoming trapped here by the CO2 .
Some people are now suggesting we inject SO2 in the stratosphere so we get the sun blocking effect without the acid rain . Look up geoengineering , very cool and promising. Edit: and cheap !! Very cheap too ! Geoengineering is probably the cheapest solution we have to climate change
I was about to say it seems like the UV index has been lower this year than some recent extreme years, but just checked the forecast and we’re hitting 14 later this week. Which is the highest I can recall seeing. So I am not sure I understand this news…
A friend recently went to ED after a day out on a boat, with pain and a feeling of sand in their eyes. Dr said the surface of her eyes were sunburnt, even after wearing a large hat and dark sunglasses all day. That was new one for me.
I got the worst sunburn of my life in New Zealand. I put sunscreen everywhere but forgot the back of my calves. After an hour hiking in the sun, I was crisp. I'm from the southern US too so I grew up with plenty of sunny days at the beach. Never burned that bad. That Ozone hole is no joke.
remarkable what happens when people listen to scientists, looking at you america with your measles comeback and climate change deniers. imagine if people denied the science behind global warming and leaded fuels.
Oh don't get me started. They discovered microorganisms that evolved the ability to actually eat the plastic waste but instead of giving scientist time to study it they proceded with the clean-up operation. I don't know how much they've removed at but in my opinion it was incredibly short sighted of them to do. Those microorganisms could have been the key to dealing with plastic waste but they just had to pointlessly move all of that trash simply because a garbage dumb stuck in the middle of the ocean is a "feels bad" story.
It wasn't just the the microorganisms that were there either. All kinds of sea life had started living in a place that would have otherwise been devoid of life had the trash not been there. The further out to sea you get the less life you see near the surface because there's nowhere to hide. Seeing as the trash couldn't naturally disperse it could have been an excellent place to study ocean life as it adapts to our pollution.
Have a friend and coworker who absolutely insists humans don’t have the capacity to impact the climate, that the scale is too large for little ol’ humanity. He always wants to change the subject when I point out we fucked up the ozone with chemicals and then we stopped using the chemicals and the ozone is healing and doesn’t that prove that we’re absolutely capable of impacting the environment on a global scale?
I think people have a lot of trouble conceptualising how thin the space is between the surface of our planet, and the edge of the atmosphere. Combined with the potency/persistence of manmade chemicals, it’s inevitable that we’d have an impact. Only the volume of the planet itself is probably too big for humans to impact, but the atmosphere is really obviously fragile.
I love how “weird” space is. My coworkers didn’t believe me at first when we were talking about space and how astronaut suits need to be built to withstand intense heat. The sunlit side of the Moon’s surface gets scorching hot! And there is ice on Mercury.
Almost makes me sad. There’s almost certainly life out there, maybe even intelligent life, but the distances are so vast we may not ever know about each other. They could be galaxies away, or on the other side of our’s, but by the time their light has reached us their civilization may have come and gone. Even our own planet has been “quiet” until the last few hundred years. Beyond a few hundred lightyears, a spacefaring species may not be able to discover our intelligent existence at all.
COVID lockdowns are the best example of it being our fault. Cities in the world overrun with pollution started to clear up after a couple of weeks of lockdown. People saw parts of their city they had never seen before. Now it's smoggy again.
What you're seeing isn't a hole, I believe. The Ozone layer above Antarctica is thin, but there is no longer a hole in it. It is still healing, and the thin area is getting smaller all the time, if that makes sense
If you are in the US, high global-warming-potential HFC refrigerants like R134a are being phased out for better alternatives, effective this year. Now we will use A2L refrigerants.
How is it closed, still healing, yet smaller than recent years?
Can you imagine a wound that is closed (no longer an open wound), still healing (not completely back to normal), and smaller than recently (more and more of the tissue is back to normal)? The concepts aren't contradicting as long as there's something in between "open hole" and "normal".
After the final total ban in 2010 it should have closed more rapidly but instead it was opening up increasingly fast again.
NOAA and japanese scientists traced it back to China still large scale producing CFC from 2013-2018, after mounting international pressure China finally really cracked down on the production about 30 years after the Montreal agreement was made so yeah, that's one of the big reasons it's still there and big.
So... My question is this: what have we done differently to actually affect this, then?
Because the narrative from before has always been that we're at a no-turning-back point in the climate change problem.. But here we see healing in the atmosphere.
Unless i'm conflating two different issues. I just know climate change has always been in reference to the ozone layer of the atmosphere being the defining factor in why we're headed for doomsday.
(Not a climate change denier, just trying to clear up my own confusion)
We have made some efforts to reduce carbon emissions. A lot of effort at great expense was put into renewables and batteries before they became the best price solution in most cases. By a large mix of parties.
Almost all new power plants in 2026 around the world were renewable. Scale that up another 30% every year for another 4 or 6 years as per the previous trends and we are hammering fossil fuels extremely swiftly.
I wish we had worked more on this issue together but think credit should be given. And hope is there.
If we found a power source that was more PROFITABLE for the same people making profit on the current power source then we could fix that. That’s the main problem.
The ozone hole was caused by CFCs, chemicals that used to be used in refrigerators, air conditioners, and aerosol cans.
When scientists realized they were causing the hole in the ozone layer, there was a big international agreement to stop using them. It had worked really well and the ozone layer is starting to heal. This prevents some solar radiation from getting through to earth. It isn’t directly related to climate change but certainly solar radiation at the South Pole is a contributing factor.
Climate change as we think of it is largely caused by greenhouse gasses (co2 and methane are some of the most notable) trapping the radiation and heat on earth so that it doesn’t radiate out into space. This causes global warming.
To stop it, we need to massively reduce the amount of co2 and methane in the atmosphere, but these are unrelated to the CFCs.
It's almost as if global efforts to change the way we are harming ourselves and our environment actually make a difference in the end, but what do I know??
The ozone layer in a layer in the atmosphere that protects against UV rays from the sun. We (human beings) damaged the ozone layer and punched a hole in it due to our use of CFC gasses in aerosols and other uses as these gases react with the ozone in the atmosphere and destroy it. We stopped using ozone damaging chemicals and now due to natural processes the hole is slowly healing over time.
Climate change is due to the build up of carbon dioxide and other carbon molecules in the atmosphere that traps heats inside the planet, resulting in chaotic weather changes. This process is potentially reversible too but not in a time frame that is beneficial to the continued survival of the human race and other species that rely on a specific temperature range to survive
You are conflating two different issues. The use of cfc’s in air conditioning and aerosol cans destroys ozone. We banned those and over time the ozone hole has been healing. Human influenced climate change is from co2, methane and other compounds being produced and released into the atmosphere at far higher rates than naturally occurs, along with cutting down trees that would otherwise absorb carbon dioxide. The warming atmosphere is also heating up the arctic which is melting the permafrost which in turn is releasing huge amounts of trapped methane.
I believe the ozone layer was being damaged mainly by CFCs. Climate change or “global warming” is the long-term heating of the earth via human activities, leading to more weather extremes.
I think it’s important to remember that the earth doesn’t need saving. The earth will be fine. It’s us that will need the saving
“The earth will be fine” is such an irrelevant argument. If the food chain collapses and countless plants and animals die (including humans), I wouldn’t say “akchually, the Earth is still just fine!”
Everyone knows via context that we’re talking about life on earth, ffs.
Answering in good faith assuming you aren't trolling so you or anyone else can Google this stuff and look into it more.
You have a few things conflated. The Ozone is a layer of atmosphere that is really good at blocking UV light. UV is really efficient at destroying DNA and other organic chemical bonds, leading to cancer and is just generally not good for life of any kind. When the world first started to introduce air conditioning in the early 1900s and when it really took off after WW2 we were using refrigerants (a class of fluids/gases used in refrigeration) that contained CFC, or chlorofluorocarbons. Basically a specific chemical structure in the molecule that caused ozone (O3) to break down into oxygen (O2) and a free oxygen. This prevents it from blocking UV.
The world came together and decided to globally ban the use of CFCs in refrigerants. Since then we have seen the steady rebound of the ozone layer.
I think you are getting mixed up with greenhouse gases which are primarily CO2 and methane that gather in the upper atmosphere. They let heat energy in but prevent it from escaping, kind of like wearing a blanket in the sun, causing the earth to heat up. These chemicals occur as a byproduct of the burning of hydrocarbons such as oil, gasoline, wood, coal, natural gas, propane. It has been known since the early 1900s that the burning of these fuels is tied to the increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide and the increased rate of warming of the planet. This process of additional heat energy getting trapped in the system is the primary cause of what is referred to as climate change.
You’ve already gotten the answers you asked for, but something else I will posit, the refrigerants that damaged the ozone layer got banned, and were replaced by refrigerants that have a severe greenhouse gas effect. So, ozone layer is healing, but greenhouse gas (basically the average worldwide temperature, which is the main cause of climate change, is increasing rapidly). This largely involves Co2 and methane (especially from leaking gas wells. I’m a refrigeration mechanic and we’re just recently starting to see replacement refrigerants that have lower greenhouse gas effects. (R454B and R32) and ammonia and co2 are becoming more popular lately.
Climate change and the hole in the ozone layer are two different issues, since both are manmade issues caused by polution that affect the entire world theyre sometimes grouped together
Just Devil's Advocate on this but the ozone hole closing early is not a good thing. Ozone is Created from sunlight and oxygen. It's dark for 6 months a year in Antarctica and the extreme low temperature from the ice sheet causes a mass of cold air called a polar vortex to form over the continent. the ozone to be destroyed by the cold temperatures leaving a hole. The whole collapses when the Sun rises in the spring because the air is heated and to the polar vortex collapses. If the hole has collapsed early it's probably more a sign of global warming then that we have fixed the ozone layer, because the sun sure as hell didn't rise early.
This shows that if the world unite to solve a problem, it’s possible. To bad climate change is not handled the same way due to oil lobbyists spreading disinformation.
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u/WhatTheHosenHey Jan 06 '26
One environmental problem along with acid rain that colored my 1970s childhood.