We managed to dial things back a bit, so that became a smaller problem.
We used to see regular news reports of actual rivers on fire. Things are still way too bad, but we forcefully throttled some things as we saw how quickly the damage was compounding.
Women’s hair doesn’t defy gravity without lots of help.
Oh my god I needed your comment for it to finally click, I was thinking “they stopped putting their hair up to protect their shoulders from the increased UVs”? But of course, it was referencing the sprays!
Well it’s understandable, the concept of being able to actually cooperate and do something about the environment on a world scale instead of just blindly pretending it’s not a thing until it kills us all is a bit hard to believe for younger generations for obvious reasons.
iirc ~1/4 of the worlds energy production is renewable. More than 90% of all new electricity capacity worldwide came from renewable sources in 2024. Doomers want you to believe it can’t happen again while we are in the very decade that is likely to change the world. Public policy doesn’t even matter at this point, renewable energy is cheaper, so nearly all new investments are in renewables.
Energy sources are only part of the issue (albeit a major one) and enormous damage has already been done to a disastrous point, calling people “doomers” with an intent to ridicule their angst, worries and experiences is akin to climate change denial.
Also, public policy is constantly used in an expensive way if that it suits the ruling classes, markets are not some neutral forces in a vacuum.
I’m concerned about climate change. But if you ask most people how much progress we’ve made they would say “barely any”. That belief that we can’t do it, is the main thing aside from public policy slowing us down. When people think things are hopeless, they often don’t see the point in fighting or changing their behavior. I also think most people don’t realize that renewable energy adoption has accelerated so quickly the last few years. Every year we have had massive growth over last year in adoption.
That’s only the case because it was the cheapest option available for a while. Oil execs noticed the trend and got cold feet, now a lot of governments are cutting back subsidies for renewables and actively hinder new projects being build. Here in germany we have investors abandoning half build solar parks cause they aren’t profitable anymore. At the same time we allow oil companies to bid for gigantic offshore projects just so they can say that they have no interest in actually building it after they won.
With the ozon hole you could see the world working together to fix it despite it beeing somewhat less profitable. With renewables you can see governments actively working against the movement despite it being the best in terms of environment and profits combined.
Solar is easily the cheapest energy and its getting cheaper every year. Repairing a coal power plant is not as attractive as a much cheaper to run biofuel plant. Etc.
Here in germany we have investors abandoning half build solar parks cause they aren’t profitable anymore.
Without knowing the specifics, I doubt profitability was the issue. Once a solar panel is installed it is pure profit with minimal maintenance. Companies get in trouble when they commit way more to a project than they can raise in investments. It seems more likely that is what happened.
Lastly your looking at a few countries that are pushing back with what amounts to theater (Germany is 56% renewable energy). Meanwhile the largest producer of energy in the world, China, is staying committed to converting to renewables and s also 56% of the way there. But even in countries pushing back the growth trend is clear, we are past early adoption and squarely in the common adoption phase of electrifying our technology out of fossil fuels.
We could stop producing all greenhouse gases today, and the planet would continue warming for 100 years. it’s a pretty tough problem we have on our hands.
Sure but the problem would be 100 times worse if fossil fuel adoption doest decline. Its good news that we seem to be on the way to shifting our behavior.
There’s been some conservation wins that I know of. Okaloosa Darter fish came off of endangered status, and eventually off of threatened The Red Cockaded Woodpecker was elevated from endangered to threatened a few years ago.
Controlled burns in the US long leaf pine forests have also lead to a return of the quail population.
Just trying to sprinkle a little good news out there.
American Bison, too. The repopulation of American bison (often mistakenly called buffalo) is one of the most successful repopulation efforts in history. The reason you’re able to order buffalo (again, not actually buffalo) burgers at your local hipster burger joint is because American bison is no longer endangered. The population has come from less than 1000 total bison (all privately owned by a handful of conservationists) to over 400k today.
That’s because the root of both is to conserve. To keep things the way they are.
Politics gets in the way of that reality since they don’t actively want to keep it the same, they actually want to regress back to previous times they can exploit personally.
The thing is it kinda isn’t. The ozone layer still needs about 20 years to get back to 1960 levels and the number of problematic states for this increasing again
TCO is expected to return to 1980 values around 2066 in the Antarctic, around 2045 in the Arctic, and around 2040 for the near-global average (60°N-60°S). - Source
Even if we stopped all greenhouse gas emmisions right now, the amount of heat stored in the ocean isn’t going to lower any time soon.
To add to this there’s also a massive El Nino about to happen and a potentially double Blue Ocean Event.
So with increasingly hot and highly acidic oceans now expelling Co2 (while also dissolving all the vitally important oxygen producing phytoplankton), and fuck all ice cover at the poles to reflect the radiation from the sun, the earth will continue to heat faster and faster.
We’re also going to run out of fresh water reserves globally very soon, and arable land is still looking to be 90% depleted by 2050, so massive global famines will kill billions in the next few decades.
And this isn’t even taking into account the feriliser shortage and El Nino induced crop die off we’re expecting in the next year, which while it might lessen the impact of further greenhouse gasses on our planet by killing a lot of people, is only going to speed up the soil degredation issue we’re facing.
Considering our current course of action is basically ‘business as usual’, the planet might not even be habitable to any life whatsoever once we’re done with these feedback loops. ‘Venus by Tuesday’ is an exaggeration when it comes to timescale, but a very real possibility otherwise.
2018 to 2022 didnt see much change (and given how far until its fully returned to normal, I think you can see qhy - it takes a long time to fully heal), but we’re certainly pretty far into success compared to where we were.
tl;dr: the massively increased rate of rocket launches and re-entry satellite burn-ups is creating a significant amount of pollution that is probably damaging the Ozone layer.
One of my coworkers insists that the hole in the ozone layer is an iris that expands and contracts for regulation. When I asked him what it was regulating, he just shrugged and gave a look that said “I don’t know, you tell me”
He also claimed that believing that humans were capable of changing the global climate was pure hubris, despite the USSR deleting the Caspian sea decades ago.
And he thinks the wind turbines that have been installed in the past 10 years are making tornadoes worse, contradicting his claims that humans can’t change the climate
in a situation in which harm increase over time, like the rise of far right, anti-science, environmental damage, etc… perhaps that “wait” is a less ethical solution than to solve the problem
now, perhaps causing harm isn’t the way to go, but… the lesser of 2 evils may still be somewhat problematic
“For regulation” is a pretty weird take, but it is self regulating (in the absence of pollution from humans). When the ozone layer is thin, more UV gets through from the sun. UV from the sun ionizes O2 and splits it apart, creating oxygen free radicals which recombine and create ozone. Thus, less ozone leads to more ozone, hence self-regulation.
I thought the aerosols that affect the environment refer to the tiny aerosol particles at higher levels in the atmosphere.
Everyone in the 80s seemed to confuse the with aerosol hairspray, which wasn’t really a huge contributor. Still aren’t most sprays today generally not this so called aerosol style anymore?
It was the Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that were used as the primary propellant in aerosol sprays. More commonly known by the brand name Freon. Notice that basically every aerosol can manufactured today has a “CFC Free” badge somewhere. Refrigerant systems also moved away from using actual Freon, and now use alternative refrigerants.
CFCs were actually invented by the same guy who invented leaded gasoline, Thomas Midgley Jr… He is probably the single most environmentally destructive chemical engineer in history.
Name me another chemical engineer that could be argued did more harm. I don’t think all of Monsanto with agent orange and Roundup has done more than the TEL and CFC fuckup.
Where’s he buried? How long is the line to piss on his headstone?
Fritz Haber invented nitrogrn fixing fertilizers and is responsible for the massive baby boom across the globe after ww2 because so much more food could now be grown.
Except now there are 8b+ people on an increasingly warming and polluted planet and these fertilizers (alongside modern farming techniques and climate collapse, both of which came about because of this baby boom…) have all but destroyed the planets’ arable land.
Late 80s hairsprays and other canned aerosols were a sizeable contributor.
They were an easy fix, and stopped being a problem almost as soon as people decided to do something. That was way before the problem reached mainstream media, so when people started talking about it, they weren’t a problem anymore. But they surely were a problem for some time.
Kids these days don’t even know about the hole in the ozone later.
Trump wants to bring it back.
in australia they absolutely do
we take skin cancer very seriously down here
Cancer is probably the least dangerous living thing in Australia.
Cancer is living? I gotta get outta here
Wait till you hear about the guy who caught tapeworm cancer from his cancerous tapeworms
We managed to dial things back a bit, so that became a smaller problem.
We used to see regular news reports of actual rivers on fire. Things are still way too bad, but we forcefully throttled some things as we saw how quickly the damage was compounding.
Women’s hair doesn’t defy gravity without lots of help.
And there was that whole thing about trying to make cars burn a little cleaner so you could actually see from 1 side of a major city to another
Oh my god I needed your comment for it to finally click, I was thinking “they stopped putting their hair up to protect their shoulders from the increased UVs”? But of course, it was referencing the sprays!
I just told my kid about how we fixed acid rain through regulation just this morning
I think the only reason it worked was because there were cheaper alternatives to CFCs already available. So it didn’t cost them money.
Well it’s understandable, the concept of being able to actually cooperate and do something about the environment on a world scale instead of just blindly pretending it’s not a thing until it kills us all is a bit hard to believe for younger generations for obvious reasons.
I don’t understand, why would it sound implausible? Isn’t that what governments are FOR?
It’s what governments are supposed to be for.
Oh. Just oil?
Not when all governments have been captured by oil tycoons it isn’t.
Oh. But they were good for this before that, right?
But government BAD! Taxes BAD!
I know, the government is bad, so if we put a bad man in charge it’ll be a double negative and become good, right?
You ADD a bad person to the government, you don’t MULTIPLY.
But what do I know about maths?! Somehow the bad effects end up growing exponentially, and I can’t explain that.
From an accelerationist standpoint, yes. /s
It’s kinda our last big environmental win.
Yeah, last. Not latest, last.
iirc ~1/4 of the worlds energy production is renewable. More than 90% of all new electricity capacity worldwide came from renewable sources in 2024. Doomers want you to believe it can’t happen again while we are in the very decade that is likely to change the world. Public policy doesn’t even matter at this point, renewable energy is cheaper, so nearly all new investments are in renewables.
Energy sources are only part of the issue (albeit a major one) and enormous damage has already been done to a disastrous point, calling people “doomers” with an intent to ridicule their angst, worries and experiences is akin to climate change denial.
Also, public policy is constantly used in an expensive way if that it suits the ruling classes, markets are not some neutral forces in a vacuum.
I’m concerned about climate change. But if you ask most people how much progress we’ve made they would say “barely any”. That belief that we can’t do it, is the main thing aside from public policy slowing us down. When people think things are hopeless, they often don’t see the point in fighting or changing their behavior. I also think most people don’t realize that renewable energy adoption has accelerated so quickly the last few years. Every year we have had massive growth over last year in adoption.
That’s only the case because it was the cheapest option available for a while. Oil execs noticed the trend and got cold feet, now a lot of governments are cutting back subsidies for renewables and actively hinder new projects being build. Here in germany we have investors abandoning half build solar parks cause they aren’t profitable anymore. At the same time we allow oil companies to bid for gigantic offshore projects just so they can say that they have no interest in actually building it after they won.
With the ozon hole you could see the world working together to fix it despite it beeing somewhat less profitable. With renewables you can see governments actively working against the movement despite it being the best in terms of environment and profits combined.
Solar is easily the cheapest energy and its getting cheaper every year. Repairing a coal power plant is not as attractive as a much cheaper to run biofuel plant. Etc.
Without knowing the specifics, I doubt profitability was the issue. Once a solar panel is installed it is pure profit with minimal maintenance. Companies get in trouble when they commit way more to a project than they can raise in investments. It seems more likely that is what happened.
Lastly your looking at a few countries that are pushing back with what amounts to theater (Germany is 56% renewable energy). Meanwhile the largest producer of energy in the world, China, is staying committed to converting to renewables and s also 56% of the way there. But even in countries pushing back the growth trend is clear, we are past early adoption and squarely in the common adoption phase of electrifying our technology out of fossil fuels.
We could stop producing all greenhouse gases today, and the planet would continue warming for 100 years. it’s a pretty tough problem we have on our hands.
Sure but the problem would be 100 times worse if fossil fuel adoption doest decline. Its good news that we seem to be on the way to shifting our behavior.
There’s been some conservation wins that I know of. Okaloosa Darter fish came off of endangered status, and eventually off of threatened The Red Cockaded Woodpecker was elevated from endangered to threatened a few years ago.
Controlled burns in the US long leaf pine forests have also lead to a return of the quail population.
Just trying to sprinkle a little good news out there.
American Bison, too. The repopulation of American bison (often mistakenly called buffalo) is one of the most successful repopulation efforts in history. The reason you’re able to order buffalo (again, not actually buffalo) burgers at your local hipster burger joint is because American bison is no longer endangered. The population has come from less than 1000 total bison (all privately owned by a handful of conservationists) to over 400k today.
I saw on Ted Turner’s wiki page that he helped with that.
I had a Bison meatloaf once that was so good. It’s so much lighter than beef. It was like eating a meat cloud.
Now your just making shit up.
Winner of the “most penis euphemisms in one name” award.
Penis McPeniswoodchuck
The irony of all ironies is how similar the words “conservation” and “conservative” are.
That’s because the root of both is to conserve. To keep things the way they are.
Politics gets in the way of that reality since they don’t actively want to keep it the same, they actually want to regress back to previous times they can exploit personally.
None of that is worldwide.
The thing is it kinda isn’t. The ozone layer still needs about 20 years to get back to 1960 levels and the number of problematic states for this increasing again
Tbf, its not even yet a win technically.
If we turn around climate change, even if we fail to avoid quadrillion dollar sea level rise, I’m going to call it a win
I hope we don’t lose too much before we do win though, or after we do
Even if we stopped all greenhouse gas emmisions right now, the amount of heat stored in the ocean isn’t going to lower any time soon.
To add to this there’s also a massive El Nino about to happen and a potentially double Blue Ocean Event.
So with increasingly hot and highly acidic oceans now expelling Co2 (while also dissolving all the vitally important oxygen producing phytoplankton), and fuck all ice cover at the poles to reflect the radiation from the sun, the earth will continue to heat faster and faster.
We’re also going to run out of fresh water reserves globally very soon, and arable land is still looking to be 90% depleted by 2050, so massive global famines will kill billions in the next few decades.
And this isn’t even taking into account the feriliser shortage and El Nino induced crop die off we’re expecting in the next year, which while it might lessen the impact of further greenhouse gasses on our planet by killing a lot of people, is only going to speed up the soil degredation issue we’re facing.
Considering our current course of action is basically ‘business as usual’, the planet might not even be habitable to any life whatsoever once we’re done with these feedback loops. ‘Venus by Tuesday’ is an exaggeration when it comes to timescale, but a very real possibility otherwise.
So is that good news, that we’re moving in the right direction?
Though the very next sentence from that linked source says
2018 to 2022 didnt see much change (and given how far until its fully returned to normal, I think you can see qhy - it takes a long time to fully heal), but we’re certainly pretty far into success compared to where we were.
Well not to worry, all these internet swarm satellites might cause another one.
how so?
Video overview: https://youtu.be/oKK0dgDIxKY
There’s many studies, so here’s two:
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024GL109280
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2025EF007229
Article: https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/how-elon-musks-dying-satellites-could-hurt-the-ozone-layer
tl;dr: the massively increased rate of rocket launches and re-entry satellite burn-ups is creating a significant amount of pollution that is probably damaging the Ozone layer.
The aluminium nanoparticles these satelites shed when they burn up in re-entry during their disposal, are also toxic.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17435390.2025.2511694
Fucks saaaake.
Well that’s because we’re at now, not at later.
We’ve had one ozone yes, but what about later ozone?
nozone
Frozone
Calzone
deleted by creator
Bowling
[gets hit on head by aerosol can.]
Most don’t know that we have an ozone layer let alone that there is a hole in it.
One of my coworkers insists that the hole in the ozone layer is an iris that expands and contracts for regulation. When I asked him what it was regulating, he just shrugged and gave a look that said “I don’t know, you tell me”
He also claimed that believing that humans were capable of changing the global climate was pure hubris, despite the USSR deleting the Caspian sea decades ago.
And he thinks the wind turbines that have been installed in the past 10 years are making tornadoes worse, contradicting his claims that humans can’t change the climate
I think your coworker may be a lost cause, do you think you could convince him that anti-freeze and turpentine will make him see god?
Engineering a death by misadventure doesn’t seem ethical to me
Just wait for the people he follows on the internet to tell him
in a situation in which harm increase over time, like the rise of far right, anti-science, environmental damage, etc… perhaps that “wait” is a less ethical solution than to solve the problem
now, perhaps causing harm isn’t the way to go, but… the lesser of 2 evils may still be somewhat problematic
“For regulation” is a pretty weird take, but it is self regulating (in the absence of pollution from humans). When the ozone layer is thin, more UV gets through from the sun. UV from the sun ionizes O2 and splits it apart, creating oxygen free radicals which recombine and create ozone. Thus, less ozone leads to more ozone, hence self-regulation.
Oh don’t worry, it’s coming back
I thought the aerosols that affect the environment refer to the tiny aerosol particles at higher levels in the atmosphere.
Everyone in the 80s seemed to confuse the with aerosol hairspray, which wasn’t really a huge contributor. Still aren’t most sprays today generally not this so called aerosol style anymore?
It was the Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that were used as the primary propellant in aerosol sprays. More commonly known by the brand name Freon. Notice that basically every aerosol can manufactured today has a “CFC Free” badge somewhere. Refrigerant systems also moved away from using actual Freon, and now use alternative refrigerants.
CFCs were actually invented by the same guy who invented leaded gasoline, Thomas Midgley Jr… He is probably the single most environmentally destructive chemical engineer in history.
Why were “CFC propellants” even helpful to the manufacturer? Can’t you just use compressed air in spray bottles to make them spray?
On the plus side, one of his inventions killed Thomas Midgley Jr., arguably the most environmentally destructive chemical engineer in history
Name me another chemical engineer that could be argued did more harm. I don’t think all of Monsanto with agent orange and Roundup has done more than the TEL and CFC fuckup.
Where’s he buried? How long is the line to piss on his headstone?
Fritz Haber invented nitrogrn fixing fertilizers and is responsible for the massive baby boom across the globe after ww2 because so much more food could now be grown.
Except now there are 8b+ people on an increasingly warming and polluted planet and these fertilizers (alongside modern farming techniques and climate collapse, both of which came about because of this baby boom…) have all but destroyed the planets’ arable land.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization is warning that 90% of the earth’s top soil will be depleted by 2050.
Late 80s hairsprays and other canned aerosols were a sizeable contributor.
They were an easy fix, and stopped being a problem almost as soon as people decided to do something. That was way before the problem reached mainstream media, so when people started talking about it, they weren’t a problem anymore. But they surely were a problem for some time.