952
Aerosol
(mander.xyz)
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.

Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
Kids these days don't even know about the hole in the ozone later.
It's kinda our last big environmental win.
Yeah, last. Not latest, last.
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.
Now your just making shit up.
Winner of the "most penis euphemisms in one name" award.
Penis McPeniswoodchuck
https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Red-cockaded_Woodpecker/id
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 had a Bison meatloaf once that was so good. It's so much lighter than beef. It was like eating a meat cloud.
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.
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.
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.
I just told my kid about how we fixed acid rain through regulation just this morning
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?
The banning of CFCs due to their environmental impacts, retooling the aerosol and refrigerant industries, is what it looks like when we have a functioning world society.
There are adults now who were born after that and don't remember a time when we could behave that way, so they have every right to be cynical.
The refrigerant industry. Oh boy.
Trump wants to bring it back.
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!
in australia they absolutely do
we take skin cancer very seriously down here
Well not to worry, all these internet swarm satellites might cause another one.
Well that's because we're at now, not at later.
We've had one ozone yes, but what about later ozone?