“Whatever happened with the ozone layer panic, if scientists are so smart?”
We listened to the scientists, and the problem went away.
Didn't go away, just stopped getting worse at an alarming rate.
Didn't the hole above Australia close again?
As a kiwi, the amount of sunburn I get every summer would imply it hasn't.
Yeah but I'm pretty sure that's just cause the sun is upside down over there or something.
It's the same as people using the example of the Y2K bug being a non event. Yeah, because globally trillions of dollars were spent fixing it before it became an event.
Similar with Y2K
it was only a nothingburger because it was taken seriously, and funded well. But the narrative is sometimes, "yeah lol it was a dud."
All this hysteria over nuclear weapons is overblown. We've known how to build them for 75 years yet there hasn't been a single one detonated on inhabited American soil. They're harmless
You even dropped a few accidentally and nothing happened! Complete duds these things really
The question is, what will happen in 2038 when y2k happens again due to an integer overflow? People are already sounding the alarm but who knows if people will fix all of the systems before it hits.
It's already been addressed in Linux - not sure about other OSes. They doubled the size of time data so now you can keep using it until after the heat death of the universe. If you're around then.
Finally it'd be the year of desktop linux with all the windows users die off
I can't remember the name but I think this is some kind of paradox.
Like the preventative measures we're so effective that they created a perception that there was no risk in the first place.
It's called the prevention paradox: It's when an issue is so severe that it is prevented with proactive action, so no real consequenses are felt so people think it wasn't severe in the first place.
Case in point: Measles. It was a thing when I was a kid. Then it wasn't. Now my kids have to deal with Measles because we can't teach scientific literacy.
When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
Y2K is similar. Most people will remember not much happening at all. Lots of people worked hard to solve the problem and prevent disaster.
I wonder how many people will see this and not know its a quote from Futurama
The sysadmin curse (and why you document your actions in a ticketing system).
I literally had this exact exchange with someone last year, when they tried to cast doubt on global warming by comparing it to the ozone. Another person did the same , using acid rain, and I pointed out that the northeast sued the shit out of the Midwest until they cut that shit with the coal fire power plants.
The Conservative Party led Canadian Government and the Regan-era Republican US Government started working on the US-Canada Air Quality Agreement, which was signed by the George H.W. Bush administration into law in the US (and the Brian Mulroney led Government of Canada).
That’s right — two Conservative governments identified a problem, listened to their scientists, and enacted a solution to acid rain. And now the problem has virtually disappeared.
Oh how low Conservatives have fallen on both sides of the border since those days.
There were goddamn Nickelodeon phone-a-thons where you pledged to not use cfc products. This shit was serious.
Edit: I just remembered ,they talked about how bad the sun was for kids in Australia, or something.
Australia and New Zealand do not fuck about with sun safety. Even with the improvements in the ozone layer, our skin cancer rates are still way higher than the rest of the world
New Zealand do not fuck about with sun safety.
Except we were kicking the can with sun screen regulation until 2022.
https://comcom.govt.nz/business/your-obligations-as-a-business/product-safety-standards/sunscreen
https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2022/0004/latest/whole.html
Until this law, sun screen lotion didn't have to prove that they actually provided the SPF that they claimed.
Ah but the Ozone hole is increasing again in no small thanks to China!
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2019-05-23/mystery-ozone-depleting-gas-tracked-to-china/11137546
Imagine if we did this with climate change. Imagine if we tried to switch to renewable energy en masse 20 years ago.
Problem with that is that in comparison the alternative to CFC was not that more expensive and then a cheaper one was invented shortly after.
For climate change you basically can double our energy costs and therefore double the cost of almost everything.
Not to seem callous, but the first world could learn to live off of a little less.
Honestly this is what I keep saying and everyone gets pissed when I do.
There's enough resources on this planet that every living human could live a decently luxurious life. But because we allow a small handful of us to hoard all those resources we have poverty on a global scale.
This has since been determined to have tack on benefits in the fight against the climate crisis as well, it's halved the potential growth in global average temperatures by 2100, which cannot be overstated in just how fantastic that is.
We went from everyone being baked alive and having 20 kinds of skin cancer to boot to merely dealing with catastrophic climate change and society changing people migrations the likes of which haven't been documented since the successive eras of steppe invasions into Europe, China, India, and the Middle East.
Out of the fire and into the frying pan.
#transcription
Matt Walsh
@MattWalshBlog
Remember when they spent years telling us to panic over the hole in the ozone layer and then suddenly just stopped talking about it and nobody ever mentioned the ozone layer
Derek Thompson
@DKThomp
What happened is scientists discovered chlorofluorocarbons were bad for the ozone, countries believed them, the Montreal Protocol was signed, and CFC use fell by 99.7%,l eading to the stabilization of the ozone layer, perhaps the greatest example of global cooperation in history.
And didn't they find a bunch of Chinese factories pumping them out again not long ago?
Imagine that... Believing what scientists say? Who does that?
Grinds teeth and silently screams inside his head
Just to be clear, are we sure that the ozone holes are still shrinking?
TBH “The whole world agreed on something” narrative doesn’t really reflect what happened.
Actually, The Industry dropped using CFC after a cheaper and luckily safer alternative has been discovered right around that time.
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