Right Thinking From The Left Coast
"To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing,
if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained?"
-- Chief Justice John Marshall, Marbury v. Madison, 1803

Monday, June 30, 2008

The Air Up There
by Lee

Let’s hear it for science!

Large amounts of ozone – around 50 percent more than predicted by the world’s state-of-the-art climate models – are being destroyed in the lower atmosphere over the tropical Atlantic Ocean. Published today (26th June ‘08) in the scientific journal, Nature, this startling discovery was made by a team of scientists from the UK’s National Centre for Atmospheric Science and Universities of York and Leeds. It has particular significance because ozone in the lower atmosphere acts as a greenhouse gas and its destruction also leads to the removal of the third most abundant greenhouse gas; methane.

Wow, you mean climate models can be wrong?  Perhaps then we shouldn’t, y’know, create global hysteria about the end of the world based on them.

Professor John Plane, University of Leeds said: “This study provides a sharp reminder that to understand how the atmosphere really works, measurement and experiment are irreplaceable. The production of iodine and bromine mid-ocean implies that destruction of ozone over the oceans could be global.”

So what the professor is saying is that they really don’t completely understand how the atmosphere works, and that things might actually be much better than what the current thinking suggests.

Posted by Lee on 06/30/08 at 08:34 PM in Science and Technology  • (20) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink • Discuss this in the forums
Page 1 of 1 pages