Scientists Baffled By Unknown Source of Ozone-Depleting Chemical 303
schwit1 writes: Scientists have found that, despite a complete ban since 2007, ozone-depleting chemicals are still being pumped into the atmosphere from some unknown source. "Carbon tetrachloride (CCl4), which was once used in applications such as dry cleaning and as a fire-extinguishing agent, was regulated in 1987 under the Montreal Protocol along with other chlorofluorocarbons that destroy ozone and contribute to the ozone hole over Antarctica. Parties to the Montreal Protocol reported zero new CCl4 emissions between 2007-2012. However, the new research shows worldwide emissions of CCl4 average 39 kilotons (about 43,000 U.S. tons) per year, approximately 30 percent of peak emissions prior to the international treaty going into effect. "We are not supposed to be seeing this at all," said Qing Liang, an atmospheric scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the study published online in the Aug. 18 issue of Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union. "It is now apparent there are either unidentified industrial leakages, large emissions from contaminated sites, or unknown CCl4 sources."
Easy, India or China (Score:4, Insightful)
Who else would, unapologetically, give the middle finger to the environment?
Re:Easy, India or China (Score:5, Funny)
Who else would, unapologetically, give the middle finger to the environment?
Brazil, Mexico, Spain, Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan, US, UK, Sweden, Argentina, Australia, South Africa, Nigeria, Poland, and probably quite a few others.
But not Canada. Canada would apologize.
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Re:Easy, India or China (Score:4, Insightful)
and I can think of a certain group of American Democrats who despite whatever noises they make at the end of the day are equally mega-corporate bitches same as the Republicans. Obama and 90% of Democrats in Congress for starters....
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So why has every environmental initiative in the past 40 years been pushed by the Democrats and resisted by the Republicans?
Why did "mega-corporate bitch" Obama introduce new carbon emissions rules in June that will cost energy producers a fortune?
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/02/us/politics/epa-to-seek-30-percent-cut-in-carbon-emissions.html
Re:Easy, India or China (Score:5, Insightful)
Can we just agree on greed being the culprit? Democrat, Republican, where's the difference? As long as there's money to be made by ignoring the law and as long as breaking a law and getting caught is cheaper than heeding it, greed trumps "doing the right thing" any time.
Re:Easy, India or China (Score:4, Insightful)
Democrat, Republican, where's the difference?
That was literally the entire point of my post that you're replying to.
Re:Easy, India or China (Score:4, Insightful)
So why has every environmental initiative in the past 40 years been pushed by the Democrats and resisted by the Republicans?
Why did "mega-corporate bitch" Obama introduce new carbon emissions rules in June that will cost energy producers a fortune?
What happened to your brain in the 60 minutes between your posts? At first you extoll the virtues of the Democrats, and now you claim your original post is about Democrats and Rebulicans being the same. Do you see the discontinuity?
GP has it right. The US was built disregarding the damage we were doing to the environment. Now that we're on top, its easy for us to tell people not to do things. But if anyone else wants to get ahead, they're going to do it the cheap and easy way. Without some sort of alternative financial incentive, greed will drive countries to disregard the environment to ensure their industry evolves. While you can point at Democrats and Republicans and call them angels or devils, the rest of the world is going to do what they want with regards to the environment (and there are a lot more of them than there are of us).
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Congratulations on painting about 100M people with that brush, because clearly they're all exactly the same.
YOU are the problem with politics in the United States.
Re:Easy, India or China (Score:5, Insightful)
The Government is basically the worst possible nightmare-scenario giant monopoly evil corporation you can imagine.
Here in the UK, our government has taken steps to prevent there being a monopoly ISP. They didn't start a government-run ISP, they just regulated things to prevent a monopoly. And... it worked. Not all government intervention means shifting things from the private to the public sector. If anything, I imagine there are now more ISP jobs than there would be with a monopoly.
Also, we don't have to suffer truly godawful ISPs, the way you do in the US, which is nice.
But no, you'll go on believing all that government does is evil (that might not be such a worry if it weren't for that your system allows payments that would be classified as bribery in damn near any other country, btw), and that there's no better way to run a country than by letting corporations screw over the average person.
Re:Easy, India or China (Score:5, Informative)
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Well, in fact it was.
For the majority of the population life in soviet Russia was better than in czarist Russia.
It also ultimately lead to Germany becoming a democracy.
Re:Easy, India or China (Score:4, Insightful)
haha, under what president was the EPA created? and the Clean Air Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Environmental Pesticide Control Act, and the Endangered Species Act become law? DDT banned? why Tricky Dicky Richard Nixon, of course.
HW Bush made Clean Air Act tougher and that reduced acid rain and smog at the time
Obama is for fracking, some key Democrats just pulled support for anti-fracking laws, Obama allowed starting drilling in sensitive arctic areas, Obama caved in and didn't allow new smog/ozone levels as being too expensive on industry (even though Bush in 2008 made tough new ground level ozone/smog standards)
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Facts and political debates never go well together.
Re:Easy, India or China (Score:4, Insightful)
Who controlled Congress for all of those things?
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Well, all the initial groups where created by LBJ, and then Nixon consolidated them
The clean are act did no such thing and created looser standards.
please, Please, PLEASE read up on the stuff.
DDT had never been shown to do what the speculation is SIlent Spring claimed it did. It was pure FUD.
There is nothing wrong with fracking. Saying Obama is for fracking is like saying Obama is for factual evidence based decisions. I know you can't handle a politician that doesn't just spout nonsense that happen to suppo
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HW Bush made Clean Air Act tougher and that reduced acid rain and smog at the time
Here's a thought: let's mod people up as long as they soundauthoritative...
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you are missing the fact that the presidents mentioned used their office as bully pulpit to push for those laws
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Why did "mega-corporate bitch" Obama introduce new carbon emissions rules in June that will cost energy producers a fortune?
I'm pretty sure the "fortune" will be paid by the common folk, and go to the corporations making green products. And, I'm guessing these "green" companies are held by the 1%
Re: Easy, India or China (Score:2)
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Both the Dems and Republicans are as bad as each other on this point. To their credit the Dems haven't bowed to the denialism PR campaign by going full retard on the pseudoscience, but instead seem to be just doing as little as possible to seem like they are doing something and practically doing fuck all.
Is it any wonder its the states that are really taking the lead on carbon reduction. I grant thats partly due to how US federalism works, but staunch action from the whitehouse would certainly send a messa
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How the fuck did this get +4 insightful? The Kosdot is strong today. Let's go back less than 40 yrs ago to the Byrd-Hagel resolution that passed 95-0 in the US senate prior to Clinton signing the Kyoto Protocol. Do you honestly believe there were 95 republican senators at that time? Hint there wasn't.
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Maybe the radical fringe in the Democratic party doesn't count anything as "environmental initiative" unless it is narsisitic grandious exhibitionism and the moderates in both party find themselves putting more effort into keeping the fringes from scuttling any posible consensus than they do solve real demonstrable problems.
For example FTA,
how many Eco-activists are going
Re:Easy, India or China (Score:5, Insightful)
So just because a bill is called the Clear Skies Act, you think it helps the environment and hurts corporations? Apparently you're the reason that consultants like Frank Luntz make the big bucks. My friend worked for him when he came up with that name. It was a total giveaway to corporate interests. That does nothing to contradict my post.
Nixon was much more centrist and pragmatic on a lot of issues than people remember. Also, that EPA bill was passed by a Democratic Congress. The GOP really started their anti-environment push with Reagan- who immediately had the solar panels removed from the White House. It went into high gear starting in 1994 with Newt Gingrich.
Re:Easy, India or China (Score:4, Interesting)
The Clear Skies Act 2003 was a failed attempt by Republicans to INCREASE the amount of allowed air pollution. It would have done exactly the opposite of its title. It is a textbook example of doublespeak. It was never passed. It was an abysmal failure on so many levels.
Old George and Tricky Dicky weren't quite so brazen as Dubya. But: HW's sulphur cap and trade program took another five years to start, and was less successful than conventional regulation in Europe.
Re:Easy, India or China (Score:5, Informative)
You should really read those links. Seriously dude, just linking something you don't actually understand as some sort of proof just mkas you look foolish.
The first one made it worse:
The law reduces air pollution controls, including those environmental protections of the Clean Air Act, including caps on toxins in the air and budget cuts for enforcement. The Act is opposed by conservationist groups such as the Sierra Club with Henry A. Waxman, a Democratic congressman of California, describing its title as "clear propaganda."
Among other things, the Clear Skies Act:
Allows 42 million more tons of pollution emitted than the EPA proposal.
Weakens the current cap on nitrogen oxide pollution levels from 1.25 million tons to 2.1 million tons, allowing 68% more NOx pollution.
Delays the improvement of sulfur dioxide (SO2) pollution levels compared to the Clean Air Act requirements.
Delays enforcement of smog-and-soot pollution standards until 2015.
By 2018, the Clear Skies Act will supposedly allow 3 million tons more NOx through 2012 and 8 million more by 2020, for SO2, 18 million tons more through 2012 and 34 million tons more through 2020. 58 tons more mercury through 2012 and 163 tons more through 2020 would be released into the environment than what would be allowed by enforcement of the Clean Air Act.[2]
In August 2001, the EPA proposed a version of the Clear Skies Act that contained short timetables and lower emissions caps [3]. It is unknown why this proposal was withdrawn and replaced with the Bush Administration proposal. It is also unclear whether or not the original EPA proposal would have made it out of committee.
The second one--Signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on December 17, 1963
The third one-- Nixon combined existing groups into one, for budget reasons.
However, I would argue the the Pubs of the 60's and 70s are vastly different then the pubs of today. Post religious right control.
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But it's a bridge to nowhere. And hey, you're taking my money at gunpoint.
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Re:Easy, India or China (Score:4, Funny)
They probably rigged their SUVs to actually manufacture CCl4 and immediately release it into the atmosphere just because.
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Oh c'mon now, no one (over the age of 2) would behave that petulantly [autoblog.com], right?
Re:Easy, India or China (Score:5, Insightful)
I can think of a certain group of American Republicans who would do exactly that...
Privately there are many Republicans that do believe in the scientific method and would like to see action on climate change but are reluctant to admit it because of fear of being labeled as traitors. On the Democratic camp there are many that realize that cap and trade, and so called "renewables" cannot be a complete solution to halting global warming but are simply afraid to support low or 0 carbon, but uncool power generation technologies, such as Nuclear for fear of being labeled the same.
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Really, if the pubs actually all got together and said, yep, it's real then they whole party would change and they would have little to fear.
Re:Easy, India or China (Score:4, Interesting)
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I can think of a certain group of American Republicans who would do exactly that...
Indeed, some conservatives in America have taken on the practice of coal rolling [slate.com], outfitting diesel trucks to spew black smoke as protest against environmental regulations.
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And a huge number of people, not just in America but indeed all around the world, persist in having open fires, despite the EPA regulating wood stoves and fireplaces.
Bastards don't know Thermageddon is upon us. You would think they would not need fires.
Re:Easy, India or China (Score:4, Insightful)
Non of that actually makes any damn sense.
This stupid scientist make things up for money meme need to really fucking stop when every expert in the field agrees.
Fuck, you're stupid.
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Wow, you either have guts or a serious lack of brains if you are trying to lecture a person on how Science works while not even knowing the difference between hypothesis, theory, and law.
Here's a hint: for something to become "only a theory" all hypothesis aspects of it has to have undergone extensive testing as well as being an accurate description of the observations being studied.
There is zero demonstrable practical output or progress in terms of human progress or human suffering to show for all the work and money that has gone into this field over the last 30 years, and anyone who puts any stock in it is no better informed than the creationist who believes that the world is 6,000 years old, because all of the world's leading bible scientists sat on their hemorrhoids and confirmed the same values while trying to infer the entire history and trajectory of the universe using a single pre-scientific-method cultural document transcribed from one culture's oral tradition, that described some details of some other culture's cultural events.
Yeah, all of us scientifically trained people are stew-pod right? Just because we didn't directly observe the clown that threw
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Old drums leak (Score:4, Insightful)
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If that was the case, it would be showing up in tests when they see what the composition of the waste is. I haven't heard of any places in north america where concentrations of CCl4 is showing up.
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such things are vented from old AC systems and fire suppression systems all the time, rather than properly pumped and destroyed
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Then it should be showing up in local air samples too now wouldn't it? And again, I haven't heard of it showing up anywhere.
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they DO show up in air samples, alternative coverage of this article mentioned Tasmania, Australia
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Well not exactly, it's showing up in batch samples. It's not showing up in various specific localized samples right. It seems that if they really wanted to find out "where it's coming from" they'd be running with more test equipment in various areas to narrow it down. Hell a smelter on the great lakes here in Ontario, has no less than 78 sampling devices in a concentric ring.
Maybe Dr. Smith left the cap off the bottle again? (Score:2)
http://irwinallentvseries.wiki... [wikia.com] ..." :
"Don and John come out of the ship asking about carbon tetrachloride. Smith says he uses it to remove stains--he's used it and left the top off. John asks him if he has any thoughts besides his immediate needs---without the carbon tetrachloride they will lose their food supply. They use it as food preservation (NOTE: how is a mystery---it is highly toxic). They will have to eat only non-perishable items and now face a food shortage (what about the hydroponic garden?).
Source is HVAC Contractors (Score:5, Interesting)
I know because it's happening all over the Coachella Valley. I have seen cut rate guys NOT reclaiming or pumping down coils - jettisoning 10+ pounds each time. This occurs at least 50 times a day here in the desert that I know of. Even top paid contractors like callthegeneral.com just don't care because their commission is based on number of visits per day, and it takes an extra 15-25 minutes to pump a system down before removal. The wholesale houses even pay a couple $$$ per pound of the reclaimed stuff, but commission rates ensure blowing off straight to atmosphere every time.
Re:Source is HVAC Contractors (Score:5, Informative)
Nope. CCl4 is not used in HVAC systems. You are thinking of freon [wikipedia.org], which is not what TFA is about.
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Re:Source is HVAC Contractors (Score:5, Informative)
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Do you have a cite for this decomposition into carbon tet? You would have to knock the fluorine(s) off the R11 or R12, that is not so easy to do. I can see where bromine containing halons could decompose into chlorine containing halons given a mixture of chlorine and bromine containing halons and some UV light.
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I believe he was thinking of R22. Certainly a related problem.
Re:Source is HVAC Contractors (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know of a single refrigerant in common use which remains liquid at STP. Almost all of them evaporate very, very quickly at atmospheric pressure.
Indeed, the most common one in new equipment (these days) is R-134a. Which is the same thing that goes into the "canned air" commonly sold and used for cleaning computer gear, and is also the same chemical used in the more common forms of freeze spray (the difference being whether it is dispensed as a liquid via an internal dip tube, or as a gas by simple lack of a dip tube).
What were you going on about, again?
Oh, right. Clues.
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halon and the old refrigerants certainly are NOT liquid at STP, you are blathering about carbon tet perhaps but this thread was about venting HVAC
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halon and the old refrigerants certainly are NOT liquid at STP, you are blathering about carbon tet perhaps but this thread was about venting HVAC
I've seen a halon system go off in person before. It most certainly was a gas.
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Don't be a dumbass. CCl4 isn't used in HVAC, CFC's are, and no, they aren't liquid at room temperatures.
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CCL4 has the industry name of R10
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... [wikipedia.org]
And was most certainly used in air conditioners for decades. It's banned for that use now, but anyone with an older system that's being replaced could definitely have R10.
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Re:Source is HVAC Contractors (Score:5, Informative)
When I open up the tap in my kitchen sink, am I "blowing off water straight to atmosphere" ??? Of course not, showing us all that you didnt know that Carbon tetrachloride was a liquid while making your first post blaming a bunch of people that you clearly have other different issues with.
Saying that something is a liquid/solid/gas/etc is a bit of a simplification. The reality is that substances exist in equilibrium between various phases, and this shifts based on temperature/pressure.
If you spill some water on a sidewalk in the summer and come back an hour later, you won't see any water, because it will evaporate - probably fairly quickly depending on the humidity.
Carbon tetrachloride is much more volatile than water in practice. The boiling point isn't all that much lower, but unlike water there is almost none of it present in the atmosphere to start out. That greatly facilitates evaporation per Le Chatelier's principle.
Oh, and I don't think anybody uses carbon tetrachloride in air conditioners. Old ones certainly use CFCs though, and most of those boil at a lower temperature. Carbon tetrachloride has been a known carcinogen for ages, so industrial uses have been shifting away from it for a while.
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When I open up the tap in my kitchen sink, am I "blowing off water straight to atmosphere" ???
Erm... Heh. Actually, yes you are. Not all of it or even a significant percentage of it is blowing straight into the atmosphere but some of it assuredly is.
As a test, take two rooms of equal size, one with a running a faucet and the other without. Measure the humidity level after as little as 10 minutes.
Have a nice day. :)
No data, so choose your favorite villain (Score:5, Funny)
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Any chance to pin that on the content mafia or patent trolls? C'mon, at least ONCE such a story has to hit someone we can uniformly hate and not be controversial.
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Any chance to pin that on the content mafia or patent trolls? C'mon, at least ONCE such a story has to hit someone we can uniformly hate and not be controversial.
So long as you don't blame it on Tesla, Bitcoin, or Starts with a Bang, everyone here will cool with it.
Re:No data, so choose your favorite villain (Score:4, Insightful)
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Christians. They're cooking some weird god food or storing CCl4 for the second coming or something.
It's got to be them.
If not them then it's the Joos. Israel is trying to burn off the ozone layer. Again.
Bastards.
<sarcasm you dolts/>
From the wikipedia (Score:5, Informative)
Not sure how accurate this is, since it's from wikipedia, but the reference seems legit.
In 2008, a study of common cleaning products found the presence of carbon tetrachloride in "very high concentrations" (up to 101 mg/m3) as a result of manufacturers' mixing of surfactants or soap with sodium hypochlorite (bleach).[18]
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10... [acs.org]
FTA:
"By mixing surfactants or soap with NaOCl, it was shown that the formation of carbon tetrachloride and several other halogenated VOCs is possible"
Re:From the wikipedia (Score:5, Informative)
Clorox had $5.6B in sales last year, of which 10% was laundry products according to their annual report. A gallon of bleach sells for $2, so if all their sales generated 275M gallons of bleach-containing chemicals = 1M m3 x 101 mg/m3 = 100,000 gm. Nope. That amount is negligible compared to what the study reports.
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Bleach isn't just for laundry. Look for "industrial cleaners", not "Laundry products."
Clorox doesn't have a lock on the laundry or cleaning products market by far. Plus, the figure is worldwide. There's a lot of bleach all over the place.
Re:From the wikipedia (Score:4, Insightful)
Industry is much better than individuals at handling chemicals safely.
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I'm wondering how much is a false detection for a similar chemical, or as the result of another chemical reaction. At work our Lead detection kits respond the same to Copper. This has led to missdiagnosis in copper plating.
Chlorinated hydrocarbons abound in the environment. Could this be by products of burning recycled PC parts and old monitors and wire. The copper and other metals theft and recycling may be the cause.
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At work our Lead detection kits respond the same to Copper.
Older copper and brass commonly had lead in them.
Re: Google it (Score:2)
This is a very well known problem: most organic compounds, wherever they're found and whatever they may be, are easily halogenated (or less often substituted with other things, usually with bacterial help). Chlorine is by far the most common halogen and the most reactive electro-negative element outside of oxygen(#2) and fluorine(#1--fun stuff, watch the videos). I was going to waste bandwidth here, but here's a couple of Wikipedia links that explain things way better:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D... [wikipedia.org]
Blea
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So every time I do a load of laundry and put bleach into it to make my undies sparking white I'm adding carbon tetrachloride to the atmosphere unintentionally.
That, and introducing a suspected carcinogen into your underwear.
Meh. (Score:2)
Actually it turned out to be koala flatulence.
Turns out digesting eucalyptus releases that type of gas.
North Korea? (Score:2)
I don't know .... (Score:2)
Degreasers (Score:3)
carbon tet and other degreasers used to just seep into the soil in "cleaning pits", I know buildings where that went on for half the 20th century.
Coming from Methane (Score:3)
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This is close to a question I was going to ask, and will do so now.
Have we ruled out all possible natural methods of CCl4 production? Just like how volcano's spew out tons of CO2, there may be methods, like you post for natural production of CCl4 which has acted as an automated regulator of the biosphere. Increased animal population, increased methane production, increased Ozone depletion. This normally happens so slowly that it is more spread out around the globe, instead of fixed over the poles, so it wou
They. Just. Don't. Know. Here's what that means.. (Score:2)
Some will blame humans.
Some will blame an unknown natural phenomenon.
Bottom line?
THEY DON'T KNOW.
And yet, despite yet another glaring example of the tenousness of our grasp of natural and human processes, people continue to think that the planet can be engineered to 'solve' climate change, etc.
Maybe the climate is changing, maybe it's not. Maybe it's human caused, maybe it's not. We just don't know. And maybe the wise person will hold off on acting in ignorance so they don't make things worse. The only
ignorance (Score:2)
a more reasonable assumption would be use in parts of the world that don't know all of a chemical's properties. You would not be able to produce a list of ozone harmful chemicals from memory either
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As they actually have to produce the stuff to set it free, that is not a plausible scenario.
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that is false, cargo ships cover the planet
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So you are of the opinion that these chemicals were used in the US with full knowledge of what they would do to the ozone layer?
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Can't we just do what we usually do? Kill them all and call the ones that don't deserve it "unfortunately unavoidable collateral damage"?
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Re:china did it (Score:5, Funny)
Its called "setting a bad example." This got my little sister out of trouble almost every single time.
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Some fault probably belongs to the countries that don't have those regulations.
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The history of China is that their government tends view their citizens as cheap expendable assets. If pollution related illnesses don’t kill them in inconvenient numbers they are willing to accept the impacts of the pollution. At least as long as those impacts fall on the general population and not the elites. I suspect you’ll find the elites have taken steps to protect themselves. Things like filtered water and air in their residences and offices etc. As far as the general public goes their
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Can't be. Great Leader invented the Ozone Layer.
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I would not be surprised at all if it is a component used in the fracking fluids associated with the process.
That is extremely unlikely. In addition to being illegal, it would also not be effective. CCl4 is not soluble is water, and would not make hydrocarbons more mobile or more soluble. It would however, readily dissolve in hydrocarbon fluids, where it would be difficult and expensive to separate.
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CCl4 is not soluble is water, and would not make hydrocarbons more mobile or more soluble. It would however, readily dissolve in hydrocarbon fluids
You mean like diesel fuel [psmag.com]?
where it would be difficult and expensive to separate.
The petroleum is going into a fractional distillation column. Its whole purpose is to perform this kind of separation. While the process might be difficult and expensive, it is a process which the petroleum will undergo anyway.
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Well, of course it came from humans. There is no natural source of CFCs on earth. They aren't a naturally occurring substance.
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