The Ozone Hole Could Heal in Our Lifetimes, UN Reports
When the world gets its act together, it can actually solve big problems. Case in point: The ozone hole, which if everything goes according to plan could be healed up by the 2060s, according to a new report from the United Nations.
According to the report, a decades-old international treaty to ban ozone-depleting chemicals has led to their decline and “much more severe ozone depletion in the polar regions has been avoided.” There’s still work to be done, but this definitely falls into the Good News category.
“We’re at the turnaround point,” Paul Newman, a scientist who helps run NASA’s Ozone Watch and chaired the UN report, told Earther.
The report is put out every four years, and this is its fifth iteration. It tracks a 1980s-era environmental problem we’re still feeling the effects of today. The ozone hole is driven by a number of chemicals that were commonly found in aerosol cans, air conditioners, and refrigerators, called chlorofluorocarbons and hydrochlorofluorocarbons. Those chemicals unleash chlorine in the stratosphere, which in turn can break apart ozone molecules. When that happens, more ultraviolet light from the sun makes it to the surface, increasing the risk of bad things like skin cancer. The problem was particularly noticeable over Antarctica, where an ozone hole began to form each spring.
https://earther.gizmodo.com/the-ozone-hole-could-heal-in-our-lifetimes-un-reports-1830260403
Now if we could just do the same about climate change.
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