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July 12 (UPI) -- The Biden administration has announced plans to continue its reduction of hydrofluorocarbons, releasing a new rule that aims to cut the United States' use of the greenhouse gases by almost half starting next year. Hydrofluorocarbon is a category of greenhouse gases used for refrigeration and air-conditioning as well as in a number of other applications, but is linked to global warming. The final rule announced Tuesday by the Environmental Protection Agency will reduce HFC consumption in the United States based on historic levels by 40% between 2024 and 2028. The reduction will be on top of...

Earth’s protective ozone layer is slowly but noticeably healing at a pace that would fully mend the hole over Antarctica in about 43 years, a new United Nations report says. A once-every-four-years scientific assessment found recovery in progress, more than 35 years after every nation in the world agreed to stop producing chemicals that chomp on the layer of ozone in Earth’s atmosphere that shields the planet from harmful radiation linked to skin cancer, cataracts and crop damage. […] The progress is slow, according to the report presented Monday at the American Meteorological Society convention in Denver. The global average...

This map shows the size and shape of the ozone hole over the South Pole on October 5, 2022, when it reached its single-day maximum extent for the year. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens The depleted area of the ozone layer over the South Pole was slightly smaller than last year and generally continued the overall shrinking trend of recent years. Between September 7, 2022, and October 13, 2022, the annual Antarctic ozone hole reached an average area of 23.2 million square kilometers (9.0 million square miles). This depleted area of the ozone layer over the South...

The hole in the ozone layer is larger than it usually is at this time of the year, according to a team of EU scientists. The European Union’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service said Thursday the ozone hole is larger than the size of Antarctica. “Forecasts show that this year’s hole has evolved into a rather larger than usual one,” said the head of the EU satellite monitoring service, Vincent-Henri Peuch. The hole makes an appearance each spring season in the Southern Hemisphere. […] Experts believe the world will only be free of harmful ozone-depleting substances in 2060, when it’s hoped...

The ozone hole over Antarctica has grown to its "maximum size" just one year after researchers reported that it was at its smallest since its discovery.

On October 24, AT published the article Ozone Hole Shrinking, NASA Announces. The author, Howard J. Warner, correctly wrote that there are many factors that cause the Earth’s ozone layer to grow or shrink, and that chlorofluorocarbons (CFC’s) are merely one factor of many. Mr. Warner cited volcanoes as one of these factors, for example. He provided a link to an article, which stated that although the Antarctic ozone hole is now shrinking overall, it actually grew in 2016, owing to the recent one-time eruption of the Chilean volcano Mount Calbuco. This eruption injected sulphur into the atmosphere, which formed the...

Unusual weather patterns in the upper atmosphere over Antarctica have caused a drastic reduction in ozone depletion, leaving the ozone with the smallest hole seen since its discovery in 1982, according to NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The government agencies said that the hole had shrunk to 3.9 million square miles for the remainder of September and October, according to satellite data. The peak in the hole was 6.3 million square miles, observed on Sept. 8. During normal weather conditions, the hole is usually around 8 million square miles during this time of year.

In 1987, countries of the world agreed to the Montreal Protocol, a treaty designed to phase out chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, responsible for destroying ozone in the stratosphere. The protocol has worked as intended in reducing these substances, and early healing of the ozone “hole” over Antarctica has been subsequently hailed by scientists. But the study by Ball and his colleagues focused instead on the lower latitudes where the vast majority of humans live. There, the scientists found a relatively small but hard-to-explain decline of ozone in the lower part of the stratosphere, the layer of the atmosphere that extends from...

Scientists confirm: the ozone hole is indeed healing.

In the period from 2000-2015, the hole in the ozone layer shrank by more than 4 million square kilometers—nearly a billion acres—according to a new report in the journal Science. During the 1980s and into the 1990s, news of a massive hole in the ozone layer caused worldwide panic, stoked by everything from rumors of sheep being blinded by increased atmospheric radiation to the fear of a skin cancer pandemic and even comparisons to “AIDS from the sky.” Now scientists at MIT along with others have found that since 2000 the ozone hole has actually shrunk by an area half...

Negotiators from more than 170 countries on Saturday reached a legally binding accord to counter climate change by cutting the worldwide use of a powerful planet-warming chemical used in air-conditioners and refrigerators. -snip-While the Paris agreement included pledges by nearly every country to cut emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the fossil fuels that power vehicles, electric plants and factories, the new Kigali deal has a single target: chemical coolants called hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, used in air-conditioners and refrigerators.-snip-And while the Paris pledges are broad, they are also voluntary, often vague and dependent on the political will of future world...

Another year has passed and that stubborn Ozone Hole over Antarctica refuses to go away...The Ozone Layer is known to block ultraviolet rays, shielding the surface of Earth from high-energy radiation. Scientists were concerned that degradation of the ozone layer would increase rates of skin cancer and cataracts and cause immune system problems in humans...World consumption of Ozone Depleting Substances has been reduced to zero over the last three decades

The Antarctic ozone hole has swelled this month to one of its biggest sizes on record, U.N. and U.S. scientists say, insisting that the Earth-shielding ozone layer remains on track to long-term recovery but saying residents of the southern hemisphere should be on watch for high UV levels in the weeks ahead.

ENEVA (Reuters) - The U.N.'s weather and climate agency said on Thursday there was no cause for alarm about a record-size hole this month in the ozone layer, that shields life on earth from the sun, as it should shrink again. The ozone hole that appears over Antarctica fluctuates in size, normally reaching its widest in the polar spring as extreme cold temperatures in the stratosphere and the return of sunlight unleash chlorine radicals that destroy ozone. Last year, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said it detected the first sign of ozone recovery, largely thanks to a 1987 ban on...

SAN FRANCISCO — The banning of ozone-depleting chemicals hasn't yet caused detectable improvements in the Antarctic ozone hole, new research suggests. Instead, changes in the South Pole's ozone hole from year-to-year are likely the result of natural variations in wind patterns, researchers said here Wednesday (Dec. 11) in a press conference at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. The findings suggest that measuring the total size of the ozone hole says little about ozone depletion, and that it's misleading to use the hole's extent alone to measure environmental progress.

The first ozone hole above the North Pole has been aggravated by extraordinarily cold winter temperatures, say scientists. Cooling of the ozone layer enhances the effect of ozone-destroying substances such as chlorofluorocarbons - CFC. A repeated ozone hole above the Arctic is to be expected, say scientists from the KIT Institute of Meteorology and Climate Research. About a year ago, the scientists detected that ozone degradation above the Arctic for the first time reached an extent comparable to that of the ozone hole above the South Pole. At a level of around 13 miles above the ground, 80 per cent...

Eighteen months after the Obama administration came out with new rules to stop refrigerants in air conditioners from thinning the Earth's protective ozone layer, an unexpected quirk has divided the industry and could have implications for the atmosphere. Much of the equipment being installed in American homes is still getting its cooling power from an ozone-depleting gas that was supposed to be phased out, says a group of disgruntled appliance makers, including the makers of Carrier and Trane air conditioners. Five companies wrote a letter (pdf) to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson this week saying the agency inadvertently left a loophole...

Climate Change: A peer-reviewed study by a respected Canadian physicist blames the interplay of cosmic rays and chlorofluorocarbons for 20th-century warming. The CFCs are now gone, and so is warming — perhaps for the next 50 years. Much of the nation got a white Christmas this year, some in unprecedented quantities. A record-breaking storm deposited 12 to 30 inches of snow in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C. Many places set records for the most snow in a single December day as more than 50% of the U.S. was covered by the white stuff. Scientists (and here we use the word...

The international treaty to protect the ozone layer turns twenty this year and claims success. But is there really reason to celebrate? Environmentalists have made many apocalyptic predictions over the past decades and, when they have not come to pass, have proclaimed that their preventive measures averted disaster -- as with the 1987 Montreal Protocol On Substances That Deplete The Ozone Layer (Montreal Protocol). The many lurid predictions of skin cancer epidemics, eco-system destruction and so on have not come true, and to Montreal Protocol proponents this is cause for self-congratulation. But in retrospect the evidence shows that ozone depletion...

In a few months, the last R-22 air conditioner will roll down the assembly line, as the industry completes the Herculean effort to redesign every product, retool every factory, and retrain every technician for the conversion to R-410A. Yet, even now, momentum is building to phase-out R-410A. Dumping R-410A would be even more ridiculous than phasing out R-22. R-22 was served a death sentence with the 1987 Montreal Protocol, created in response to reported thinning of the ozone layer. Urgency was based on the discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole in 1985. We were told drastic action was required to...