“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.
Down there??? The Earth isn’t flat, you say??
The picture on your wall is also flat, still it has up here and down there
No, also the massive SO2 that Mt Pinatubo put into the atmosphere slowly went away. And the CFCs.
Pinatubo created more sulfur emissions during its eruption than 10 years of all human coal burning.
And also on top of that we were also wrecking the Ozone.
Nature can always make our mistakes much much worse.
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.
No
Get that marble brain Reddit-style bs outta here. If you wanna deny, you’re gonna have to come up with a reason that you could be right. Otherwise, we’re just gonna point al laugh at your dumbassery.
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Did you even bother to read it?
Among other things it says: “Based on the Montreal Protocol and the decrease of anthropogenic ozone-depleting substances, scientists currently predict that the global ozone layer will reach its normal state again by around 2050.”
The reason it isn’t discussed as much is because it’s on the mend and the only things newsworthy are the larger than normal cyclical hole that forms. Another thing mentioned was a volcanic eruption in 2022 that is believed to contribute to that “larger than normal” hole.
Nothing there disputes the fact that we took action. I worked as a refrigeration tech and we even had to learn about this before we could be EPA certified to handle refrigerants.
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.
Was there ever really a threat to begin with? The whole thing sounds like Jewish space lasers to me.
Edit: Gotta love getting downvoted for asking a question.
Yes. A massive amount of work went in to making sure the transition wnet smooth.
You’re probably getting down voted because you asked here instead of a search engine, and many people think it’s common knowledge, and it was already answered in this thread.
Sometimes an innocent question looks like someone JAQing off.
Sounds like a great way to keep people from interacting at all.
There wasn’t much of a real “threat”, in that planes wouldn’t fall out of the sky. but banking systems would probably get quite confused, and potentially lead to people being unable to access money easily until it got fixed.
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).
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
Yeah but not all people live on American soil…
It’s the American tradition to ignore that
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.
“Lol Elon rocket go boom, science isn’t real” is also happening
Stupid people just think they’re the smartest ones in the room now
Elon musk isn’t a scientist, he’s a scammer who got lucky. That, and an asshole.
Well considering Elon situation I wouldn’t blame anyone for making fun of his idiotic ventures. Also starship is actually dumb and saying “you expected for it to blow up” is something no real scientist would’ve said unless they were making a bomb.
I wasn’t working in the IT field back then, as I was only 16, but as I knew that it’d most likely be my field one day (yup, I was right), I followed this closely due to interest, and applied patches accordingly.
Everything kept working fine except this one modem I had.
I kinda wish I knew what it was like working on Y2K stuff. It sounds like the most mundane bug to fix, but the problem is that it was everywhere. Which I imagine made it pretty expensive 👀
That’s a pretty good description. And most software back then didn’t use nice date utilities, they each had their own inline implementation. So sometimes you had to figure out what they were trying to do in the original code, which was usually written by someone who’s not there anymore. But other times it was the most mundane doing the same fix you already did in 200 other programs.
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
This is the funniest comment I have ever read here. Thank you.
I think everything works in windows but the old windows media player. You can test it by setting the time in a windows VM to 2039.
Obviously new systems are unaffected, the question is how many industrial controllers checking oil pipeline flow levels or whatever were installed before the fix and never updated.
Being somewhat adjacent to that with my work, there is a good chance anything in a critical area (hopefully fields like utilities, petroleum, areas with enough energy to cause harm) have decently hardened or updated equipment where it either isn’t an issue, will stop reporting tread data correctly, or roll over to date “0” which depending on the platform with industrial equipment tends to be 1970 in my personal experience. That said, there is always the case that it will not be handled correctly and either run away or stop entirely.
2038 is approaching super fast and nobody seems to care yet
At the rate of one year per year, even.
For each second that passes we’re one second closer to 2038
Except for leap seconds. Time is the worst to work with :(
Y2K specifically makes no sense though. Any reasonable way of storing a year would use a binary integer of some length (especially when you want to use as little memory as possible). The same goes for manipulations; they are faster, more memory efficient, and easier to implement in binary. With an 8-bit signed integer counting from 1900, the concerning overflows would occur in 2028, not 2000. A base 10 representation would require at least 8 bits to store a two digit number anyway. There is no advantage to a base 10 representation, and there never has been. For Y2K to have been anything more significant than a text formatting issue, a whole lot of programmers would have had to go out of their way to be really, really bad at their jobs. Also, usage of dates beyond 2000 would have increased gradually for decades leading up to it, so the idea it would be any sort of sudden catastrophe is absurd.
The issue wasn’t using the dates. The issue was the computer believing it was now on those dates.
I’m going to assume you aren’t old enough to remember, but the “only two digits to represent the year” issue predates computers. Lots of paper forms just gave two digits. And a lot of early computer work was just digitising paper forms.
I remember paper forms having “19__” in the year field. Good times
a whole lot of programmers would have had to go out of their way to be really, really bad at their jobs.
You don’t spend much time around them, do you?
With an 8-bit signed integer counting from 1900…
Some of the computers in question predate standardizing on 8 bits to the byte. You’ve got a whole post here of bad assumptions about how things worked.
You’re thinking of the problem with modern solutions in mind. Y2K originates from punch cards where everything was stored in characters. To save space only the last 2 digits of the year because back then you didn’t need to store the 19 of year 19xx. The technique of storing data stayed the same for a long time despite technology advancing beyond punch cards. The assumption that it’s always 19xx caused the Y2K bug because once it overflows to 00 the system doesn’t know if it’s 1900 or 2000.
Look some info on BCD or EBCDIC.
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.
I use talking points like these a fair amount with Republicans. Try to get them to think back to when they were leaders in environmental policy. Get back to their roots of environmental stewardship. It seems to have moved the needle slightly.
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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.
The fact is, most companies are fine to let an existing system run rather than replace it with one that has a cheaper consumable thing, provided they can still get that consumable and the cost of replacing that system is high.
Basically, corps would have kept buying and using CFCs because replacing the refrigeration system is too costly.
Not only was an alternative found that was cheaper and safer and almost as good (as effective), but scientists and engineers put in the effort to find ways to adapt existing systems to the new working fluid. All for significantly less than replacing the system.
Not only was a replacement found, but it was made economically viable for widespread deployment in a very short timeframe; not just having a short development time, but also a very short duration to deploy the new solution to an existing system.
You’re right, that it was cheaper and everything, but most of the time changing the working fluid of a refrigerator/air conditioning unit, will require that the system is replaced. They worked around that. Additionally, you’re correct that it was industry that made the change and pushed it to their clients.
I just want to make sure we recognise the efforts put in by the scientists and engineers that enabled the rapid switch to non-CFC based cooling systems. It’s still an amazing achievement IMO, and something that required a remarkable amount of cooperation by people who probably don’t cooperate often or at all (and are, in all likelihood, fairly hostile to eachother, most of the time).
IMO, that’s still one of the best examples of global cooperation that anyone could possibly point to. Rarely do we have a problem where there’s almost universal consensus on the issue and how to fix it. In this case, there was. That level of cooperation among the people of earth is borderline unparalleled; the only other times we cooperated this well that people would know about are usually negotiations done with the barrel of a gun. Namely the world wars. One group said that we’re going to do a thing, another group said nope. It was settled with lives, bullets and bombs, and nearly every person alive was on one side or the other… Except Sweden, I suppose… And maybe smaller countries that didn’t have enough of an army to participate. (I’m sure there’s dozens of reasons, but I’m not a historian)
Without guns, bombs, or even threats, just a presentation of the facts and a proposal for a solution, everyone just … went along with it.
To me, that’s unprecedented.
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.
Imagine if we did this with climate change. Imagine if we tried to switch to renewable energy en masse 20 years ago.
like as if we wanted to live
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.
I might just be drunk, but that was a very poetic turn of phrase.
Just to be clear, are we sure that the ozone holes are still shrinking?
As far as im aware the hole in the ozone layer is basically gone
Actually there are signs it’s been growing again. Because we forget history so quick.
Sorry I left my ozone vacuum running overnight.
I see articles up to 2022 talking about it shrinking, healing on the predicted timeframe. 2023 is a huge outlier, possibly caused by a volcano, but there’s variability every year. That doesn’t mean it’s growing again
I need to look into it again, but they had found favtories in china emiting a ton of it.
Conservatives aren’t used to the concept of “Problems go away when you do something about them.”
They are stuck in the mindset of “The problem will always be with us, so just shame those suffering from it and isolate them so we don’t catch their problem.”
To be honest, this is not just conservatives.
Naw, this is literally the conservative mind set. Even if someone doesn’t vote for republicans, thinking like this is conservative thinking.
This is also the liberal mind set.
No it isnt.
So what are your views on liberals that support Biden regardless of his funding of genocide in Palestine? To me it seems exactly like this mind set of “we can’t fix this, lets just not let their problem spill over to us”.
My view is that I would prefer someone younger and with similar ideals as Bernie but in reality, we have a choice between Biden and a man that given the chance, would end liberal’s right to vote forever.
I feel like people that bitch and complain about Biden do not at all understand the danger we are all in if Trump wins because the vote is split. Republicans do not have a conscience. They are more than happy to band together despite their disagreements if it means that they win. I just wonder why in the fuck anyone would risk that happening again given the decades of harm Trump caused in one term.
So am I happy about voting for Biden? No not really. It bothers the fuck out of me that Israel has the support it does. But the reality is that Trump and the modern republican party are about [] that close to reinacting the night of broken glass and Id rather that not happen.
I don’t think you understand the point of view people critisizing Biden. Democrats are the ones that put Trump in power, just so they can have an easier elections and don’t have to place more popular candidates to run against them. Voting for Biden is simply accepting defeat, that their plan worked and that they can do absolutely anything and you will support them because they will also support a worse candidate on the other side at the same time. It is not looking at the big picture, long term. In the future they can get someone like Trump to be a Democrat candidate and support someone even worse on the Republican side and you will have to vote for them under exactly the same situation. Democrats have a candidate that literarlly funds a genocide and we would think that once that line is crossed people would simply say that is enough, but apparently even Hitler would be elected in US elections as long as he places someone worse as prime candidate of another party.
I’ve always hated this comparison because the two problems are just not the same, at all. CFCs were nowhere near as ubiquitous as fossil hydrocarbons, and CFCs had an essentially drop-in replacement, which fossil fuels do not. There’s no non-hydrocarbon fuel that we can just replace for coal, natural gas, gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel, etc. None that I’m aware of, anyway.
#transcription
Matt Walsh
@MattWalshBlogRemember 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
@DKThompWhat 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.
I can read it fine thanks
Do you go around carving stairs into ramps, too?
I’m not sure what your intent was, but you’re coming off as “I don’t want online spaces to be welcoming to people who are visually impaired.”
Like me 🤣😎
Okay why the fuck has this been top of my front page for two days
Lemmy auto sorts by “active” so my responding to you will now keep it at the top of your page for day 3 lol
And didn’t they find a bunch of Chinese factories pumping them out again not long ago?
