Ozone hole could be making global warming worse

[xchrom]

http://grist.org/news/ozone-hole-could-be-making-global-warming-worse/

It’s like Lord Voldemort joining forces with The Penguin.

Two of the globe’s most epic environmental threats appear to be ganging up on us: The hole in the ozone layer could be hastening global warming.

Yes, the hole in the ozone layer. It still exists, though it has been getting smaller because the world rightly panicked and began phasing out the use of CFCs in the 1980s. It was previously thought that the hole was helping to slow down global warming, but new research published in Geophysical Research Letters suggests the opposite. From Nature:

The team’s models predicted a shift in the southern-hemisphere jet stream — the high-altitude air currents flowing around Antarctica — as a result of ozone depletion. This produced a change in the cloud distribution, with clouds moving towards the South Pole, where they are less effective at reflecting solar radiation. …

Ozone hole could boost global warming

http://blogs.nature.com/news/2013/08/ozone-hole-could-boost-global-warming.html

***SNIP

The team’s models predicted a shift in the southern-hemisphere jet stream — the high-altitude air currents flowing around Antarctica — as a result of ozone depletion. This produced a change in the cloud distribution, with clouds moving towards the South Pole, where they are less effective at reflecting solar radiation.

The result was that the effects on the Earth’s net energy balance were opposite to what had been calculated before. “A negative radiative forcing is what you’d expect when the ozone is depleted, but our research shows that there is a positive net radiative effect during the Antarctic summer,” Grise says.

The extra net energy absorbed by the Earth would be 0.25 watts per square metre, or roughly a tenth of the greenhouse effect attributed to CO2, Grise says. The result could be a small but non-negligible contribution to global temperature rise.

“I think it’s an interesting piece of research. They are talking about a new mechanism in the world of ozone and climate change,” says Forster. “There’s quite a lot of work to be done to pin down the mechanism, but it does sound reasonable.”

[OKIsItJustMe]

1. More here…

http://www.democraticunderground.com/112751288