660
Aerosol
(mander.xyz)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2026
660 points (100.0% liked)
Science Memes
20384 readers
3976 users here now
Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
- Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
- Keep it rooted (on topic).
- No spam.
- Infographics welcome, get schooled.
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
Research Committee
Other Mander Communities
Science and Research
Biology and Life Sciences
- !abiogenesis@mander.xyz
- !animal-behavior@mander.xyz
- !anthropology@mander.xyz
- !arachnology@mander.xyz
- !balconygardening@slrpnk.net
- !biodiversity@mander.xyz
- !biology@mander.xyz
- !biophysics@mander.xyz
- !botany@mander.xyz
- !ecology@mander.xyz
- !entomology@mander.xyz
- !fermentation@mander.xyz
- !herpetology@mander.xyz
- !houseplants@mander.xyz
- !medicine@mander.xyz
- !microscopy@mander.xyz
- !mycology@mander.xyz
- !nudibranchs@mander.xyz
- !nutrition@mander.xyz
- !palaeoecology@mander.xyz
- !palaeontology@mander.xyz
- !photosynthesis@mander.xyz
- !plantid@mander.xyz
- !plants@mander.xyz
- !reptiles and amphibians@mander.xyz
Physical Sciences
- !astronomy@mander.xyz
- !chemistry@mander.xyz
- !earthscience@mander.xyz
- !geography@mander.xyz
- !geospatial@mander.xyz
- !nuclear@mander.xyz
- !physics@mander.xyz
- !quantum-computing@mander.xyz
- !spectroscopy@mander.xyz
Humanities and Social Sciences
Practical and Applied Sciences
- !exercise-and sports-science@mander.xyz
- !gardening@mander.xyz
- !self sufficiency@mander.xyz
- !soilscience@slrpnk.net
- !terrariums@mander.xyz
- !timelapse@mander.xyz
Memes
Miscellaneous
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Kids these days don't even know about the hole in the ozone later.
in australia they absolutely do
we take skin cancer very seriously down here
Trump wants to bring it back.
We managed to dial things back a bit, so that became a smaller problem.
We used to see regular news reports of actual rivers on fire. Things are still way too bad, but we forcefully throttled some things as we saw how quickly the damage was compounding.
Women’s hair doesn’t defy gravity without lots of help.
Oh my god I needed your comment for it to finally click, I was thinking "they stopped putting their hair up to protect their shoulders from the increased UVs"? But of course, it was referencing the sprays!
I just told my kid about how we fixed acid rain through regulation just this morning
Well it's understandable, the concept of being able to actually cooperate and do something about the environment on a world scale instead of just blindly pretending it's not a thing until it kills us all is a bit hard to believe for younger generations for obvious reasons.
I don't understand, why would it sound implausible? Isn't that what governments are FOR?
But government BAD! Taxes BAD!
I know, the government is bad, so if we put a bad man in charge it’ll be a double negative and become good, right?
It's kinda our last big environmental win.
iirc ~1/4 of the worlds energy production is renewable. More than 90% of all new electricity capacity worldwide came from renewable sources in 2024. Doomers want you to believe it can't happen again while we are in the very decade that is likely to change the world. Public policy doesn't even matter at this point, renewable energy is cheaper, so nearly all new investments are in renewables.
That's only the case because it was the cheapest option available for a while. Oil execs noticed the trend and got cold feet, now a lot of governments are cutting back subsidies for renewables and actively hinder new projects being build. Here in germany we have investors abandoning half build solar parks cause they aren't profitable anymore. At the same time we allow oil companies to bid for gigantic offshore projects just so they can say that they have no interest in actually building it after they won.
With the ozon hole you could see the world working together to fix it despite it beeing somewhat less profitable. With renewables you can see governments actively working against the movement despite it being the best in terms of environment and profits combined.
We could stop producing all greenhouse gases today, and the planet would continue warming for 100 years. it's a pretty tough problem we have on our hands.
There's been some conservation wins that I know of. Okaloosa Darter fish came off of endangered status, and eventually off of threatened The Red Cockaded Woodpecker was elevated from endangered to threatened a few years ago.
Controlled burns in the US long leaf pine forests have also lead to a return of the quail population.
Just trying to sprinkle a little good news out there.
None of that is worldwide.
American Bison, too. The repopulation of American bison (often mistakenly called buffalo) is one of the most successful repopulation efforts in history. The reason you’re able to order buffalo (again, not actually buffalo) burgers at your local hipster burger joint is because American bison is no longer endangered. The population has come from less than 1000 total bison (all privately owned by a handful of conservationists) to over 400k today.
I saw on Ted Turner's wiki page that he helped with that.
I had a Bison meatloaf once that was so good. It's so much lighter than beef. It was like eating a meat cloud.
The irony of all ironies is how similar the words "conservation" and "conservative" are.
That's because the root of both is to conserve. To keep things the way they are.
Politics gets in the way of that reality since they don't actively want to keep it the same, they actually want to regress back to previous times they can exploit personally.
The thing is it kinda isn't. The ozone layer still needs about 20 years to get back to 1960 levels and the number of problematic states for this increasing again
Tbf, its not even yet a win technically.
If we turn around climate change, even if we fail to avoid quadrillion dollar sea level rise, I'm going to call it a win
I hope we don't lose too much before we do win though, or after we do
So is that good news, that we’re moving in the right direction?
Though the very next sentence from that linked source says
2018 to 2022 didnt see much change (and given how far until its fully returned to normal, I think you can see qhy - it takes a long time to fully heal), but we're certainly pretty far into success compared to where we were.
Well not to worry, all these internet swarm satellites might cause another one.
how so?
Video overview: https://youtu.be/oKK0dgDIxKY
There's many studies, so here's two:
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024GL109280
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2025EF007229
Article: https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/how-elon-musks-dying-satellites-could-hurt-the-ozone-layer
tl;dr: the massively increased rate of rocket launches and re-entry satellite burn-ups is creating a significant amount of pollution that is probably damaging the Ozone layer.
Fucks saaaake.
Most don't know that we have an ozone layer let alone that there is a hole in it.
One of my coworkers insists that the hole in the ozone layer is an iris that expands and contracts for regulation. When I asked him what it was regulating, he just shrugged and gave a look that said "I don't know, you tell me"
He also claimed that believing that humans were capable of changing the global climate was pure hubris, despite the USSR deleting the Caspian sea decades ago.
And he thinks the wind turbines that have been installed in the past 10 years are making tornadoes worse, contradicting his claims that humans can't change the climate
I think your coworker may be a lost cause, do you think you could convince him that anti-freeze and turpentine will make him see god?
Engineering a death by misadventure doesn't seem ethical to me
Just wait for the people he follows on the internet to tell him
in a situation in which harm increase over time, like the rise of far right, anti-science, environmental damage, etc… perhaps that “wait” is a less ethical solution than to solve the problem
now, perhaps causing harm isn’t the way to go, but… the lesser of 2 evils may still be somewhat problematic
“For regulation” is a pretty weird take, but it is self regulating (in the absence of pollution from humans). When the ozone layer is thin, more UV gets through from the sun. UV from the sun ionizes O2 and splits it apart, creating oxygen free radicals which recombine and create ozone. Thus, less ozone leads to more ozone, hence self-regulation.
I thought the aerosols that affect the environment refer to the tiny aerosol particles at higher levels in the atmosphere.
Everyone in the 80s seemed to confuse the with aerosol hairspray, which wasn’t really a huge contributor. Still aren’t most sprays today generally not this so called aerosol style anymore?
It was the Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that were used as the primary propellant in aerosol sprays. More commonly known by the brand name Freon. Notice that basically every aerosol can manufactured today has a “CFC Free” badge somewhere. Refrigerant systems also moved away from using actual Freon, and now use alternative refrigerants.
CFCs were actually invented by the same guy who invented leaded gasoline, Thomas Midgley Jr... He is probably the single most environmentally destructive chemical engineer in history.
On the plus side, one of his inventions killed Thomas Midgley Jr., arguably the most environmentally destructive chemical engineer in history
Late 80s hairsprays and other canned aerosols were a sizeable contributor.
They were an easy fix, and stopped being a problem almost as soon as people decided to do something. That was way before the problem reached mainstream media, so when people started talking about it, they weren't a problem anymore. But they surely were a problem for some time.