Scientists Now Claim Their Model Shows Rocket Launches Damage Ozone Layer
Computer models suggest soot particles from the rockets could damage ozone shield that protects life on Earth.
On Wednesday, SpaceX added to its list of considerable accomplishments.
SpaceX launched a commercial communications satellite and landed a rocket on a ship at sea on Wednesday (June 29).
A two-stage Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on Wednesday at 5:04 p.m. EDT (2104 GMT), carrying the SES-22 communication satellite toward orbit.
About 8.5 minutes after launch, the Falcon 9’s first stage came back down to Earth for a pinpoint touchdown on the SpaceX droneship A Shortfall of Gravitas, which was stationed in the Atlantic Ocean.
As space expert and pundit Robert Zimmerman notes, this puts American enterprise ahead in the new Space Race.
The leaders in the 2022 launch race:
27 SpaceX
21 China
8 Russia
4 Rocket LabAmerican private enterprise now leads China 37 to 21 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 37 to 34.
This is too much success for Americans to enjoy. So environmental science is being used to argue that rocket launches are going to result in damage to the ozone.
SpaceX and Virgin Galactic have sparked a new era of space travel and although these joy rides to the final frontier are exciting, they have a dark side that is accelerating climate change, a new study reveals.
A team of scientists, led by the University of London College, found that black carbon particles emitted by rockets are almost 500 times more efficient at holding heat in the atmosphere than all other sources of soot combined – and this is enhancing global warming.
The findings are based on all rocket launches and re-entries in 2019, along with projected space tourism scenarios based on the recent billionaire space race.
Researchers found, under a scenario of daily or weekly space tourism rocket launches, the impact on the stratospheric ozone layer threatens to undermine the recovery experienced after the successful implementation of the Montreal Protocol.
And this is mainly due to Elon Musk’s SpaceX’s use of kerosene and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic’s hybrid synthetic rubber fuel, according to researchers.
I will point out the conclusions that were drawn from “modeling.”
This data was then incorporated into a 3D atmospheric chemistry model to explore the impact on climate and the ozone layer.
They found that pollutants from solid-fuel rockets and re-entry heating of returning spacecraft and debris are particularly harmful to stratospheric ozone – and have the potential to speed up global warming, an increasingly dangerous risk given the likelihood of global temperatures going above the 1.5-degree threshold outlined by international governments.
Changes in the Earth’s atmosphere are difficult to predict, as various factors influence them. Ozone concentration, for example, is impacted by solar activity, local pollution, and seasons. I am very skeptical that the modeling is accurate.
It is also important to note that the last time world organizations tried to control ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), one nation continued to use them: China.
Today, the ozone hole still exists, forming every year over Antarctica in the spring. It closes up again over the summer as stratospheric air from lower latitudes is mixed in, patching it up until the following spring when the cycle begins again. But there’s evidence it’s starting to disappear – and recover more or less as expected, says Solomon. Based on scientific assessments, the ozone layer is expected to return to pre-1980 levels around the middle of the century. Healing is slow because of the long lifespan of ozone-depleting molecules. Some persist in the atmosphere for 50 to 150 years before decaying.
Despite the Montreal Protocol’s overall success, there have been setbacks. In 2018, for example, the concentration of CFC-11, banned since 2010, was found to not be coming down as quickly as was expected, suggesting undeclared emissions were coming from somewhere. The Environmental Investigation Agency traced the emissions to factories in China, which were manufacturing it for use in insulation foam. Once made public, the Chinese government quickly clamped down and scientists say we are now back on track.
I somehow doubt China will throttle back on its rocket launches. So, I hope the American space companies will continue to move forward without encountering environmental activist turbulence.
I am also sure China’s disinformation warriors will be hard at work promoting this study. It turns out Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter may pay more dividends than just free speech, as he can help counter disinformation campaigns and keep SpaceX flying.
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I remember hearing things like this during the Apollo program.
It was bogus then too.
Just another climate scam to redistribute our wealth to the world and bring ourselves into captivity with us doing all the work to get there.
Remember that the Russian FSB originated and funded the Anti-Nuke movement in Europe.
Remember that the Saudis and Emmirates funded the anti-Fracking propaganda and the fake GASLAND film.
Would someone benefit if SpaceX could not launch?
“I am also sure China’s disinformation warriors will be hard at work promoting this study.”
I bet that China funded the study. I also remember our welfare class arguing that money spent on space should be used on them. All that would do is get us more completely useless people, useless to society, useless to themselves, and even useless to their children. We really need to stop feeding those people. both here and abroad.
Computer models like this can be manipulated to spit out any result the so-called “researchers” want. Just like the ones used to model the spread of viruses, the efficacy of vaccines, and the weather, they’re only as trustworthy as the input data, the algorithms used to manipulate that data, and the people interpreting the results.
We need to find a different solution to global warming. Something that doesn’t impoverish our society and turn the USA into the USSR.
How about building a huge parasol to block sunlight from reaching earth?
EX-cellent!
The genius of that!
Oh goodness. It is no wonder we have not colonized the moon and explored the cosmos properly, by sending human beings out into space and not space junk.
Funny thing about 03. The sun tends to repair the damage.
Ozone is the new CO2, just like CO2 was the new ozone before.
Gotta keep the scam going.
And look out for that nitrogen…
I’ve had it. I’m refilling my tires with Sarin tomorrow.
The ozone whole appears when the sun angle is low during winter. Each summer it is repaired. Once again: Correlation is not causation.
Whole => hole
I got it. The whole is equal to or greater than the hole.
The rung is now true.
“Predictive Model” is a euphemism for “Educated Guess”
“Predictive Model” is a euphemism for
“Educated Guess”“complete bullshit”FIFY
With “educated” running a fairly wide gamut from “ignorant” to “maliciously wrong”.
“Educated”: Who’s paying and what results do they want?
Should not a “Predictive Model” be occasionally correct in it’s predictions?
Next, you’ll expect at least one Executive Order in an administration to improve the country rather than destroy it.
Hi, I’m a progressive and I like forward-thinking ideas like trains and windmills and walking to Mars.
What did socialists use before there were candles? Electric lights.
Can I get my R12 back now?
I heard propane works. Even cheaper, and even approved a few years ago. It has an R number.
I’ve used a propane blend for years. Much more efficient than R134.
R12 was the best damn automotive freon ever, and still widely used of course, like in Mexico.
And fireworks add about 60,000 metric tons of CO2 to the atmosphere. So?
YOU “useless eaters” are the carbon they want to reduce.
“Climate change” hysteria is all about getting rid of the great unwashed masses so the elite can have the whole world as their own private playground.
Green is the new red.
Radical environmentalists are “watermelons.”
Been there, done that, the ozone layer grows thick and thin, abundant and rare, following its own evolutionary process.
ZOMG! They’re going to pierce the Earth’s protective layer and we’re all going to die!
Said almost nobody since about 1850-something, I think.
So, is it that the ignorant old people who came before actually knew what they were talking about? Or do we just ignore them? Or are you talking out you a** again?
Also, it would seem a pretty easy solution: just gather up the smog from Chinese cities and carry it to altitude and release it. After all, smog’s primary component (I was told back in the day) is ozone….
Hey, isn’t Biden trying to shut down the Permian Basin because they’re generating too much ozone? Right hand, left hand…
So these tiny little rockets (scale-wise) are piercing the fragile atmosphere. I can almost hear its screams of pain. The vaunted “ozone hole” over Antarctica closed (with no help from the major polluters) all by itself. Yes…there will be global warming on a lethal level as the dying sun expands to engulf the earth….. in several million years.
Computer models are not science
When I was an engineer, we use to say the outputs are only as good as the inputs. Junk in equals junk out. If the inputs into the computer model is garbage, you’ll get crap results. I’m guessing the input and assumptions taken are garbage.
Also, if the model is crap, the results are crap. Many of the old climate models were clearly biased crap, based on a reading of the source code. Now they don’t make the code public, so we should assume they’re great now. :/
Remember the Club of Rome’s “Limits to Growth” computer model? Utter garbage. And yet many scientists endorsed it.
Some people have no imaginations and no faith in human ingenuity.
A unit of one of my computer courses in 1972 was about “physical limits of computation.” Stuff like limitations on trace size, heat dissipation, miniaturization, and speed beyond which hardware would never go. I vehemently refused this Kool-Aid, rebelliously penning an essay (in an answer to a test question) about how professional electrical engineering academics all swore that the mininum dimensions of an AM tuning coil ensured that a car radio was an impossibility… until Bill “Learjet” Lear, who had no professional training, designed and built one that worked just fine.
And indeed, within 10-30 years, every one of these “limits” was broken by improvements like optical circuitry, parallel processing, on-chip memory, and eventually, quantum computers.
Henrybowman I hate to break it to you, but you can’t get a quantum computer even on a Lamborghini or Rolls Royce. Maybe they’ll start with snowmobiles because they’re used in cold environments (still pretty hot compared to 0 Kelvin though.)
Also I bet those EE profs didn’t say it would never be possible with even new tech. I am one, and no EE would ever say that. It was probably that it wasn’t possible or practical with some existing tech.
Around that time they were redefining “science” and “scientist” to suit the new groupthink view of science. None of those endorsers could possible have read and understood the source code and said that. Probably biologists (they’re experts right?) that don’t lower themselves to deal with nitty gritty details like that, also they can’t understand them.
The climate models have so many variables that the only way they can solve the related equations is to make boatloads of assumptions. All you have to do is look at who is making the assumptions. That explains a lot.
“You vill hunt, gazzer, and f*k. Zoze tree tings. NOZZING ELSE!”
“Scientists” use to say that CFCs destroyed ozone and caused the ozone hole at the south pole back in the 1980s, but after several decades of CFC bans, the ozone hole is still there without explanation from these scientists.
Whatever will they do when a nuclear warhead throws three hundred and fifty trillion tons of dirt in the air and obscures the sun for 66 weeks ?
Rejoice. We are dying, and they will live.
The ozone layer? That’s so 20th century.
I’m sure they are just discovering this now not back in the 70s when everything was a suspected as a culprit in ozone depletion
I remember in school, being taught that fireworks caused it, nuclear weapons caused it (our govt had set off hundreds above ground by that point). But they never thought off rocket launches? I doubt that.
Eventually they decided that our hairspray cans and air conditioning caused and moved onto acid rain and then global warming
Betcha that computer model was designed to get the results they reported. There is virtually zero chance that an “environmental scientist” will do honest research.
An “environmental scientist” modeling climate doesn’t have the ability to do honest research. To understand meteorology one needs (gasp!) physics. And people who can do physics don’t go into “environmental science”.
Someone has to say these things plainly. These fake-scientists have to be insulted and embarrassed in public to the extent they aren’t called experts on these things anymore. For the protection of the public.
Nobody’s going to take that bet. Even bending their model as far as they could, they still needed to use “Researchers found, under a scenario of daily or weekly space tourism rocket launches…”
That’s using a rigged scale and still dropping a giant lump of scrap iron on it so the numbers come out the way you want.
Was that “research” funded by China and Russia? Hmmm?
“could damage ozone shield”
They have no evidence that it is causing damage.
“Experts say” seems to be “evidence” enough, particularly when they cancel, ban, and destroy any expert who dares say otherwise.
Science™ is now a mortal threat to human existence. For a while, we had tamed it to focus on doing good for humanity. Now they are framing humanity as the primary threat to Gaia. There are just too many of us on this planet. Maybe we should reduce the scientist™ population?
“There are just too many of us on this planet.”
Way too many. Every marxist needs to go. That should cut the population by half or better.
About 10,000 years ago most of the midwest was under a mile of ice. I hear it was the dinosaur farts that caused it all to melt.
Letting the leftists push the world around with that (when they didn’t even know if there was any problem with the O-zone or what the historical makeup of it was) was a HUGE mistake. The leftists have taken off since then and tried to destroy humanity by banning every single thing their fevered pea-brains could dream up.
“recovery”?? LOL. THey didn’t know what the O-zone had earlier looked like because they had just started measuring it … and voila!! Mankind is killing it!!!
I suggest they fix the model. It’s wrong.
Sounds like the study is nothing more than a “hit piece” against Elon Musk. Tremendous success yields critics. Get a life!
Astroids made up of who knows what hit the atmosphere and have been since the earth was spun up.
Just about all the climate extremests’ now mainstreamists’ claims can be rebutted with some common sense.
They DO NOT KNOW, they love couch their suppositions in the terms of the certain, but they do not know anything for certain.
We have seashell type fossils all over the place, above sea level and far above the seal level rise they claim would inundate our coastal cities.
Guess what? That stuff happened way before the Industrial Revolution and may happen again but it won’t be because of man and emissions or cow farts (please…).
Man fantasizes about having that power. Some will tell unforgivable lies to get it.
See who they are.
“27 SpaceX
21 China
8 Russia
4 Rocket Lab”
That looks like about 100 launches in one calendar year.
Meanwhile, there are about 93,000 airline flights every day That is, over 33 million per year.
Either they fear the number of space launches to increase by a factor of a million or more, or they are postulating that one rocket produces as much pollution as a million airliners?
Have they considered that perhaps even if space rockets were insanely polluting, there just aren’t enough launches to make much of a difference??
As it has every spring since the world began. The antarctic ozone depletion is a completely natural phenomenon that was first measured in the 1930s.