Question

PLEASE HELP ASAP
Identify two cost effective ways society can use to prevent further destruction of the ozone layer. Explain your answer.

Answer 1

The primary chemicals that cause damage to the ozone are chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs or freons) and bromofluorocarbon (halons).

Decreasing or eliminating the use of these chemicals will help protect the ozone layer. For the most part, this has already been done, and substitute chemicals have been found for use. However, many of the other chemicals still cause ozone layer depletion, just not as much, or cause other environmental damage when used.

We could try to go in, and remove the extra chemicals from the atmosphere. There are two problems with this approach:

1. It's very expensive. Scientists predict that the human-caused depletion of the ozone layer will be corrected by 2050, just by not using those chemicals anymore. In the grand scheme of things, that isn't very long, so would it be worth an enormous cost to speed it up?

2. The consequences are not well known. What else could we end up doing to disturb the atmosphere if we go in and tinker with it? What will the next chemicals do that we leave up there? Why take this risk, possibly expanding the hole, or causing global warming, or creating some other problem, when the problem will fix itself in another 40 years?

Notably, the CFCs humans use that are considered to cause ozone depletion do not dissolve in water. Similar products from natural sources like volcanoes do dissolve in water, and are washed out of the atmosphere by rain. Additionally, the world exists in a balance--small changes in one area can throw other areas off.

Finally, while we can't "stop" the creation of ozone, that isn't the issue--we did effect the speed at which ozone is destroyed. Think of if this way: 1 million ozone were made per week, and then 1 million were destroyed naturally each week. That would be the normal process. What if 1 million were still made each week, but 1.1 million per week were destroyed? Even though the same amount is always made, there is still ozone depletion. It might be slow and take a while to build up into a problem, but the problem still exists.

Answer 2

There is absolutely nothing that can be done. CFCs were phased out by the Montreal Protocol years ago. However, the time scale for these things to drift up into the stratosphere and catalyze ozone depletion is decades. So you just have to wait until what was emitted decades ago runs its course. We completely lack the technology, let alone the wisdom, to attempt large-scale chemical modification of the stratosphere.