Aerosol
10d 23h ago by mander.xyz/u/fossilesque in science_memes@mander.xyz from mander.xyz
Kids these days don't even know about the hole in the ozone later.
It's kinda our last big environmental win.
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.
Cockaded Woodpecker
Now your just making shit up.
Winner of the "most penis euphemisms in one name" award.
Top contenders:
Red-cockaded Woodpecker — "cockaded" refers to a ribbon or rosette ornament once worn on hats, not anatomy.
Cock-of-the-rock — sounds like a tavern name invented by a teenager.
Dickcissel — often cited as the funniest North American bird name. "Dick" was historically a common nickname for a male bird.
Bush Thick-knee — not penis-related, but frequently gets laughs.
Rufous-naped Lark — harmless, but "rufous-naped" is often misread at a glance. Shag — in British English, perfectly normal; elsewhere, not so much.
Cockatoo — contains "cock," though the name comes from Malay, not English.
Woodcock — another classic.
Black-cockatoo and other cockatoos — bonus points for stacking "cock" into longer names.
Penis McPeniswoodchuck
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 had a Bison meatloaf once that was so good. It's so much lighter than beef. It was like eating a meat cloud.
I saw on Ted Turner's wiki page that he helped with that.
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.
None of that is worldwide.
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
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.
Energy sources are only part of the issue (albeit a major one) and enormous damage has already been done to a disastrous point, calling people "doomers" with an intent to ridicule their angst, worries and experiences is akin to climate change denial.
Also, public policy is constantly used in an expensive way if that it suits the ruling classes, markets are not some neutral forces in a vacuum.
I'm concerned about climate change. But if you ask most people how much progress we've made they would say "barely any". That belief that we can't do it, is the main thing aside from public policy slowing us down. When people think things are hopeless, they often don't see the point in fighting or changing their behavior. I also think most people don't realize that renewable energy adoption has accelerated so quickly the last few years. Every year we have had massive growth over last year in adoption.
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.
Solar is easily the cheapest energy and its getting cheaper every year. Repairing a coal power plant is not as attractive as a much cheaper to run biofuel plant. Etc.
Here in germany we have investors abandoning half build solar parks cause they aren't profitable anymore.
Without knowing the specifics, I doubt profitability was the issue. Once a solar panel is installed it is pure profit with minimal maintenance. Companies get in trouble when they commit way more to a project than they can raise in investments. It seems more likely that is what happened.
Lastly your looking at a few countries that are pushing back with what amounts to theater (Germany is 56% renewable energy). Meanwhile the largest producer of energy in the world, China, is staying committed to converting to renewables and s also 56% of the way there. But even in countries pushing back the growth trend is clear, we are past early adoption and squarely in the common adoption phase of electrifying our technology out of fossil fuels.
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.
Sure but the problem would be 100 times worse if fossil fuel adoption doest decline. Its good news that we seem to be on the way to shifting our behavior.
Yeah, last. Not latest, last.
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?
Not when all governments have been captured by oil tycoons it isn't.
Oh. But they were good for this before that, right?
The banning of CFCs due to their environmental impacts, retooling the aerosol and refrigerant industries, is what it looks like when we have a functioning world society.
There are adults now who were born after that and don't remember a time when we could behave that way, so they have every right to be cynical.
The refrigerant industry. Oh boy.
It's what governments are supposed to be for.
Oh. Just oil?
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?
From an accelerationist standpoint, yes. /s
You ADD a bad person to the government, you don't MULTIPLY.
But what do I know about maths?! Somehow the bad effects end up growing exponentially, and I can't explain that.
I think the only reason it worked was because there were cheaper alternatives to CFCs already available. So it didn't cost them money.
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!
And there was that whole thing about trying to make cars burn a little cleaner so you could actually see from 1 side of a major city to another
Trump wants to bring it back.
ozone later
Well that's because we're at now, not at later.
We've had one ozone yes, but what about later ozone?
nozone
Frozone
Calzone
Bowling
[gets hit on head by aerosol can.]
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.
The aluminium nanoparticles these satelites shed when they burn up in re-entry during their disposal, are also toxic.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17435390.2025.2511694
Fucks saaaake.
in australia they absolutely do
we take skin cancer very seriously down here
Cancer is probably the least dangerous living thing in Australia.
Cancer is living? I gotta get outta here
Wait till you hear about the guy who caught tapeworm cancer from his cancerous tapeworms
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
Name me another chemical engineer that could be argued did more harm. I don't think all of Monsanto with agent orange and Roundup has done more than the TEL and CFC fuckup.
Where's he buried? How long is the line to piss on his headstone?
Fritz Haber invented nitrogrn fixing fertilizers and is responsible for the massive baby boom across the globe after ww2 because so much more food could now be grown.
Except now there are 8b+ people on an increasingly warming and polluted planet and these fertilizers (alongside modern farming techniques and climate collapse, both of which came about because of this baby boom...) have all but destroyed the planets' arable land.
Why were “CFC propellants” even helpful to the manufacturer? Can’t you just use compressed air in spray bottles to make them spray?
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.
Young people have no idea what it used to smell like. For a decade everything reeked of smoke and hairspray.
You could taste it in the air
Galadriel: Feel it in the water
I feel it in my fingers
This is so real. Like everyone had a broom on their heads. It was full on capybara hair.
I feel it in my toes.
🎶I feel it in my toes...
(I got you!)
Christmas is around us,
Come on and let it snow.
Everywhere you went felt like a bowling alley.
Everything you touched had a thin sticky layer of cigarette smoke gunk on it. Hell I remember doctors casually smoking in examination rooms.
now that you mention it, cheese burgers taste different than they used to because of this most likely.
They changed the oils they cooked with from tallow to whichever vegetable oil is cheapest. Those newer oils burn at cooking temperature and add a flavour to the fried meat
That happened in the late '80s when the lies about saturated fat became popularly believed
Which lies are you talking about?
It was awesome.
I do remember people complaining that the new hairspray didn't have any hold.
I also remember punks resorting to egg whites and Elmer's, but I can't say that I know that's related.
I also remember punks resorting to egg whites and Elmer’s
Punks actually just did that anyway, even back when the good hairspray was still plentiful. Everyone just had their own "best" method that they swore by: egg whites, school glue, Knox gelatin, I even knew a couple of gutter punks who put their mohawks up with spray paint. I used to use an extra thick hair gel that you could only find in places where they sold hair care products for black people. I think most people probably preferred the hairdryer and AquaNet method though. It was cheap, relatively easy, and it worked.
My secret was simple: hairblower with the cheapest maximum hold spray.
I would start at the base of my scalp and spray some hairspray and then with a comb, raise a spot of hair at a time while blowing hot hair on that spot.
In less than 5 mins, my mohawk was ready and strong.
When I wanted to go the extra mile, I would then cover the mohawk in hair gel and blow dry it just like I did with hairspray. My mohawk would stay straight for a few days and it was quite easy to wash. Good times
I'm alternate reality croquette and I endorse this method.
Only I didn't use a comb.
I have curly hairs, so the comb helped keep the hair straight, and kept my hand from sticking
I dont even really remember women actually wearing their hair like this, and I’m old as fuck.
yeah these look like 1+ hour styles that most people are only going to bother with for special occasions, unless they're an actor with a staff stylist and/or filthy rich
When I think ozone destroying hair, I think teased 80s hair that A LOT of people wore
Old enough to remember when women had loads of free time because washing machines and electric vacuums had been invented but they weren't allowed to work after they were married?
No wonder you don't remember. This is Brigitte Bardot mid 1960's maybe. You should be about 80 yo to remember lol.
As a white man from this era I always preferred the pixie.
Ah, I see you're a man of culture.
I remember the beehive hairdos. True monuments to structural engineering that would make any architect spiral into a pit of inadequacy.
I just think they're neat.
How old are you? Cause this is Brigitte Bardot in her thirties at most. We're talking about 1960's.
For a good while now I just felt old. But not today. Today I feel fucking old.
Two weeks ago I had an MRI to see if I need knee surgery. Tomorrow I get to talk to Ortho about my impending knee surgery-- A lateral tear of the meniscus in the cleft with some degeneration of the joint. I'm sick of walking with a cane and wearing a knee brace.
Saturday I drove 360 some miles to get an MRI to see if I have prostate cancer. No results yet, but I have my suspicions based on my PSAs. The question is: Is it the slow cancer or the fast cancer?
Thursday I need to drive another 100 miles to talk to another doctor about what is now a very minor issue.
So yeah, I'm mother fucking old today.......
***Oh, and yes I remember Bardot vividly from my youth. And a host of others you may or not remember. From Marilyn Monroe to Jane Russel to Maureen O'Hara.
Sadly, you can't get the proper hold without CFCs...
Is that so? How does the propellant matter?
It doesn't. As long as it's non-reactive, it only matters for the people designing the spay can.
I think the GP was sarcastic.
It lifts and separates.
It has what plants crave.
Direct, burning sunlight
Like most people would change anything about their lifestyle for the common good... It just went out of style.
No, it became illegal to manufacture the necessary products.
I am old enough to remember it going out of style.
I just shook my head when I saw this post, scrolled down to find a comment which reflected the truth, and farted
Work amount.
This. I'm a hairdresser and people just do not have the time it takes to create or sit for these elaborate hairstyles any longer. Also, hygiene habits have changed. Most people shower, not bathe, and women would keep these hairstyles for one to two weeks before washing them out and redoing. Most women won't go one day without washing their hair now.
If only we could get industrial manufacturing and energy production regulated to evolve in the same way that personal care is.
But non-aerosol gel exists for the same purpose. Why don't they use that?
You can still buy aerosol hair sprays too they just don’t use CFCs
Most use propane as a propellant now.
You can also use aerosol based ones, the propellant just has to be non crazy.