Plugging Holes

The process that allowed us to came together as a global society to address the depletion of earth's ozone layer is one of the great success stories of ecosystem management.  First scientists provided a clear and unambiguous warning about the threat and what was causing it.  Policymakers, governments, and private industry used that information to design practical solutions and to implement them.  Governments came together and took collective and decisive action to support those solutions.  That culminated 30 years ago in the signing of the Montreal Protocol, which helped us phase out the use of chlorofluorocarbons and hydrochlorofluorocarbons that are the main enemies of stratospheric ozone.

 However, check out this BBC story about the rise of other compounds that are beginning to have a detrimental affect  http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-41585552

 One of the main ones is dichloroethane that is used in the manufacture of polyvinyl chloride (PVC).  PVC is everywhere.  Agriculture, is one example where it is increasingly being used for things like irrigation pipe, green houses, and row covers among other things.

This news story is based on a recent scientific paper.  Check out the original source here:
https://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/17/11929/2017/

Also note that there is still scientific controversy about this.  Unlike the case when the Montreal Protocol was signed

Check out this paper that came out today in PNAS:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/long/1702078114v1

The lead author, William Ripple, is from OSU.

This is from the Significance section of the article:

Determining the drivers of extinction risk has been a key pursuit of conservation biology. Considering that body mass could be a strong predictor of extinction risk, we constructed a global database of body masses for 27,647 vertebrate species. Results show that the smallest- and largest-bodied vertebrates have elevated extinction risk. The largest vertebrates are mostly threatened by direct killing by humans, whereas the smallest species are more likely to have restricted geographic ranges—an important predictor of extinction risk—and be threatened by habitat degradation. Declines of large and small vertebrate species will truncate the size distributions characterizing these taxa, jeopardizing ecosystem services to humans, and generating cascading ecological and evolutionary effects on other species and processes.