I know right. "Hey I see you like worrying about stuff...well, how about these apples!"

Scientists really need to learn how to keep it to themselves for like a year or two. /s

The underlying dataset is fascinating and supports the UV-B damage hypothesis while also falsifying the mega-volcano hypothesis. It took a great deal of Wikipedia research for me to get a feel for the paleo geography and paleo climate of East Greenland 359 Mya. The “warming causes ozone collapse” meme seems aimed at gaining media attention but that tactic seems to be the norm now in scientific papers.

Sometimes the curation role of a journal is important and peer review can identify errors. In this case it seems like access to the right geological formations by competent scientists is key and I read nothing in the paper made me question the science. I don’t think the lack of journal prestige diminishes the significance of this specific paper; it probably reflects the modern relevance of this extinction event.

Both 'Science' and 'Nature' have prestige, but people get confused because same domains are used for multiple journals.

Open access journals like Advances or Nature Communications are not that bad, but Nature Scientific Reports is horrible.

It's very low impact journal with minimum review. It's intended to be place for grey literature where technical reports and scientific reports with no importance go. Unfortunately it has started to publish junk science too. Those pieces get posted into HN frequently. All that happens under nature.com that makes them seem legit.

Good catch. Advances I gather is their open-access journal? Not necessarily any worse I would think, but yeah not for the big impact papers.

Hey!

Science Advances has an Impact Factor over 12.

Publishing in this journal is a career making milestone. Our university prepares a press release for anything over 10ish. To get into Science proper you need resources that almost nobody has, including years video editing experience and dedicated staff to produce the rotoscoped videos Eric Betzig shows.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/337/6096/835/tab-pdf

That's the ref in the paper. It's a bit confusing because they're looking at chemical processes taking place at 15-20km altitude. Temps there are around -55C maybe, 200K).

They plot changes for activation of the process, but I don't have enough knowledge about it to understand the implications. The bottom axis of their graph runs from 195K - 210K though so clearly it's not a big delta. They seem much more interested in the amount of water vapor at altitude.

The other thing is that it seems like the process has a fairly short cycle time. By which I mean they mention changes on the order of days. When I think about ozone holes I think mainly in the context of decades.

So I'm not sure how much the mention of warming and ozone loss in the OP paper was a 'hey that might be of note,' or was a more substantially linked relationship.

(I kind of wonder if pole reversal/magnetic field weakening or solar events could play into the loss of ozone during the extinction in the original paper?)

The paper makes this statement at the end:

Last, we emphasize that because chlorine ac- tivation depends exponentially on water vapor and temperature, and in turn that the forcing of climate may well control the convective injec- tion of water into the lower stratosphere, the idea that ozone “recovery” is in sight because we have controlled chlorofluorocarbons and halon release is a potential misjudgment.

I have searched for, but been unable to find, a chart of estimated UV levels at ground level over the past few hundred years.

I'm interested in it because suntans seem so much worse now than in the past, where people didn't have access to suncream, yet still spent lots of time outside.

"I got used to it by spending my whole life outside" doesn't seem to fully explain it.

> I would think pumping out tons of ozone is significantly easier than removing atmospheric CO2 or, you know, burning less carbon(how absurd, right?).

That reminds me of the Simpsons episode where they bring in a serious of increasingly more absurd animals to deal with a small invasive species they find.

https://youtu.be/3f5viRoaZNw?t=87

"...thus solving the problem once and for all!"

"But-"

"ONCE AND FOR ALL!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SYpUSjSgFg

Anybody can make Ozone, but how do you propose getting it high enough in the atmosphere?

Well, there is less ozone in total than CO2 produced per year, but ozone is harmful at ground level: https://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/facts/ozone.html

It's a single paper in a journal. This is how science works: they are putting out their hypothesis and the data and their conclusions.

It doesn't mean they're 'right' (regardless of the certitude of the HN headline).

I think it is important to state, that this isn't some established fact. And it's not a thing that this one paper could 'establish' as fact.