Melting polar ice is releasing CFCs back into the air, exacerbating the problem.
We need another pandemic.
The pandemic didn’t get into full swing until 2020-2021 though. (March was when everything shutdown in the US at least). So what happened in 2019?
Apparently, a volcano eruption. The last paragraph of this section states:
In September 2023, the Antarctic ozone hole was one of the largest on record, at 26 million square kilometers. The anomalously large ozone loss may have been a result of the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai eruption.
Huh, I thought the hole in the ozone was a success story for decisive environmental action and that it was “fixed”
Nothing is permanent. China started using untold amounts of cfls again and polar ice melts as well as human mining have released massive amounts of ozone destructive methane. There was good evidence of the damage slowing and reversing for a time, but we just kind of stopped caring around the time we had that massive global “climate change isn’t real” psy-op.
It is actually getting better, it just takes time.
In fact, according to the above Wikipedia article it was in a great spot in 2019 and then a volcano erupted:
In 2019, the ozone hole was at its smallest in the previous thirty years, due to the warmer polar stratosphere weakening the polar vortex. In September 2023, the Antarctic ozone hole was one of the largest on record, at 26 million square kilometers. The anomalously large ozone loss may have been a result of the 2022 Tonga volcanic eruption.
For a moment I thought this was the google chrome logo’s evolution.