Reddit reviews Principles of Planetary Climate

For the record, counters suggested Principles of Planetary Climate in another thread.

> In my eyes this isn't a chemistry problem.

Except it is a chemistry problem. Your explication on atmospheric dynamics is incorrect on multiple levels:

• The Coriolis effect is not why the atmosphere at the equator is 'thicker' than at the poles. In fact, the notion of "thickness" of the total atmosphere doesn't make sense because the Karman Line isn't an absolute limit on this quantity. What you really mean is that the tropopause is higher at the equator than at the poles, and this has everything to do with the fact that there is more radiation and convection at the equator; recall from the hypsometric equation that the thickness of a layer of the atmosphere is directly proportional to the average temperature of the layer. Also, the atmosphere is satured with water vapor in the tropics, which helps facilitate exothermic processes like condensation which further warm the atmosphere column, expanding it.
  
  
• Next, the "thickness" interpretation of the ozone hole isn't literal thickness of a layer of the atmosphere. Typically, you use mass mixing ratio (xi) or concentration (# molecules/cm3) when you deal with atmospheric chemistry. When studying Ozone with the aid of spectroscopy, you use optical depth/extinction of UV at several wavelengths to estimate these quantities. A scientist named Dobson was the first person to directly measure polar ozone levels using spectroscopy, and he came up with a convenient way to record ozone concentrations which are now referred to as Dobson units. The notion of atmospheric ozone in a column "thinning" means concentrations in the column are decreasing, which translates to the theoretical 'Dobson column' thinning in height. But we're talking about concentrations normalized over a unit volume.
  
  
• Density doesn't factor into any of this because we're already talking about absolute unit volumes. Throw in perfect gas law if you want, but it's not necessary for any of these considerations.
  
  I'm sorry, but your entire explanation is just scientific jargon-babble devoid of any real geophysical fluid dynamics . That's just not how the atmosphere works.
  
  > Ask yourself this. How long have we had satellites studying the earth?
  
  We've been measuring atmospheric ozone since before TOMS was in orbit. The thing is, if you know a bit of chemistry, you realize that this is a red herring. We don't need a multi-millenial timeseries of ozone data to know that the modern ozone hole is exceptional. We already know that the primary mechanism of Ozone production in the stratosphere is the Chapman mechanism (which I'll point out was elucidated decades before the issue of an ozone hole appeared). There aren't any other significant sources of stratospheric ozone! Transport of ozone from the troposphere is negligible because the dynamics of crossing the tropopause (in fact, the way you advect tracers into the polar stratosphere is by vertical transport in the mid-latitudes where the tropopause is higher, and then by horizontal advection - which you can only get in the NH/SH summer when the polar vortex is too weak to prevent this from occurring!)
  
  This mechanism then gives us a way to estimate the lifetime of ozone, and we see that for the most part, it is in equilibrium - it is nly appreciably sunk from the stratosphere when catalytic coupled HOx/NOx/BrOx/Halogen cycles act on the reservoir of ozone. And we know that there aren't significant natural sources of these chemicals to the stratosphere.
  
  Basically, if you go back to that textbook rerference I gave you, the basic science is quite clear on how ozone is formed and destroyed, and it's rather obvious based on the chemistry that there is a significant anthropogenic signal. Refer to Crutzen, Molina, Rowland, Stolarski, Cicerone, Johnston, Solomon, and many others on this topic. (The first three shared a Nobel prize in chemistry for their elucidation of stratospheric chemistry).
  
  > Do you really believe that man has had time to understand something as complex as our climate in such a short time? I don't for a minute think we have even scratched the surface of understanding our planet.
  
  Meaningless question, or otherwise a strawman. You might think climate is overwhelmingly complex, but there are those of us who spend our entire lives studyign different aspects of it. The body of knowledge on climate is far larger than you realize or probably can even imagine. Most of the questions you can think of about climate are answered satisfactorally in undergraduate texts on the subject.
  
  
  
  
  

Principles of Planetary Climate

Excellent book very readable. Also gives you opportunities to model simple climate systems in python.