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Comment by xavierstein | Hacker News Reader

I guess I'm more looking for a response to "yes CFCs can destroy ozone even though they are heavier than air," and "here is a graph of the size of the ozone vs space shuttle reentries" that shows a non-correlation.

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The hole was pretty much the size of Antarctica at its peak, how could something the size of a small aircraft flying through the atmosphere 135 times cause such a huge hole!?

Also if you lie down on the ground do you suffocate to death because of all of that heavy ozone hanging around there? No, because it's dispersed throughout the atmosphere.

Ultimately it sounds like the kind of situation where no amount of logic is going to change his mind and that you're probably better off avoiding the subject entirely for the sake of your own sanity.

Have you tried just getting him to read the Wikipedia page? It describes how those gases circulate and how it was discovered. Particularly the "Misconceptions" section. Also the shape of the depletion is not shuttle-sized AFAIK. Finally remind him of rain, or a house in a tornado. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion

If he's into correlations point him at http://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations - Nicholas Cage films cause drownings, Cheese leads to bedsheet entanglement, and norway oil causes traffic accidents.

Water is heavier than air, but that doesn't stop the rain, does it?

That's not a good counterexample because rain comes down. Water vapor, which goes up, is actually lighter than air by a large margin (0.804g/L versus 1.225g/L) at the same temperature and pressure.

Liquid water is certainly denser than air, and the fact that it vaporizes before rising up into the atmosphere is immaterial to the point that it ends up there anyway. The process (evaporation and subsequent fluid mixing) is not significantly different from the process which puts ozone in the upper atmosphere.

Water vapour is water.

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