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RE: The Arctic - A freezing-cold part of Earth and more on the survival of the inuit people
I've spent most of my life north of the Arctic Circle.
It's not true that we don't need to worry about getting sunburnt. The snow can even reflect the rays intensifying the radiation damage. I remember once we were out skiing the whole day - the next day a girl in our party woke up with 2nd degree sunburn in her face.
Wow that's intense, never knew such was experienced in the Arctic and sure didn't come across it in the referenced articles, looked that up and it turned out that the burn was as a result of global warming in the Arctic, from an article dated 18 years ago, it says that was not so before, am glad you brought it up, will sure try to stay away from the Arctic :)
No, global warming has nothing to do with sunburns. The ozon layer is supposed to protect us from UV radiation, but there was quite some problems with it. It's quite normal to mix the ozon problem with greenhouse effect, but it's two quite different beasts.
I think you should see this article (the introductory part) for the relationship between the ozone problem and effect of increased UV light. This will sure make a good topic for another day. It's nice knowing more about the Arctic.
The biggest problem with the greenhouse effect is the large timescales at play - the CO2-emissions of today will cause problems for centuries, and even if we would stop using fossil fuels completely tomorrow, we will still get significant problems with greenhouse effect.
Luckily, the ozone layer replenishes itself pretty fast, and the ozone-depleting chemicals are pretty short-lived at those heights (50-100 years according to wikipedia). Those chemicals have been almost banned internationally, and as a result ozone levels are already on the way back to the old normal (and will probably be back at 1980-levels around 2050 according to wikipedia). It's almost a forgotten problem. It's one of the rare cases where international cooperation has been successful on tackling a global environmental problem.