Montreal, Canada. I took these last Spring. Lovely city. Great architecture. Solid museums. Tasty markets. Ribbons and ribbons of bike lanes. And a really strange metro.

Great example how science becomes life saving environmental policy. This fantastically produced piece shows the history of how the Antarctic Ozone Hole was discovered by a graduate student, then reported in a few newspapers. Chemicals dumped into the environment were the cause.

The public picked up the story of the Ozone Hole and got really, really worried that corporations were putting too much pollution into the air. They formed partnerships with environmental groups, universities, and certain governments, and lobbied other world leaders to help fill in the Ozone Hole.

Eventually, leaders agreed on the Montreal Protocol - a system of cap and trade that limited the amounts of pollution companies could dump into the environment. A must watch for budding environmentalists, policies wonks, and science-types.

Today, the Montreal Protocol loosely serves as the model for cap-and-trade system of the Kyoto Protocol, European Union Emissions Trading Scheme, Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, California’s AB 32, and many other systems around the world.

Today is the International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer. Take a deep breath.

Have a look at the UNDEP’s ozone website for more information.

Joe at sarka.tumblr.com wrote in response to my International Ozone Day post: “I didn’t know this was today. Last night, I watched Known Universe, a National Graphic TV series on Hulu. In one of the episodes, a scientists dipped a basketball into a bucket of water, took out the basketball, and the resulting water dripping from the basketball was analogous to the thinness of Earth’s atmosphere. It was a shocking analogy, one of those things where you appreciate our precarious existence. We are truly living in a “Goldilocks zone”. Sometimes you just have to wonder how one thing goes wrong and that’s it: our atmosphere gets sucked into space, our oceans are poisoned, an asteroid crashes into the planet. It’s said that our planet is resilient, and I believe it. But I also believe that it is delicate. And I also believe that such a precarious balance can ultimately only be held together by a divine force, by God, and that it is our responsibility to help that force keep things together.

Happy International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer day!

Source: Joe @ Sarka.tumblr.com.

This is the stuff I’m trying to fix. (I had the volume turned off, so I missed the commentary). 

Well That’s Just Plain Unfortunate of the Day: Heavy rainfall in Montreal has created conditions sufficient for a sewer geyser to lift a car several feet in the air.

You might be able to fix the dents, but that smell’s gonna stick around for a minute.

[jalopnik / twbo.]