Ananova - Ozone hole has shrunk - scientists

The scientists are attributing it to warmer than normal air in the Antarctic. (Make your own global warming reference here.) It's the smallest it's been since 1988. It's good news; there's been some good news on the global environmental front lately.

I'm not a doomsayer. My personal description is that I'm a short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist, that when humanity is at the edge of the cliff, human creativity will find a way to escape. A lot of environmentalists are doomsayers, who think that the earth's ecology is very fragile. It isn't; on the contrary, it can take a lot of abuse. As long as we're careful, it will survive. (Heck, in the long term -- meaning tens of millions of years -- it could probably recover from just about anything we could do with the possible exception of global thermonuclear war.)

I'm certainly not advocating taking a laissez-faire approach to the environment. We aren't going to destroy the Earth or anything like that. But we could make it inhospitable for large animals (including the most common large mammal, a biped of global distribution) for a very long time. Or just generally more unpleasant. I think we should protect endangered species and try to limit mankind's footprint on the Earth whenever possible.