Penny wise, pound foolish?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Penny wise, pound foolish?

- Penny Wise and Pound Foolish: NYC’s Budget Cuts to Leave Lasting Wounds, by Richard Buery, HuffingtonPost.com, March 26, 2017.

3. Would it make sense to ask a doctor to examine a patient, but take away their stethoscope? That is what the Canadian government is asking scientists to do when it comes to ‘examining’ the ozone layer.

Many assume that the ozone problem was fixed in the 1980s. In reality, the annual Antarctic ozone hole keeps reappearing at near record sizes and last year, for the first time, scientists reported an ozone hole over the Arctic.

As the first ozone hole appeared in the northern hemisphere last year, Environment Canada decided to drastically reduce its ozone science and monitoring program. It closed several of Canada’s 17 ozone monitoring stations, stations which have provided the longest-running record of ozone levels in the world. They are about one-third of the Arctic ozone measurements.

In this penny wise and pound-foolish cost-saving measure, Environment Canada argues that satellite imagery and data collection are sufficient. History says otherwise.

In 1985, the British Antarctic Survey discovered the Antarctic ozone hole through routine ground level ozone monitoring, conducted to measure the density of the ozone layer. NASA’s atmospheric scientists say satellite imagery had missed the near total depletion of the ozone layer over Antarctica.

Satellite imagery and data collection did not — and cannot — give a complete picture of the stratospheric ozone layer because of the angle of the sun’s light over the Arctic and Antarctic. Ground level ozone monitoring is essential to cross-reference the satellite data and provide a full understanding of it. In-situ measurements are essential for validating satellite measurements, asserts Johannes Staehelin, chair of the World Meteorological Organization’s ozone science advisory group.