Acid Rain and Ozone Holes - Revisited

House of Cards

Just a few bits of old news proven to be overstated by the greenies on the Left and used to make more legislation and curb more freedoms… as usual.

American Conservative Union Story

But in retrospect the evidence shows that ozone depletion was an exaggerated threat in the first place….

So what do we know now? A 1998 World Meteorological Organization report said that "since 1991, the linear depletion trend observed during the 1980s has not continued, but rather total column ozone has been almost constant." This was too soon to be attributable to the Montreal Protocol as that same report noted that the stratospheric concentrations of the offending compounds were still increasing at the time of writing. In fact, they did not begin to decline until the end of the 1990s. This lends credence to the view, widely derided at the time of the Montreal Protocol, that natural variations explain the fluctuations in the global ozone layer more than CFC usage.

More importantly, the feared widespread increase in ground-level UVB radiation has also failed to materialize. Keep in mind that ozone depletion, in and of itself, is not of consequence to human health or the environment. It is the concern that an eroded ozone layer would allow more of the sun's damaging UVB rays to reach the earth that gave rise to the Montreal Protocol. But the WMO concedes that no statistically significant long-term trends have been detected, noting earlier this year that "outside the polar regions, ozone depletion has been relatively small, hence, in many places, increases in UV due to this depletion are difficult to separate from the increases caused by other factors, such as changes in cloud and aerosol." In other words, ozone depletion's impact on UVB over populated regions is so small as to be easily lost amidst the noise of background variability.

Acid Rain / Amazon Rain Forrest

Acid Rain was one of the many scare tactics used by radical environmentalists during the 1970’s and 80’s based on faulty and/or skewed reports. During the 1980’s the federal government initiated the huge National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program (NAPAP), employing seven hundred scientists at a cost of over $500 million. The NAPAP study found – to the surprise of most its scientists – that acid rain was far less threatening than it had been assumed to be at the onset of the study. Acid rain is a threat to only a few lakes, about 2% of the lake surfaces of the Adirondacks (Brookes, Warren T. Acid Rain: “The $140 Billion Fraud?” Consumer Comments 14 (November, 1990), p.2. [Publication of Consumer Alert]).

And this minor problem could be made less acidic with cheap and quick liming. Another interesting factoid is that in 1860, when forests around those lakes began to be cut and wood burned (which, by the by, lowers the acidity), the lakes were as acidic as now (Simon, Julian L. The Ultimate Resource 2, Princeton University Press [Princeton, New Jersey: 1996], pp. 265-66).

Myth: Acid Rain is unnatural.

Fact: Rainwater is naturally acidic. Because water is such a good solvent, even in the cleanest air, rainwater dissolves some of the naturally present carbon dioxide, forming carbonic acid. According to EPA regulations, Ph levels any lower than 5.0 are environmentally harmful. Yet, an analysis of ice from the Antarctic and the Himalayas, deposited hundreds and thousands of years ago when the environment was presumably pristine, had Ph values ranging from 4.8 to 4.2.

Myth: Acid rain has caused a large portion of U.S. lakes to become acidic.

Fact: In a recent study of 7,000 Northeastern lakes, only 3.4% were found to be acidic. Most of these lakes are just as acidic as they were before the Industrial Revolution. Furthermore, most of the acidic lakes in the United States are in Florida, where there is the least acid rain.

http://www.nationalcenter.org/tp25.htm

The Clean Air Act of 1990 was passed (with large economic consequences mind you) all the while ignoring NAPAP’s findings. The director of NAPAP expressed disappointment and dismay (Brookes, Warren T. “Acid Rain: The $140 Billion Fraud?” Consumer Comments 14 (November, 1990), p.2. [Publication of Consumer Alert]), that is until 60 Minutes ran an expose on the acid rain scandal. In Europe, the supposed effects of acid rain in destroying forests and reducing tree growth have now been shown to be without foundation; forests, in fact, are larger, and trees growing more rapidly than in the first half of this century.

Myth: Acid rain destroys vegetation.

Fact: Acid rain actually has a positive impact on vegetation. The nitrogen and sulfur characteristic of acid rain, act as nutrients essential for plant growth. The world's first acid rain study concluded that, "the principle effect of acid rain is the improvement of crop yields and crop protein content."

http://www.nationalcenter.org/tp25.htm

This all leads to the many current scares about Global Warming and the ozone hole. Again, these “popular” press items are based on some shoddy reports and have been skewed by extremists that for the most part are doing this because of political and philosophical views that are at variance with business and capitalism.

Why then would these skewed reports about environmental woes so permeate the general public? Patrick Moore was asked the same question on an ABC special that aired in June called “Tampering with Nature,” his response was that the environmental movement has been hijacked by political activists: “They're using environmental rhetoric to cloak agendas like class warfare and anti-corporatism that, in fact, have almost nothing to do with ecology” (http://www.greenpiece.org/abcnews.html)[1] All these new and old environmental doomsayers are nothing more than a blip on the interest-group screen, peddling nothing more than hype and politics.

Books of Interest

S. Fred Singer, Hot Talk – Cold Talk: Global Warmings Unfinished Debate.

Patrick Michaels & Robert Balling, The Satanic Gases: Cleaning the Air about Global Warming.

Dixie Lee Ray & Lou Guzzo, Trashing the Planet: How Science Can Help Us Deal With Acid Rain, Depletion of the Ozone, and Nuclear Waste (Among Other Things)

Bjorn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World

Julian Simon, Hoodwinking the Nation

Peter Huber, Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists

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[1] http://www.greenpiece.org/abcnews.html