Wasn’t this supposed to be one of the great ecological threats of the 1980s? I haven’t heard mention of this phenomenon in the news for years. Did we finally fix the problem? Was it mostly hype (e.g. killer bees), or did the media simply move on to other impending disasters?
I think acid rain was an exaggerated environmental problem. Acid rain generally affects limited areas, and these areas might have natural ecological defenses against acids. For example, a lot of lakes which could be damaged by acid rain are protected by the presence of limestone in underlying sediments. This buffers the acidic effect and results in very little pH change. Lakes which lake such limestoney sediments, e.g. in Ontario, can be seriously hurt.
Another thing is, some aspects of acid rain are beneficial. Acid aerosols tend to depress local temperatures - sort of a counter to global warming. I don’t think this is a big deal; I think it has more of a negative potential, since it might disguise the true magnitude of global warming if the latter is measured by thermometers in a particularly acid-rainy area.
Also, nitric acid in rain has a beneficial effect on soybeans. There was a study on this which purported to show that acid rain had a net benefit, and that coal emissions weren’t such a bad thing. Totally bogus, of course, since coal create a sulfuric acid problem, not a nitric acid problem, and sulfuric (battery) acid does not make good fertilizer. But the word has gotten around that acid rain isn’t so bad.
Anyway, in my opinion the real reason acid rain isn’t so bad is, the ill effects have never been shown to be huge or permanent. It’s unfair because U.S. smokestacks kill fish in Canadian lakes, but this effect isn’t as bad as was thought during the acid rain scare of the 80s. I worry much more about habitat loss, solid waste, and ozone depletion.
P.S. Will look for cites, sites, and possibly sights when I get home. (Aww, the wonders of homophones.)
Don’t have time to browse, but the problem must not have gone away, because the U.S. Geological Service is still monitoring it.
They’ve got some nifty graphics, too.
http://btdqs.usgs.gov/acidrain/
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” - the White Queen
There was an article in the 11-1-99 issue of U.S. News & World Report called ACID RAIN: FORGOTTEN, NOT GONE, which said:
"Perhaps no environmental issue of the 1980s was more contentious than acid rain. The controversy over whether acid rain was poisoning lakes and killing fish in North America pitted electric utilities against environmentalists, coal miners against sport fishers, the Midwest against the Northeast, and the United States against Canada. The political debate was so fierce, and the scientific process so acrimonious, that Congress created what was then the country’s biggest environmental research project to study acid rain, consuming half a billion dollars and 10 years. But after Congress amended the Clean Air Act in 1990, requiring polluters, mainly electric power companies, to reduce their emissions of sulfur dioxide, one of the chief contributors to acid rain, the problem seemed to be solved.
"But scientists now say acid rain has by no means disappeared. A new study-the most comprehensive look yet at lakes across North America and Northern Europe-found that in many places lakes are becoming less acidic. But across the northeastern and midwestern United States, there is no sign of recovery-and there may not be for decades. ‘The problem is complex, and it has not gone away,’ says Gene Likens, an ecologist at the Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y.
“This new study, published earlier this month in Nature, is noteworthy both for its geographic scope and because the researchers moved beyond theories and computer models and actually checked to see how lakes had responded to the declines in sulfur emissions. The researchers, 23 scientists from nine countries, compiled records on conditions in 205 lakes and streams, monitoring changes from 1980 to 1995. They checked for the crucial first step in recovery, a decrease in the acidity of the water, which in turn would enable aquatic life to bounce back.”
If you need the full text and your library doesn’t have it, let me know. (Your library can help you find other things, too.)
Acid rain is still a serious problem in the Adirondacks of New York State. Even after the Clean Air Act, plenty of acid is being dumped into the lakes. Part of this is due to the fact that factories can “sell” their pollution credits, so polluting plants buy them from plants that don’t need them.
From the EPA: (http://www.epa.gov/rgytgrnj/programs/artd/air/acidrain/acidrn2.htm
The problem gets more play in upstate New York than elsewhere. Since it isn’t on the national media radar, it doesn’t get reported all that much.
“What we have here is failure to communicate.” – Strother Martin, anticipating the Internet.
The last thing I heard about acid rain was that it is effecting birds. Their natural sources of calcium is being leached by acid rain according to some study (I’ll try and look it up :rolleyes 
and they recommend putting crushed egg shells in with your wild bird feed. (My mom said that her mama always fed the chickens crushed egg shells. It cut down on the amount of oyster shells they would have to buy.)
In the Blue Ridge mountains that form the Eastern side of the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, acid rain from our northern neighbors who chiefly burn fossil fuels to produce electricity is a big problem (not casting blame, it’s just the way the wind blows) many of our former trout streams are now just so much dead water. We dump tons of lime at the headwaters each year in hopes of counteracting it, but it will be years before we know if this helps. Yes, my friend, acid rain is still very much with us.
It was quite fun showing incredibly wealthy Mercedes-Benz owners the effects of acid rain on their cars in Northern Virginia in the early 90’s. The disbelief often had to be beaten down like a whack-a-mole game, until we would show the distinctive raindrop patterns on these people’s cars under fluorescent lights. I suspect we stopped more than a couple of environmental naysayers in their tracks when their paint jobs started disintegrating on them.
We finally had to start taking people out to the elevated parking lot and showing them the Honda dealership next door. All the Hondas came with plastic coverings on the body panels to prevent the paint erosion that a few weeks of exposure in a Northern Virginia spring can cause. New cars that sat on the lot for more than a couple of weeks had to be buffed in order to mask the damage that had already occurred. After I left, I’m told that Benzes started shipping with protective plastic all the way to the dealer as well. It’s out there, and my old pals are making a shitload of money off of it.
Oh yes, there are a lot of things that were big news in the 1980s that we hardly hear about today. Acid rain is but one example.
We hear far less about date rape and AIDS and even drunk driving now. The problems have by no means disappeared. They just don’t get ratings anymore.
Acid rain was exaggerated as a problem because the earliest studies, which predicted the most serious problems, were flawed. As I recall, there was one Canadian lake which was used as a major example of acid rain destruction because acid levels had risen recently and fish stocks were dying like crazy. A later study showed that the lake had been highly acidic a hundred years ago, and that was its natural state. Logging operations had cleared forest around the lake, which lowered acid levels (perhaps it was an oak forest, and natural tannic acid leached into the lake. But I can’t recall). When logging operations were halted and the forest regrew, the acid levels in the lake rose.
A lesson for the kids - correlation does not imply causation. This was the classic error here - pollution levels increased in the area, and acid levels in the lake increased. It turned out they weren’t related.