Is global warming like acid rain? Have they picked a new issue?
It never went away. Wiki
Global warming is a bit more threatening in my opinion.
Well, we did something about it. Car emissions standards and testing, for instance,
Putting the last two posts together, you get something close to the answer. In part, they did something about and in part it is still there, but to a lesser degree. It is not as damaging as it once was. On the other hand, if they continue to build coal-fired generating plants at the rate they want to, it will return. A little conservation could go a long way to diminishing acid rain although global warming is probably beyond any possibility of changing in under a century.
And in the 80’s vaste swathes of heavy industry was destroyed and/or exported. Also regulations and schemes were bought in to help deal with the problem.
It went to china with America’s jobs
God bless effective government regulations!
Through regulation and clean-up the US reduced the source of Acid Rain by a good amount. This lessened Acid-Rain as a problem.
I hope this answers your question, though I wonder if you actually meant to post in GD or the pit?
Jim
It’s hard for people to wrap their minds around the concept of acid rain. It looks just like neutral rain. The harm it does is sometimes subtle, like the loss of detail on the windward side of statues. When it takes the zinc off a galvanized fence, how many will look at the rust and think, “That’s acid rain at work”? It may wipe out the life in a lake, but few people will be aware of it. Some pine forests have died because of power plants many miles upwind, or so I’ve read. Have you seen 'em? I haven’t.
I get the impression that some people think acid rain is like concentrated sulfuric acid dripping from the sky while people run screaming in terror. As people have said, its much more subtle than that.
Acid rain was particularly a problem in Europe, a sulphur treaty went into effect to reduce emissions in 1987, following a general treaty on air pollutions from 1979. In Norway the amount of sulphur is reduced by 75% since 1980 and nitrogen by 40% (about 90% came from abroad).
Acid rain led to salmon going extinct in all the main rivers in Southern Norway, along with 10 000 freshwater fish stocks. However, Norway didn’t experience the kind of death to forests which was visible in Central Europe (a picture here from this page). The reason why we don’t hear about much anymore is because efforts to reduce acid rain has been fairly successful.
Acid rain is still a problem.
http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/news/state/070228acidrain.html
And if acid rain is still this much of a problem after decades of trying to fix it, imagine how big a problem global warming will be after decades of people claiming that it’s no problem at all.
Have the fish returned?
It went the way of missing children. Remember them? On milk cartons and posters at McDonalds and on local newscasts. Problem solved!
Heh, I’m tempted to ask, what part of extinct is difficult to understand 
Seriously, the lake stocks are gone of course, but the distribution of millions worth of lime (calcium carbonate?) annually together with reductions in emissions has returned PH levels to closer to normal. New stocks have been reintroduced many places, with partial to great success.
Acid rain isn’t cheap, though. The economic damage caused by acid rain today is about half a billion dollars in Norway alone. The government’s liming program currently runs at 15 millions a year, and there are other expenses.
A big difference from global warming is that acid rain was easy to pin down, and fairly easy to do something about. And more visible, the images of a dead forest on television makes a bigger impression than pointing a finger to the sky and talking about greenhouse gases (which, btw, is probably the reason why hurricanes are linked with global warming so often even though they are only tangibly related).
In order for salmon to disappear from rivers, it means the condition had been there for several years. A salmon (the kind I’m familiar with) that swims upstream to the place of its birth has been at sea for seven years. So, you’ve had at least seven overlapping failed spawns for the fish to vanish. It is a long term problem, as others here have said.
Yes, very much so … a looming ecological crisis that can be headed off with timely governmental regulation.
I know that the acid rain issue cost the world economy billions if not trillions of dollars but it seems we like got it under control (OK maybe not in China) (Thanks for your informative posts). The large scale economic cost was not noticeable to the average person.
Solving the global issue is a much much bigger issue. It involves radical changes to almost every facet of our lives. I don’t see how government regulation can stop this problem. Any government with the balls to step in a make the necessary changes will quickly be voted out.
I don’t buy Al Gores reasoning that this is an easy issue to solve. Assuming we do all the right things, will we even reap the rewards in our lifetime?
This sounds like a completely different thread from what I started but there you go anyway.
Very nicely put! Kudos to you!
While the remaining impacts on areas such as parts of Norway, Maine, the Adirondacks, etc., with granitic bedrock and soils derived therefrom should not be minimized, let me comment on this in a way that will bring it home to members here.
Do any of you still have your maps from the record-breaking snowfall in Oswego County NY that was in the news about a month ago? If so, bring up those maps. Look at the extreme upper right of them, where the eastern county line runs vertically, i.e. North-South. Just across that line is a southward flowing tributary of the Salmon River called Prince Brook, in Osceola, NY. (Here’s Bill’s Snow Update from that location.) That stream receives a lot of runoff from heavy snows every year, and this year more than most, of course. But during the spring runoffs during the Carter presidency, the late 1970s, it was one of the places in the country most impacted by acid precipitation (in this case, acid snow). And that stream’s pH was measured by a qualified NYS DEC ecologist at 1.0. Let me repeat that: pH 1.0 – the acidity of stomach acid.
Where it came, by and large, from was high-sulfur coal being burnt in the Midwest, largely in power plants, and being released into the air from the smokestacks at those plants without any precipitation or scrubbing. It would dissipate into the air, move east across the Great Lakes with the prevailing westerlies, picking up moisture from the lakes as it went, until it hit the uplands of upstate New York – first the Tug Hill Plateau and then the Adirondacks. Rising air cools, and precipitates. Suspended sulphates and other soluble acidifiers are precipitated out with the moisture. Net result: acid rain and acid snow.
What happened to acid rain? In this case, Una Persson. And her colleague consulting engineers. They have rebuilt those plants, between them, to be more efficient and generate more power, and to produce a clean exhaust by scrubbing the emissions and precipitating out the particulates. Which led to more energy for Midwesterners and cleaner air and water for Northeasterners. This has been brought up before, but I think we owe that lady thanks once again.
You perhaps need to consider that a new coal power plant must use BACT, or “Best Available Control Technology” to reduce its emissions - mostly, acid rain emissions. What does this equate to in terms of reduction? New designs that have EPA approval which I have worked on (in the US - note most countries building coal plants are not nearly as clean as the US!) generally have 98% or more SO2 removal, and 90% or more NOx removal (essentially, the two acid rain components, with the SO2 being more critical). The use of polishing baghouses in designs are even addressing the PM2.5 issue to a large extent. You should look at some new or rebuilt plants (such as Hawthorne) to see how incredibly clean (not counting CO2, mind you) a new coal plant in the United States really is.
The problem is the hundreds of “grandfathered” units out there - mainly, my customers - which can get away with emitting large amounts of SO2 and NOx. Now, a huge portion of them are facing reductions, and fast, due more to State regulations than anything else. And, this week, I was at meetings at a power plant in the NE where we discussed burning a very low-sulfur coal on purpose to take advantage of SO2 emissions allowances - which could have resulted in a net savings of $8M per year not to pollute. That’s sort of a no-brainer there, so the plant is going to take my suggestion and cut their SO2 emissions by 65% or so without any regulatory requirement.
That having been said, I do feel as a coal power expert that the US certainly has the capability to “un-grandfather” all the coal plants, and pretty much eliminate the power plant contribution to acid rain in the US. It likely would result in electric bill increases of 25-50% or so, but it could be done.