]]]]]]] THE CONTINUING MYTHOLOGY ABOUT ACID RAIN [[[[[[[[[[ (8/31/1989) By Warren T. Brookes [From Human Events, 2 September 1989, pp. 12-13] [Kindly uploaded by Freeman 10602PANC] On Tuesday evening, July 25, Ned Potter of ABC News did a three-minute segment purporting to show how acid rain (caused by sulphur dioxide -- SO2 -- emissions from Midwestern utilities) was killing trees in Camel's Hump Mountain in Vermont. Aerial photos showed a pattern of dead or dying tall spruce trees. We were informed acid rain was sterilizing the soil. An environmentalist guided us through the devastation. It was potent TV. It was also a hoax. When the Camel's Hump story was first brought to national attention in Natural History magazine in 1982, soil scientists flocked to see it first hand. But, in order to examine the dead or dying trees, they had to fight their way up through a veritable jungle of healthy young red spruce trees and new growth. It was immediately clear there was nothing toxic about the soil. On closer examination, soil scientists from Yale, University of Pennsylvania and the U.S. Forest Service found the dead or dying trees had one thing in common: They all dated from before 1962. Trees started after that period were generally healthy. What happened in 1962? Yale's forestry expert Tom Siccama told us, ``All we know is that suddenly in 1962, the trees got very unhappy, and it was probably the very severe drought followed by and especially killing winter. ``The one thing it was not was acid rain. Look, you don't get that sudden a change from something like acid rain. And why didn't it happen in adjacent areas or states? The people in Vermont who blame this on acid rain must think they live on an island or something,'' Siccama said. In fact, Siccama's own research, corroborated by Andrew Friedland of Dartmouth, shows that over the last few years tree health in that whole region is improving, not getting worse. ``We cored hundreds of trees in the area in 1982, and again in 1987, and, in that period, the number of sick trees went down markedly. We just got through coring about 90 trees at Hubbard Brook in New Hampshire and discovered that the rate of growth has more than doubled in the last two years alone,'' Siccama told us. Indeed, since 1952, total growing wood volume in the Northeast and New England has risen faster than any other region, including the softwoods the ABC report alleged were dying. (See Table I.) So the entire ABC acid rain story was a fraud, including Ned Potter's concluding statement that ``doctors say acid rain is responsible for 50,000 deaths a year.'' But not even the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) claims any known deaths from sulphur dioxide (SO2) emissions. The 50,000 figure came from one extreme theoretical estimate in an analysis where half the experts estimated zero health effects. Sadly, this is exactly the kind of nonsense President Bush has unleashed with his embrace of the ``Green Revolution'': a media race to see who can paint the grimmest pictures. He also re-energized the EPA, which has a huge power and funding stake in doing the same. These deadly incentives lead to an awful lot of BS (bad science). There is no better example of this than the EPA's wildly scary 1980 report suggesting acid rain was causing a kind of ``aquatic silent spring'' in Northeast America and Canada: ``It is in the lakes and streams where the most dramatic effects of acid rain have been observed. The increasing acidity of lakes in North America and Europe has been documented. ... This has led to a decrease in populations of fish and other aquatic organisms.'' This report led to the establishment of a 10-year scientific study of the causes and effects of acid rain, or what is called the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program (NAPAP). Unfortunately for the environmentalists, this assessment actually tried to be scientific, that is, to avoid reaching conclusions first and then searching for evidence to support them. The result in 1987, after more than $300 million was spent in exhaustive study, was to conclude essentially that regional SO2 concentrations were causing no discernible damage to crops or forests at present levels of acid rain emission (about 22 million tons a year, down from 32 million in 1970). Also, the number of acid lakes and streams was far lower than the EPA had warned, affecting less than 2 per cent of the surface water area even in the Adirondacks, the most heavily impacted region. And the connections between acid rain and acid lakes were statistically too weak to correlate. No Correlation Between Acid Rain and Acid Lakes The reaction to the interim assessment by the environmentalists and their allies in Congress was fury and the firing of NAPAP's director, Dr. Lawrence Kulp, and the demand that the new director of NAPAP, Dr. James R. Mahoney, ``rewrite'' the report and produce ``an implicit repudiation of the interim assessment.'' Yet just last April, Mahoney was handed a study by the EPA's own Direct Delayed Response Project (DDRP) with a chart that shows no statistical correlation between acid rain deposition and acidic lakes. For New England, the correlation between acid rain and acid lakes is less than 0.16 (statistically insignificant), compared with a correlation of acid lakes with soil chemistry of nearly 0.80. That data came as no surprise to Dr. Edward Krug, of the Illinois State Water Survey, who authored a 263-page April 1989 study for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). This study concluded that aquatic acidification has little, if anything, to do with acid rain and everything to do with land use, soil chemistry and geology. Lakes and streams get over 90 per cent of their water, not from rain, but from the surface runoff that is filtered first through very acidic surface soils and organic matter and then through bedrock, which tends to neutralize that acidity. In those areas where the forest surface is allowed to develop, uncut, unharvested and unburnt, surface soil acidity builds up so much that the bedrock below is hard pressed to neutralize it all. This is especially true in steep mountainous areas where water runoff goes more directly from the soil into the lake or stream or in those areas like Cape Cod where the underlying surface is not rock but acidic vegetation such as sphagnum moss. Paleolimnological (lake sediment analysis) studies in fact show that 90 percent of the presently acidic lakes in the Northeast and Scandinavia were acidic in pre-industrial times. Even the NAPAP report indicates that aquatic acidification is far less than thought. Krug maintains most of that is re-acidification. What made some of those lakes become less acid by the early 20th Century was hundreds of years of clearcutting and burning that not only destroyed the acidic buildup of forest floor organic material but replaced it with ash, which is alkaline. Conversely, when those regions were then allowed to reforest, the re-acidification process began. As Dr. Krug pointed out in a 1983 article in Science magazine, ``In New England, the volume of standing wood has increased by about 70 percent between 1952 and 1976.'' As recently as 1922, 90 per cent of the Adirondacks and northern New England had been completely clear-cut. Now they are virtually totally reforested. ``Given the effects of vegetation of soil acidification,'' Krug noted, ``there is little doubt that this recovery of landscape from earlier disturbances can result in increasingly acid surface soil horizons and the thickening and acidification of forest floors. ``Thus mountainous areas of the northeastern United States are not pristine environments that are acted upon only by acid rain. These landscapes which were disturbed (cut over and burnt) in the past are undergoing soil transformation processes that produce the greatest increases in natural soil acidity.'' Krug also cites controlled experiments which repeatedly show that when highly acid snow melt is leached through less acid soil, the resulting water has the same acidity as the soil, showing that natural surface acidity is the controlling factor in watersheds, while acid rain effects are at most trivial. A classic example is Hubbard Brook in New Hampshire, which has remained strongly acidic even as the rain acidity in New Hampshire has in fact declined for 25 years. Dr. Krug reports that ``The highest percentages of highly acidic lakes in North America exist in relatively low or no acid deposition areas. This suggests the possibility that, contrary to predictions of the acid rain theory, highly acidic surface water can be a natural phenomenon of these regions.'' For example, 12 per cent of Florida lake surfaces are acid, but its rain is only one-sixth as acid as the Adirondacks, which have less than 2 per cent acid lake surfaces. (See Table II.) Krug's best example is southwest Tasmania off Australia, whose climate and topography most clearly resemble Northeast America. Southwest Tasmania enjoys pristine nonacidic rainwater, yet over 28 percent of the lakes and streams there are highly acidic, but its rainwater is in fact quite alkaline. As Krug told us, ``In statistically weighing possible causes of lake acidification, acid rain does not even show up as a significant variable, let alone correlative.'' No wonder EPA and environmentalists have worked hard and with some success to drum King out of his profession and to ignore his valuable DOE study. Liming Could Solve Acid Lakes' Problem The astonishing part of the Bush acid rain program is the weakness of both its economics and its science. Even if you accept the premise that all of the Northeast and Canadian acid lakes resulted from acid rain (which they did not), you could lime all those lakes back to alkalinity for about $250 an acre by helicopter or $50 an acre by boat. The National Acid Precipitation Assessment Project (NAPAP) has identified only 15,124 acres of acid lake area (under 2 per cent of the total) in the Northeast and Midwest. You could lime all of these lakes every year for under $4 million by helicopter, under $800,000 by boat, or about 1/10th of 1 per cent of the $3-$4 billion cost of the Bush program (Table III). And, unlike the Bush sulphur dioxide removal program, this would actually ensure de-acidification of lakes. Environmentalists oppose this solution because it would undermine their bureaucratic and ideological agenda and would expose the weak science on which acid rain remediation is based. In 1987, the National Park Service refused the state of Massachusetts' offer to lime the lakes and ponds in the Cape Cod National Sea Shore, 40 per cent of which are acidic. The trouble is those ponds and lakes are naturally acidic (like over 90 per cent of all acidic lakes). In this case it is because of the sphagnum moss that lines their bottoms. The Park Service explicitly didn't want to disturb that ``natural ecosystem.'' As Superintendent Herbert Ohlsen wrote the Massachusetts officials in 1987, ``As you know, all of the paleolimnological evidence indicates a 12,000-year history of predominantly acidic lake conditions on outer Cape Cod. We know of no data to support your Division's assumption that significant impact (i.e. pond acidification) is occurring due to current acid rain.'' In short, cutting SO2 emissions will have no effect on the acidity of Cape Cod lakes which comprise over half of all acidic lakes in southern New England. Ohlsen told the Audubon Society that ``Such acid conditions can result from natural processes in the watershed involving local soils and vegetation, and have been well known for many years.'' Acid Rain Might Impede Any `Global Warming' Ironically, there is now growing evidence that removing SO2 emissions could actually contribute to global warming. As Dr. Patrick Michaels, chairman of the Department of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia details in a new paper, SO2 emissions ``serve to `brighten' clouds, reflecting away increasing amounts of solar radiation, and possibly compensating for greenhouse warming.'' To oversimplify it, while carbon dioxide (CO2) helps the atmosphere hold more heat in, SO2 helps reflect it away. Temperature data suggest that in areas downwind of the major SO2 emission sources, the warming trend has been lessened, due in part to this ``cloud brightening'' effect. As Michaels argues, ``Perhaps this can explain the cooling of the U.S. [in the last 100 years] in the face of the trace gas [CO2 and others] increases.'' Michael's thesis was supported in the June 1989 issue of Nature magazine by a leading British climatologist T.M.L. Wigley, who warned, ``If we were successful in halting or reversing the incrase [sic] in SO2 emissions we could as a by-product accelerate the rate of greenhouse-induced warming. ...'' Be that as it may, taking that risk isn't necessary. For less than $10 million a year the unproven effects of acid rain can be neutralized (limed) out of existence. Table I U.S. Forests -- Growing Stock Volume (Millions of Cubic Feet) ----------------------------------------------------------------- 1952 1977 1987 % Change U.S Total ................... 610 725 755 23.8 Softwoods ................ 430 465 450 4.7 North Total ................. 106 166 190 79.2 Softwoods ................ 28 46 49 75.0 Northeast Total ............. 61 100 109 78.7 Softwoods ................ 18 31 31 72.2 New England Total ........... 24 42 44 83.3 Softwoods ................ 14 23 22 57.1 ----------------------------------------------------------------- Source: U.S. Forest Service; U.S. Statistical Abstract. Table II Acid Rain and Acid Lakes -- No Correlation? ----------------------------------------------------------------- Acid Rain Index Per Cent of Lakes Acid (Adirondacks = 100) Number Area Adirondacks 100 10.1 1.7 Upper Peninsula, Michigan 50 9.4 2.4 Florida 15 12.4 12.0 Nova Scotia 20 47.3 N.A. Western Tasmania 0 28.0 N.A. Frazier Island, Australia 0 79.0 98.0 ----------------------------------------------------------------- Sources: EPA -- Department of Energy; Assessment of the Theory and Hypotheses of the Acidification of Watersheds, April 1989; Dr. Edward C. Krug. Table III Economics of De-Acidifying Lakes ----------------------------------------------------------------- Acid Lake Area Annual Cost of Liming (acres) By Helicopter By Boat Adirondacks 4,846 $1,211,500 $242,300 Southern N.E. Massachusetts/Conn. 5,669 1,417,200 283,400 Central N.E. New Hampshire/Vt. 480 120,000 24,000 Total Northeast 12,496 3,124,000 625,000 Upper Midwest 2,628 657,000 131,000 Total Impact Area 15,124 $3,718,000 $756,000 Cost of Bush's Acid Rain Program .................. $3-$4 billion ----------------------------------------------------------------- Source: NAPAP Interim Assessment 1987; Living Lakes Data. * * *
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