THE ACID TEST

A typical case where such contradictions are being ignored is the case of acid rain.

That's right: Allow machine tools only in halls with diamond-studded windows, and it might help to cut on cooling water. The diamonds might keep the phlogiston out: it's never been tried and you have no right to wait just because you don't know the whole story.

Like the phlogiston theory, acid rain has its "Oh-yeah?" questions, the main difference being that in the latter case they are being studiously ignored. The foremost of them is this: If coal is the culprit, how come there were no complaints in the 1950's when roughly the same amount of coal was burned in North America as now (and considerably more was burned in Europe)?

And there are others. If coal is the culprit, where does coal-free California get its acid rain from? (It gets its coal-fired power from Mexico and the Indian reservation in N.E. Arizona, neither of them normally upwind.) And yes, rain is often acid now, but how much more than 10, 20, 50, 300 years ago? (This is a difficult one to answer, since systematic measurement started only a few years ago. However, core samples from drillings into 300 year-old ice layers in the Himalayas, for example, showed them to be as acid as any rain today; no doubt, as we remarked before, due to the hitherto unsuspected 17^th century Great Nepalese Industrial Revolution.)

There may be convincing explanations that eliminate these objections. But anyone who simply ignores them in issuing statements or giving press conferences is not a serious scientist, but a politician. We are sorry to report that this includes the President's science advisor George A. Keyworth II, whose statement in July, a summary of an unfinished report, contains some platitudes on "imperfect data," but no mention of the hard questions above.

Meanwhile Environmental Grand Protector Ruckelshaus has announced that he is shooting for mid-September to take a position on acid rain. Watch for the comparison with the 1950's and the case of California. If they are missing from his statement, remember this is the guy who, exclusively for political reasons, banned DDT.