California has acid rain, but no coal-fired plants, and there is some evidence that acid rain in the east may follow traffic patterns rather than power plants [AtE Oct 82]. This could fit in with the fact that as much (or more) coal was burned in the 1950s as now.
So we have a theory.?
Not in honest science. (As a matter of fact not even in Sternglass-Ehrlich "science:" the theory lacks media appeal.) There are many other places where the sulfur could come from.
R.J. Murris of Rijswijk, Holland, a reader of the London Economist, replied to their (fashionably parroted) brief on acid rain in a letter (4/14/84), pointing out the connection between the 1982-3 increase in forest damage around the globe and the 1982 eruption of the exceptionally "acid" Mexican volcano El Chicon, which released 20 million tons of sulfur-dioxide aerosol cloud into the stratosphere.
"There is a convincing correlation," writes Murris, "between the acidity of the Greenland ice sheet layers and major volcanic eruptions in the past, such as Krakatoa and Katmai, Alaska. Especially remarkable is the period of low acidity of the ice lasting from 1920 to 1960, when no major eruptions occurred
¾but industrial pollution did continue! If measurements of the acidity of the ice layers deposited in the past two years confirmed a marked increase, this would surely strengthen the hypothesis of a dominant volcanic origin [of acid rain]..."Such research would cost very little compared with the billions with which sham-environmentalist politicians plan to saddle the ratepayer, but it is fatally flawed: it cannot compete with screams about fishkills as a vote-getter.
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Vol. 11, No. 11
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Issues Issue/No.: Vol. 11, No. 11 Date: November 29, 2004 12:18 PM (For actual publication date see newsletter.) Title: Small-time politics
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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