As with CO2, billions of taxpayer dollars were diverted from the poor and needy to imaginary dangers of sulfur dioxide. Simply adding some lime changed lakes to alkaline, assuming alkaline lakes were needed:
"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....
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
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.''
Michaels' 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
increase [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."
...........
..............
11/16/1990, U.S. Global Change Research Act of 1990 (George Bush #1)
------------------
3/6/15, "Causes and consequences of the climate science boom," William Butos and Thomas McQuade
From the paper:
"1. The Government’s Role in Climate Science Funding...[is] embedded
in scores of agencies and programs scattered throughout the Executive
Branch of the US government. While such agency activities related to
climate science have received funding for many years as components of
their mission statements, the pursuit of an integrated national agenda
to study climate change and implement policy initiatives took a critical
step with passage of the Global Change Research Act of 1990. This Act
established institutional structures operating out of the White House to
develop and oversee the implementation of a National Global Change
Research Plan and created the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP)
to coordinate the climate change research activities of Executive
Departments and agencies.[33] As
of 2014, the coordination of climate change-related activities resides
largely in the President’s Office of Science and Technology Policy,
which houses several separate offices, including the offices of
Environment and Energy, Polar Sciences, Ocean Sciences, Clean Energy and
Materials R&D, Climate Adaptation and Ecosystems, National Climate
Assessment, and others. The Office of the President also maintains the
National Science and Technology Council, which oversees the Committee on
Environment, Natural Resources, and Sustainability and its Subcommittee
on Climate Change Research. The Subcommittee is charged with the
responsibility of planning and coordinating with the interagency USGCRP.
Also, the Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy is housed within
the President’s Domestic Policy Council. While Congress authorizes
Executive branch budgets, the priorities these departments and agencies
follow are set by the White House. As expressed in various agency and
Executive Branch strategic plans, these efforts have been recently
organized around four components comprising (1) climate change research
and education, (2) emissions reduction through “clean” energy
technologies and investments, (3) adaptation to climate change, and (4)
international climate change leadership.[36]....By any of
these measures, the scale of climate science R&D has increased
substantially since 2001. Perhaps, though, the largest funding increases
have occurred in developing new technologies and tax subsidies. As can
be seen from Table 1, federal dollars to develop and implement “clean
energy technologies” have increased from $1.7 billion in 2001 to $5.8
billion in 2013, while energy tax subsidies have increased from zero in
2001 and 2002 to $13 billion in 2013, with the largest increases
happening since 2010. The impact on scientific research of government
funding is not just a matter of the amounts but also of the
concentration of research monies that arises from the focus a single
source can bring to bear on particular kinds of scientific research.
Government is that single source and has Big Player effects because it
has access to a deep pool of taxpayer (and, indeed, borrowed and
created) funds combined with regulatory and enforcement powers which
necessarily place it on a different footing from other players and
institutions. Notwithstanding the interplay of rival interests within
the government and the separation of powers among the different
branches, there is an important sense in which government’s inherent
need to act produces a particular set of decisions that fall within a
relatively narrow corridor of ends to which it can concentrate
substantial resources.
2. By any standards,
what we have documented here is a massive funding drive, highlighting
the patterns of climate science R&D as funded and directed only by
the Executive Branch and the various agencies that fall within its
purview.[40]
To put its magnitude into some context, the $9.3 billion funding
requested for climate science R&D in 2013 is about one-third of the
total amount appropriated for all 27 National Institutes of Health in
the same year,[41]
yet it is more than enough to sustain a science boom. Its directional
characteristic, concentrated as it has been on R&D premised on the
controversial issue of the actual sensitivity of climate to human-caused
emissions, has gone hand in hand with the IPCC’s expressions of
increasing confidence in the AGW hypothesis and increasingly shrill
claims of impending disaster.
3. The recent pattern of federal climate science funding, moving toward
emphasis on the development of technologies and their subsidization
through the tax system, suggests that climate change funding has become
more tightly connected to agencies like the Department of Energy, NASA,
the Department of Commerce (NOAA), EPA, and cross-cutting projects and
programs involving multiple agencies under integrating and coordinating
agencies, like the USGCRP, lodged within the Executive branch. The
allocations of budgets within these agencies are more directly
determined and implemented by Administration priorities and policies. We
note that the traditional role of NSF in supporting basic science based
on a system of merit awards provided (despite some clear imperfections)
certain advantages with regard to generating impartial science. In
contrast, even a casual perusal of current agency documents, such as The
National Science and Technology Council’s The National Global Change Research Plan 2012-2021, shows that those driving this movement make no pretense as to their premises and starting points.[39]
4. To be sure, the very opaqueness of these allocations and their
actual use only provides for “ball park” estimates. However, we believe
that the results presented in Table 3 come closer to a useful accounting
than what previously has been provided. We have combined data from
Leggett et al. (2013) and the AAAS Reports for Fiscal Years 2012 and
2013 (the only years for which the AAAS provides detailed budgetary data
for climate science R&D and climate-related funding). This
constrains Table 3 to including data only from 2010 through 2013. We
have adjusted budgetary data and categorized it in light of discussion
points 1-5 above. Note that the estimated aggregate expenditures for
climate science and climate-related funding (excluding tax subsidies)
from 2010-2013 in Table 3 are about twice that of the Leggett findings.
5.5 Funds administered by the Treasury Department in Table 2 are
credit lines and loans channeled through the World Bank earmarked for
international organizations to finance clean technologies and
sustainable practices; consequently such funds would also more
accurately be considered as climate-related sustainability and
adaptation....
8. This summary and the detail in Table 1, however, do not capture the
full scale of federal funding for climate science R&D. Two
complications must be considered to capture a more accurate estimate.
First, the entries in the first row of Table 1 for climate science only
refer to monies administered by the Executive branch via the office of
the USGCRP and does not include all climate-related R&D in the
federal budget. For example, the entry in Table 1 for the USGCRP in 2011
is just under $2.5 billion; yet the actual budget expenditures for
climate science-related R&D as calculated by the American
Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) total about $16.1
billion.[38]
In addition, since USGCRP funding is comprised of monies contributed
from the authorized budgets of the 13 participating departments and
agencies, a more accurate estimate of climate-related R&D requires
deducting USGCRP funding from the aggregated budgets of those 13, most
of which are included in Table 2.
9. Leggett et al. (2013) of the Congressional Research Service provides
a recent account of climate change funding based on data provided by
the White House Office of Management and Budget (see Table 1, below).
Total expenditures for federal funded climate change programs from
2001-2013 were $110.9 billion in current dollars and $120.2 billion in
2012 dollars. “Total budgetary impact” includes various tax provisions
and subsidies related to reducing greenhouse gas emissions (which are
treated as “tax expenditures”) and shows total climate change
expenditures from 2001-2013 to be $145.3 billion in current dollars and
$155.4 billion in 2012 dollars.[37]
10. The USGCRP operates as a confederacy of the research components of
thirteen participating government agencies, each of which independently
designates funds in accordance with the objectives of the USGCRP; these
monies comprise the program budget of the USGCRP to fund agency
cross-cutting climate science R&D.[34]
The departments and agencies whose activities comprise the bulk of such
funding include independent agencies such as the National Aeronautics
and Space Administration, National Science Foundation, Environmental
Protection Agency, US Agency for International Development, the
quasi-official Smithsonian Institute, and Executive Departments that
include Agriculture, Commerce (National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, National Institute of Standards and Technology), Energy,
Interior (the US Geological Survey and conservation initiatives),
State, and Treasury.[35]
11. The past 15 years have seen a sustained program of funding, largely from government or quasi-government entities.[31]
The funding efforts are spread across a bewildering array of sources
and buried in a labyrinth of programs, agency initiatives, interagency
activities, and Presidential Offices, but what they seem to have in
common is an adherence to the assumption that human activity is
primarily responsible for the warming observed in the latter part of the
20th century. Funding appears to be driving the science
rather than the other way around. And the extent of this funding appears
not to have been heretofore fully documented.[32]"...
.
=========================
11/16/1990, U.S. Global Change Research Act of 1990
......................
...............
Comment: Like CO2, it was a marriage of politics and media, backed by weak science, and was to be cured in part by
"emissions trading." 'Acid rain' was pushed
by George Bush (the first) who claimed he was the
"Environment President."
.......................
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