Acid rain ("saurer Regen"), and purportedly inescapably associated with it "Waldsterben" ("dying forests"), used to be the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) of the 1980s in Germany. The country was in almost mass psychotic fear of an impending man-made apocalypse.
Now, for the US-American perspective:
In 1994, the US-Congress-mandated National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program (NAPAP), involving hundreds of scientists conducting extensive laboratory and field investigations around the country, published these results on acid rain in North America:
- Acid rain has not injured forests in either the U.S. or Canada.
- Acid rain has had no observable effect on human health.
- Acid rain has not injured crops, and may even have a positive effect on some crops.
- Acid rain has acidified only a very small number of lakes, and these can be restored to health by liming.
Conclusion of a Heartland Institute survey article on the NAPAP results from 1994:
In the scientific community, the NAPAP findings are accepted as
authoritative. But the environmental movement, having sold acid rain as
an urgent problem requiring your immediate financial contribution, chooses simply to ignore the study.
The acid rain provisions of the Clean Air Act Amendments will add billions of dollars a year to the utility bills of homeowners and businesses, yet the benefits in terms of environmental protection and human health will be negligible.
The story of acid rain demonstrates a painful truth about the modem
environmental movement: Too often, good sciences imply doesn‘t matter.
According to one insider interviewed on 60 Minutes in 1990, “The
environmental community has spent almost no effort attempting to even
monitor the progress [of NAPAP]. . . We have been working on trying
to get legislation in Washington.” Politicians, under heavy pressure from
media and the environmental lobby, also chose to ignore the NAPAP
report. The U.S. Senate spent just one hour discussing the report for
which it spent $500 million in taxpayers’ money. Incredibly, the report
was never even presented to the House of Representatives.
Senator John Glenn (D-Ohio) scolded his colleagues with words that
could have been directed to the environmental movement as well:
"We spend over $500 million on the most definitive study of acid
precipitation that has ever been done in the history of the world and
then we do not want to listen to what [the experts] say."
The NAPAP study, to summarize, found that claims of the destructive
effects of acid rain are much exaggerated. Acid ruin poses little or no
threat toforests, crops. human health, or lakes. Once again, billions of
dollars are wasted battling a problem that doesn’t exist.
Go to the excellent source.
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