Acidity in atmosphere minimised to preindustrial levels | Hacker News Reader

Acidity in atmosphere minimised to preindustrial levels

news.ku.dk

154 pointsupen83 comments

My family's business in the 1970s was cleaning windows on tall buildings in Saskatoon (there were dozens). The effects of acid rain on buildings was dramatic. Facades on buildings that had stood since the 1920s were crumbling. Acid rain damage control was a whole segment of our business. Presumably the pollution there was no worse than anywhere else.

Emissions controls for vehicles and coal power plants are important. Things would be much worse without them.

"preindustrial" being tagged at 1900 seems more than a bit off. Steel boomed in the 1880's (starting in 1850's with Bessemer). I would think a better data set would be to look back to 1850 or better 1800 to be sure to capture a decent number of years that show the "preindustrial" time period.

All that said. It is nice to see the trend over the past 30 years!

Half the steel ever made has been produced in the last couple decades.

1913 production was ~60 million tons (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2892944/posts ).

2015 production was ~1500 million tons.

True, and we are getting cleaner production methods. The early production was incredibly inefficient and produced way more pollution than now. I can say _that_ with some certainty, but I can't say that they produced x% of the current production back then and were N times more polluting. Plus, it isn't clear how the atmosphere absorbs/reacts to the pollutants. (is there a lag? why the spike in 1970s? did the levels really fall off so quickly? I thought once steel left the US production it got much "dirtier" to produce?) Lots of questions, I'm mostly asking to show me a bit of the range that is clearly outside the definition of "preindustrial"

For the record, steel production has not left the US (although many of the jobs have due to automation).

The US is #4 in the world for steel production[1], although China produces about 17x more.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_steel_pro...

US steel production in absolute terms has dropped 45% (edit: 31%) from 50 years ago, when we made about 25% of steel globally. Now we produce less than 5% of steel globally. I'd say steel production has largely left the US.

The Wikipedia article shows US production dropping 30% from 1967 to 2015. It's a loss, yes, but 70% of the production is still here. What's changed is that China and other countries are producing much more now, so as a percentage of world-wide production the US has dropped. But that'd be true even if we were producing more domestic steel than before.

The other big thing is that US per-capita steel consumption (including imports and finished products) is significantly down since the 1970s.

This says that US steel consumption per capita went from 622 kilograms in 1979 to 451 kilograms in 1988: https://www.worldsteel.org/en/dam/jcr:373b3927-26ff-4591-8e7...

More recent numbers here say 348 kilograms per capita in 2003 down to 297 kilograms in 2015: https://www.statista.com/statistics/185031/apparent-steel-us...

With a US population of 225 million in 1979 and 322 million in 2015, that means that total US steel consumption is only 68% of what it was in 1979. It doesn't look like domestic production has declined much (if any) faster than domestic consumption since the end of the 1970s.

Cars are lighter than in the 1970s, cars last longer than in the 1970s, and non-steel materials are increasingly used in roles that steel was used for in the 1970s. Like parts of cars and making beverage cans.

> The Wikipedia article shows US production dropping 30% from 1967 to 2015. It's a loss, yes, but 70% of the production is still here.

Fair, I plugged my number in upside down. The production 50 years ago was ~46% higher than today, or today's is ~31% lower.

> What's changed is that China and other countries are producing much more now, so as a percentage of world-wide production the US has dropped. But that'd be true even if we were producing more domestic steel than before.

Yes, but we've also dropped 30% of our own production. When our absolute production is down this much and our overall share of production has plummeted, I think it's fair to say the industry has largely left. The population is also up by over 50% since 1967, so per capita our steel production has basically been cut in half.

In comparison, the absolute number of consumer electronics that America produces might actually be higher than 50 years ago, but as a share of the market, production has plummeted, to the point that everyone would likely agree that consumer electronics manufacturing has largely left the US.

When you say "has largely left", that implies that we no longer have companies doing the work, that we've lost the capability to do the work. That doesn't seem to be the case, at least not based on these figures.

If we're producing less steel than we used to, but we're still producing some, then we still have the capability to expand. Production is down and if it continues we'll eventually lose the ability to produce our own steel, but we're not there yet.

For consumer electronics, I disagree that "everyone would likely agree that consumer electronics manufacturing has largely left the US", especially if our production of consumer electronics is up. (Is it rising as well?) We may not be the leader anymore, but that's very different from "largely left".

I don't believe that everything is fine with US manufacturing; I think it's a problem that there are many things we still need which we don't make anymore. But there are many things that we do make, even when other countries make them too, so it's not all doom and gloom.

> When you say "has largely left", that implies that we no longer have companies doing the work, that we've lost the capability to do the work. That doesn't seem to be the case, at least not based on these figures.

I think this is wishful thinking. Well we've shed ~75% of jobs from the steel industry in the past 5 decades. We don't produce enough steel to meet our own needs. In fact we are the top importer.

Most of the integrated steel mills are shuttered, down to 11 from something like 50. There used to be 9 in Cleveland alone. Now there is 1.

We have some companies doing the work, but we have fewer, and they're doing less of it.

> If we're producing less steel than we used to, but we're still producing some, then we still have the capability to expand.

This is a meaningless statement. If our production was zero, we'd still have the capacity to expand. The reality though is that we are not expanding production. It's contracting while the industry in general is booming.

If US car manufacturing were down 30% since 1970 while worldwide sales were up 200%, I think everyone would agree that our automotive industry was floundering. In fact the numbers for car manufacturing aren't nearly that bad and most everyone still agrees that the U.S. car industry is in trouble.

> Production is down and if it continues we'll eventually lose the ability to produce our own steel, but we're not there yet.

Of course we're not there. But we don't have to hit zero before we're in trouble, nor do we have to hit zero before we're effectively unable to meet our own needs. At this point we already (net) import something like 25% of the steel that we need.

> For consumer electronics, I disagree that "everyone would likely agree that consumer electronics manufacturing has largely left the US", especially if our production of consumer electronics is up. (Is it rising as well?) We may not be the leader anymore, but that's very different from "largely left".

I made up an example. I suspect that it is up since Woz was putting together Apple Is in a garage. When the numbers are that small, it's not hard for them to grow. At the same time, we basically have no domestic electronics manufacturing industry. The vast, vast majority of that happens in Asia. Even if our overall numbers are actually up, our manufacturing doesn't exist in a vacuum. When our own consumption is virtually completely outsourced, our industry has utterly failed to meet the demand and it's fair to say that the industry has effectively left.

It seems unreasonable to me to look at total output in isolation as if no other factors are relevant. While we might produce 70% of the steel we used to, we produce far less virgin steel than we used to. And we cover far less of our own needs than we used to. And we produce far less of the world's supply than we used to. And we employ far fewer people. And we have far fewer steel mills.

> I don't believe that everything is fine with US manufacturing; I think it's a problem that there are many things we still need which we don't make anymore. But there are many things that we do make, even when other countries make them too, so it's not all doom and gloom.

I don't think it's all doom and gloom, but the steel industry is clearly largely outside the US now.

Active production capacity has left the US, but one of the things that people lament about the loss of industry is the loss of technical capacity. The current US steel industry is clearly large enough to support some high level of technical capacity, even if it doesn't compete in terms of volume.

It seems that really big, really fussy castings get done in Japan and Korea though.

> Fair, I plugged my number in upside down. The production 50 years ago was ~46% higher than today, or today's is ~31% lower.

For such comparisons, we should always use either explicit ratios or (even better) a logarithmic scale. “X% more” and “X% less” are confusing constructs which are easy to screw up.

The backdrop for this is each location has gotten more productive in part because most of this is recycled steal. So, the US has lost far more than 30% of it's steal mills.

AKA, net production of new steal in the US from ore is what has has really declined.

To understand steel production, you need to look at three numbers, not one: production, capacity, and consumption.

One of the things that has happened since 2000 is that China has expanded its steel production capacity a lot. The capacity utilization--which should optimally be around 80-90%--is at 75% right now and plummeting. China basically built its steelmaking capacity assuming consumption growth rates would increase instead of what they actually did (decrease).

The obvious solution is to close down steel mills. Unfortunately, many governments consider steelmaking to be a point of national prestige (the EU started out as the European Coal and Steel Community!), to the point that democratic governments often idolize steelmakers (with other industrial workers) as the "every-man" [1]. Which means no one wants to cut their capacity.

[1] I find this somewhat ironic given that, now that I think about it, no one in my family that I can trace ever worked in a factory of any kind. Although my grandparents and some of my second and third cousins are farmers, which was historically the other idolized profession.

Looking at the amount produced by year it seems like U.S. production has been relatively steady over the last year and not too much lower than it was in previous decades. I think looking at percentages doesn't really tell the full story here, since China's production has increased so much as to overshadow most other countries' output. The "drop" from 25% to 5% wasn't as much due to production leaving the US as it is production not increasing at breakneck pace.

> I think looking at percentages doesn't really tell the full story here, since China's production has increased so much as to overshadow most other countries' output. The "drop" from 25% to 5% wasn't as much due to production leaving the US as it is production not increasing at breakneck pace.

But that is extremely relevant. When our production is flat (actually declining) while world production is soaring, it means that we control very little of the market. We don't control supply. We don't control pricing. This puts our production at higher risk because it's much easier for China and India to price our industry out of business.

Our production per capita has also been cut in half since 1967. So in addition to the world producing more, the US is actually producing a lot less. Our consumption is also up, and we're producing only about half of what we consume now.

If you don't inject it into the stratosphere, most pollutants such as acids or particles are precipitated out (dry or wet) pretty quickly (on the order of days to weeks/months), so I'd expect a lag of max 2 months due to the transport time to Greenland (and it will be a bit lower due to the distance and loss over time). [1]

(If China did a better job of filtering the SO2 from exhaust, this particular air problem there would be gone within a week.)

[1] http://acmg.seas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/djj/book/bookcha...

The spike in the 70s will have been the steady growth of cars and re-industrialisation since the war. The fuel crisis was 73, for a couple of years, which led to queues at pumps, rationing and introduction of speed limits in many places. That led to recession and the decline of some heavier industries... and was a factor leading to the election of Reagan and Thatcher at the end of the 70s, start of 80s. Their restructuring led to the terminal decline of some heavier industry.

In 79 there was a UNECE conference[1] on pollution that most members signed up to. 1985 gave us the Sulfur agreement that UK and US (amongst others) never ratified. The mid 90s saw further reduction of sulfur, that finally the UK adopted, though the US didn't.

That led to wider use of SO2 scubbers and tighter emissions, though initial efforts only stemmed the increase due to rising car numbers during the 80s. The agreement has had regular updates ever since, leading to lower targets, adding pollutants, adoption of catalysts etc. Most of the acid rain is now in the oceans of course.

It's still all under the UNECE so excludes the growth economies and the developing world so in today's world it excludes much of the world's industry.

That was nearly all from memory - there will be mistakes. :)

It's worth noting that at the start of the 80s acid rain, its causes and effects, were on the news almost like climate change is today. It was every week - seeing pieces showing dieback in Scandanavian forests, lake acidity, some previously unknown effect and on and on. In the UK it was a weekly reminder the Thatcher govt didn't believe. We learned the UK had tried to limit Sulfur in the 30s and had started fitting SO2 scrubbers on power stations - between the wars! The war meant that was the last heard of it until the 80s and 90s.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_Long-Range_Trans...

Ozone and acid rain, things from the biology book that we no longer need to worry about. Hopefully C02 has a nice clear peak in retrospect someday too :|.

Presumably China adopted some of the pollution control technologies developed in the 1970s as it industrialized.

edit: It's pretty likely that steel production since 2010 is greater than all steel production prior to 1900. I would think that the energy used to make steel since 2010 is at least comparable to the energy used for all metal production prior to 1900.

Industrialization certainly got started prior to 1900. I would say it took a while to really hit it's stride.

Thanks for taking the time to give a clear view of what's happened. Lots of us spend time trying to make a point (on one side or the other), and not enough spend time trying to clarify what's actually going on.

I think it needs to start a lot earlier. I would expect that a lot of the acidity would have come from the UK, we were to blame for a lot of the acid rain that affected the Black Forest.

A combination of short smokestacks and global weather patterns mean that while England created a lot of local problems for itself, it wouldn't show up well in the Greenland ice sheet record that is being sampled here.

Agreed. The direction we're trending is good, but isn't that entire range [4.99-5.75] considered "acidic"?

Rain is normally acidic due to dissolved Carbonic acid.

Source: http://chemistry.elmhurst.edu/vchembook/190acidrain.html

"Normal rainfall is slightly acidic..." ~ thanks for the info

I normally love HN comment sections because really knowledgable people put these articles into greater perspective. This has not been one such section. Can someone with domain specific knowledge speak to what this means? What are the scope of the benefits? What was the danger if this hadn't been turned around?

I have some knowledge of this area. So the basic problem with acid rain was that the acidity was freeing trace amounts of aluminum in the soil, causing widespread deaths of trees and fish. (There are other mechanisms also, but that was one of the primary ones.)

The solution was the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act, which made cap & trade the law of the land. This law placed a legal limit on the total amount of SO2 and NOx that society can release into the atmosphere. Further, by allowing companies to trade their emissions allotments, they created a mechanism that dramatically reduced the cost to society of making these reductions by creating enormous financial incentives to reward the companies that figured out the least expensive ways to reduce these emissions.

This is one of the most successful environmental laws of all time. To quote the EPA:

"We estimate that the annual dollar value of benefits of air quality improvements will be very large, and will grow over time as emissions control programs take their full effect, reaching a level of approximately $2.0 trillion in 2020. These benefits will be achieved as a result of CAAA-related programs and regulatory compliance actions estimated to cost approximately $65 billion in 2020. Most of these benefits (about 85 percent) are attributable to reductions in premature mortality associated with reductions in ambient particulate matter; as a result, we estimate that cleaner air will, by 2020, prevent 230,000 cases of premature mortality in that year."[1]

[1] https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-07/documents...

Is there a good reason we can't implement the same system for other types of emissions, such as, say, CO2?

There's no reason it can't be used to fix climate change, and in fact cap & trade is the only type of law that's ever actually fixed any air pollution problem in real life. But for various reasons congress is preventing cap & trade from getting implemented at the federal level. And while Hillary Clinton supports a carbon tax, this doesn't actually impose any legally binding cap on carbon pollution, nor does it incentivize the entrepreneurs who are able to invent new technologies to get the biggest reductions for the least money.

One place it is working though is with fisheries. Today the majority of US commercial fisheries are managed using cap & trade (called 'catch shares'), and the work is being done to get 70% of the world's commercial fisheries managed this way be 2020:

https://www.edf.org/oceans/how-turn-around-overfishing-crisi...

It seems like either a carbon tax or cap-and-trade would spur innovation. Why do you think one would spur more innovation that than the other?

A tax is simply a deterrent, where c&t is an opportunity to make a boatload of money selling your credits to a carbon hog while simultaneously improving the state of the art for co2 emission reduction to free up more credits to be sold/bartered.

A tax provides an incentive to make money too, because it's an expense that businesses can optimize.

Businesses that are better at cutting carbon output either become more profitable or gain market share (through lower prices than their competitors).

It's also an opportunity for businesses that sell equipment to reduce carbon output.

Almost all economists agree that a CO₂ tax is the best way to minimise those emissions.

According to something I read that seemed credible (I know...), this is politically impossible to get through congress without exempting most major CO₂ producers.

"Too big to regulate." Scary stuff.

Look up "acid rain".

In the 1970s we had marble buildings being corroded, lakes becoming inhospitable to fish, losses of billions of years per year in reduced agriculture and large numbers of people dying each year from respiratory problems. Today all of those have been reversed.

As well, visible smog didn't look very nice...

Around where I live acid rain was a major problem earlier. It wiped out the wild trout along the west coast of the country.

AFAIK the problem was that the when the streams became acidic they dissolved certain minerals from the soil that somehow congested the gills and made it impossible for the fish to exchange oxygen with the water.

It also ruined thousands of small ponds. There were ponds, miles into the wilderness, with huge Brook Trout populations. I fished them with my dad in the 1970 and 1980s. By the mid to late 80s all the fish were gone. I went back in 2005 and there wasn't a single fish in the ponds still. I am hoping they will come back one day.

EDIT: Looks like these ponds have been restored by the state with thousands of dollars of state money. These ponds are literally 3 miles from the closest dirt road.

I might be able to take my kids there in a few years.

As far as I can see, the general trend of the plot is not new knowledge. There are a myriad of this kind of analysis going on in the background all the time, and what is mostly gained is a slightly clearer picture, with more locations covered, better temporal resolution and more independent measurements to crosscheck with (eg so you can be reasonably sure your equipment was calibrated properly, you did a good job taking the samples and applied all the corrections right - of course, don't just believe everything if the results fit, and don't just throw them away if they don't, but at the beginning it is often not clear what is correct, and many teams tackling the problem increases the quality of the results.)

The interesting thing here is the measurement method, that can now be let loose on other samples as well. However, that also is one further small step to better data, I reckon, no great breakthrough here.

So, it's nice, and the paper will most probably be cited quite a bit within the community, but that should be the level of importance I think.

If you want to talk about acid in the atmosphere.. look no further than polluted cities in eg China. It's straight-out unhealthy for people and the acidic rain is bad for plants and things. So it's a problem for forests and agriculture, and also smaller bodies of water and the life within. On the other hand, the aerosols that form block some sunlight and cool the area down, and counteract global warming, especially in the stratosphere (which is only reached by huge volcanic eruptions, we don't have many of there, just a handful per century). (Yes, this is a proposed climate engineering method.)

(Btw, the oil sand extraction in Alberta, Canada has produced huge mountains of sulfur. The stuff is only mildly flammable, but I can't help imagine what would happen.)

http://www.usmessageboard.com/threads/keystone-xl-pipeline.3...

Now if we can just get acidity in the oceans back to preindustrial levels we'll be set.

We don't even have a shred of a clue how to do that, only prevent it, and it may well be a bit late to meaningfully prevent.

As someone with 0 knowledge on this. Why is it late and is there any hope one day to be able to reverse the acidity of the oceans?

The problem is the sheer scale, both in terms of quantity of dissolved CO2, and time.

I think the (second part)of this does a better job explaining just how and why than I would though:

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/reversing-ocean-acidification-aggre...

I think the difference between acidity due to sulfur dioxide and CO2 is twofold.

Sulfur dioxide is reactive and gets rapidly cleared in the environment. Sulfur dioxide + H2O -> sulfuric acid -> acidic rain -> + just about any metallic element -> sulfate[1]. So a hang time of 'years' vs CO2 hang time of thousands of years.

Second the amount of CO2 we're releasing is probably two orders larger than the amount of sulfur dioxide we were releasing back in the 70's. Since raw coal and petroleum contains a fractional percentage of sulfur it stands to reason the CO2 produced is probably 100 larger than SO2.

This seems incredibly vacuous:

> Acid in the atmosphere can come from large volcanic eruptions and manmade emissions from industry

It's not surprising that the atmosphere isn't as acidic now, as there has been a decline in volcanic activity in the last 100 years (purely statistical noise).

In fact, it's rather harmful to push the "hey we're making improvements" narrative when there is still so much to be done to prevent global environmental catastrophes.

So I think you are implying that if it's not negative news about the environment then people shouldn't be hearing it. I hate this attitude that the environment is indisputably in a headlong rush to hell. This to me is much more detrimental to the efforts to make positive environmental changes. The general public will not trust science if they are not being told the truth whether a particular truth supports a particular agenda or not.

Make no mistake, this is no attitude, this is a stating of facts: http://www.soas.ac.uk/cedep-demos/000_P500_ESM_K3736-Demo/un...

Good news is fine, but rare. Important good news rarer. Find me good news and I may change my tune, until then I'll continue to remind you of the Pacific garbage patch and the global water crisis.

The general public will only trust science if it comforts them - no one wants to believe that the type of environmental degradation late capitalism promotes is possible. The general public will not believe that eating hamburgers contributes to water shortages, that driving automobiles causes global climate problems, that our trash is causing the oceans to acidify into a pool, barren of life... They will believe their post-consumer-waste Starbucks cup is saving the world, and that they are heroes.

I found some good news here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12531603

Have you stopped driving, eating hamburgers and creating trash? Or are you just killing the mood at parties? I'm all for taking action that will make a difference but there is no point in getting all worked up about what might happen when there's nothing you can do about it. Humans have been convinced that the world is about to end for thousands of years. Let me know when it actually happens.

Could you support your assertion that the variation shown in the graph is due to volcanic activity? To me it looks like "steady increase after WWII, up to critical levels, then subsiding after the clean air acts of the 1970s". But I have no background in the subject.

http://www.nbi.ku.dk/Nyheder/nyheder_16/luftens-syreforureni...

Sure, here's a really simple one: https://www.metabunk.org/sk/Volcanic-activity-1945-2015.png

Interestingly, this graph shows volcanic activity declining after the passage of the clean air act - perhaps the gods of volcanism heard our pleas.

In all likelihood, yeah, it was a combination of the two factors, but it did bug me that they ignored below-average global volcanism post 1970.

Global volcanic activity is an imperfect proxy, however. For instance, about 20% of present day global volcanic SO2 emissions are from a few volcanoes in Vanuatu (Yasur, Lopevi, Ambrym, Ambae, Gaua and Vanua Lava).

Victories are good. If the narrative is 100% gloom and doom and never acknowledges a shred of success, people become fatalistic and give up.

The article specifically pointed out that they had a way of separating industrial sources from volcanic, etc. RTFA.

Good news for a change. I will wait a decade and want to see these kind of tests repeated before I will really cheer.

We have directly-measured data for the later part of the plot (from different locations of course), and many satellite images with excellent spatial coverage to boot. This is real, don't worry. :)

Really confusing that the graph starts at 2000 and goes backwards in time along the X axis. Is that a Danish thing?

The plot is weird: The title of the plot ("Isens alder (år )") literally means "age of the ice (years)", so the x-axis should probably have gone from 0 (being year 2016) to 116 (being year 1900), which would sorta have made sense.

ices older (y)ear. Oh, how Germanic languages always make sense in hindsight.

Agreed. I think what happened here is that the graph is really made by depth along an ice core (which starts at 0). In order to make the graph more interesting they converted depth to "years ago".

I'm pretty sure the X Axis is the year.. meaning to the right is historical data and to the left is the most recent. Its a little weird but it kind of makes sense.

not a Danish thing, perhaps it's because it's just a plotter so it starts printing the first year and then goes back?

This is great news for ecosystems everywhere!

But there may be a downside. It remains unclear how human SO2 emissions contribute to sulfate aerosol levels in the stratosphere, and so increase albedo. As China reduces SO2 emissions, global warming may accelerate.[0] Maybe getting those emissions directly into the stratosphere would be useful. But that would require nontrivial energy.

[0] Kasoar et al. (2016) Regional and Global Climate Response to Anthropogenic SO2 Emissions from China in Three Climate Models. http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=20160011155

The mind is blown that this can't be repeated with CO2 emissions: The rules should be simple.

1) auction permits for a single compound (create separate auctions for each worrisome greenhouse gas)

2) allow for secondary markets (e.g. futures) with some cost for permit transfers

3) disallow credit schemes. Trading offsets is too easy to game.

4) allow anyone who cares to buy off carbon permits in the general auction and let them go fallow.

Of course, that will never happen, because there are a host of politically favored entities that are interested in keeping things complicated for their own benefit.

It is a tragedy that article like these are usually used by climate change deniers as SCIENTIFIC proof.

A climate change denier, citing the success of government regulations that limit emission of environmentally harmful substance, without noticeable harm on economy, must not be really thinking it through...

According to the EPA, fixing acid rain has brought society $2.0 trillion worth of economic benefits per year at an annual cost of $65 billion.

https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-07/documents...

This is purely an ad hominem argument because I don't have time to dig into their claims: isn't in the EPA's interest to claim that their regulations are worth the cost?

The clean air act isn't an EPA regulation. It was created by an act of congress, and part of that law requires the EPA to file regular reports on whether or not the law is working.

https://www.epa.gov/clean-air-act-overview/1990-clean-air-ac...

Drinkable water/breathable air is worth any cost.

Drinkable and breathable at all? Sure, since without water and air we die.

But what about tradeoffs? What if we can leave air polluted enough that two hundred years of breathing it would be fatal, and spend that money elsewhere? Would that tradeoff be worth it? No-one ever lives to be 200 anyway.

What about a century? Almost no-one lives to be 100.

At what point is the tradeoff no longer worth it?

And, to return to your statement (which I earlier conceded): drinkable water & breathable air can't be worth any cost, because if they cost my life then I can't enjoy them anyway.

Given that resources are fungible, and that money spent preventing acid rain could instead feed the hungry: how many people are you willing to kill in order to preserve buildings from corrosive rain?

It's a tragedy that so many so called intellectuals want to stifle any debate by labeling people "climate change deniers" in the first place. I fully believe that there is enough evidence that we need to take immediate action but exactly how human activity is impacting the environment is far from understood. To pretend that anyone knows exactly what's going on, or even if the changes we have measured in recent years are with out a doubt human caused, is BS, even if there is significant evidence pointing in that direction.

How about acidification of the oceans?

How about greenhouse gases in the atmosphere?

It's a different issue. Acidification of the oceans happens mainly due to dissolved CO2 [0], while the acid in the atmosphere is mainly due to SO2 and NOx.

Greenhouse gases were not discussed in the article and were not part of that study, but as you may know, they're still going up. [1][2][3] (Oh yay, the sum of CFCs is actually going down.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification

[1] http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/ (This page is so scary.)

[2] http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends_ch4/

[3] http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/aggi/aggi.fig2.png // http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/aggi.html

> How about acidification of the oceans?

Reduce waste, stop ships from ocean dumping. Start with the West and then bully the rest to follow. The US/EU can control who can access their market.

"Sorry, you can only land here, if you can prove that you did not dump your waste."

> How about greenhouse gases in the atmosphere?

I think economics will solve this one. To me waste and planned obsolescence seems like the much bigger problem. Green energy is just "more new stuff", we are good at that.

Edit: Another answer to your comment just made me realize, I had a different kind of acidification in mind and missed the point.

Sounds like you are talking about what Sweden announced today: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/19/waste-not-want...

Remember, guys, there's no good news and everyone is doomed.

s/Acidity/CO2/g

If only we could save the world with Perl

There are a lot of people who will hear CO2 and immediately decide they don't believe you. There's been some bad science behind global warming that deniers will latch onto, and I suspect "CO2" will just get associated with that in many people's minds. The science behind (and the effects of) ocean acidification are far more sound, IMHO. Probably wouldn't be bad to get a second chance in many people's minds at presenting the data.

Of course, I'm sure the same people may latch on to this as "the problem is all fixed".

How do you want to discuss ocean acidification without mentioning CO2?

I don't want to. I don't want to s/Acidification/CO2/ either.

This was in reference to the articles title, in other words "CO2 in atmosphere minimised to preindustrial levels..." Sorry to rustle so many jimmies

Reply on news.ycombinator.com