Was Acid Rain a Real Problem?
By Ross Pomeroy
May 28, 2022
Thirty-five years ago, the waters of Lake Colden in New York's Adirondack Mountains were found to be too acidic to support fish, making the picturesque, high-altitude body of water one of the signature casualties of acid rain. Red spruce trees in New England were also showing signs of strain as the rain leached vital calcium from the soil, severely stunting the trees' growth. Today, Lake Colden's trout have returned and the spruce trees are flourishing, tangible signs that the decades-long effort to mitigate acid rain has worked.
Now that sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions – the causes of acid rain – are greatly reduced in Europe and North America, a success based on capstone environmental legislation, it's easy to look back on the panicked news stories from the 80s and 90s and wonder if acid rain was really more of a "nuisance, not a catastrophe," as William Reville, an Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry, wrote for the Irish Times. Seeing as how we dealt with the problem, we may never conclusively know the answer.
What we do know is that scientists in the U.S. and Scandinavia originally discovered acid rain in the 1960s, and chose to gather evidence for years – more than a decade in some cases – before sounding the alarm in the 70s and 80s. American ecologist Gene Likens and his colleagues found that while rainwater was often slightly acidic, with a pH of 5.6, by 1980 the average rainfall in the U.S. was at a pH level of 4.6, about ten times more acidic! And it was getting worse.
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2022/05/28/was_acid_rain_a_real_problem_833801.html
