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I normally love HN comment sections because really knowledgable people put these articles into greater perspective. This has not been one such section. Can some

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?

btilly 10y ago
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...
- reitanqild 10y ago
  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.
  - baldfat 10y ago
    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.
kaybe 10y ago
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.337712/ http://www.usmessageboard.com/threads/keystone-xl-pipeline.3...
Alex3917 10y ago
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/fullreport_rev_a.pdf https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-07/documents...
- j2kun 10y ago
  Is there a good reason we can't implement the same system for other types of emissions, such as, say, CO2?
  - Alex3917 10y ago
    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-crisis https://www.edf.org/oceans/how-turn-around-overfishing-crisi...

btilly 10y ago

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...

reitanqild 10y ago
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.
- baldfat 10y ago
  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.

kaybe 10y ago

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.337712/ http://www.usmessageboard.com/threads/keystone-xl-pipeline.3...

Alex3917 10y ago

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

j2kun 10y ago
Is there a good reason we can't implement the same system for other types of emissions, such as, say, CO2?
- Alex3917 10y ago
  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-crisis https://www.edf.org/oceans/how-turn-around-overfishing-crisi...