
Acidity in atmosphere minimised to preindustrial levels - upen
http://news.ku.dk/all_news/2016/09/acidity-in-atmosphere-minimised-to-preindustrial-levels/
======
tlb
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.

------
al_biglan
"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!

~~~
maxerickson
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](http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2892944/posts)
).

2015 production was ~1500 million tons.

~~~
al_biglan
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"

~~~
kogus
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_steel_production)

~~~
dpark
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.

~~~
DougWebb
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.

~~~
dpark
> _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.

~~~
DougWebb
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.

~~~
dpark
> _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.

------
DubiousPusher
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?

~~~
Alex3917
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...](https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-07/documents/fullreport_rev_a.pdf)

~~~
j2kun
Is there a good reason we can't implement the same system for other types of
emissions, such as, say, CO2?

~~~
Alex3917
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...](https://www.edf.org/oceans/how-turn-around-overfishing-crisis)

~~~
skybrian
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?

~~~
b34r
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.

~~~
skybrian
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.

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

~~~
M_Grey
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.

~~~
endisukaj
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?

~~~
M_Grey
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...](http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/reversing-ocean-acidification-aggressive-
co2-removal-will-take-more-700-years-1513897)

------
hasbroslasher
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.

~~~
jcoffland
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.

~~~
hasbroslasher
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...](http://www.soas.ac.uk/cedep-
demos/000_P500_ESM_K3736-Demo/unit1/page_11.htm)

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.

~~~
parineum
I found some good news here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12531603](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12531603)

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

~~~
kaybe
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. :)

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

~~~
adamtulinius
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.

~~~
Ericson2314
ices older (y)ear. Oh, how Germanic languages always make sense in hindsight.

------
mirimir
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](http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=20160011155)

------
dnautics
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.

------
mayank10j
It is a tragedy that article like these are usually used by climate change
deniers as SCIENTIFIC proof.

~~~
yongjik
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...

~~~
Alex3917
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...](https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-07/documents/fullreport_rev_a.pdf)

~~~
zeveb
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?

~~~
pbarnes_1
Drinkable water/breathable air is worth any cost.

~~~
zeveb
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?

------
zkhalique
How about acidification of the oceans?

How about greenhouse gases in the atmosphere?

~~~
allendoerfer
> 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.

~~~
rosege
Sounds like you are talking about what Sweden announced today:
[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/19/waste-not-
want...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/19/waste-not-want-not-
sweden-tax-breaks-repairs)

------
fokinsean
s/Acidity/CO2/g

If only we could save the world with Perl

~~~
TallGuyShort
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".

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

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

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

