Whatever happened to acid rain?

so great. We watched that again the other day just by a chance, and I hadn't seen it in a couple of years, and it's still just he's hard to like, Chad said our friend, it's hard to believe that that's voice comes out of that guy. And he's kind a new one, like mother Economy really good. Yeah, yeah, he's a good guy. Um. I don't know what chocolate Rains about, but there's a good call out. I would be very interested to hear everyone's interpretation of what chocolate rain means

that too. Um, let's see, Chuck, do you remember back in the eighties hearing about two things too terrifying environmental things. One the Ozone layer, specifically the whole in the ozone layer, and two acid rain, you throw an apartheid and that is the eighties. Yeah, I'm not gonna play sen City nope. Um, yeah, that's pretty much. Also, don't forget cocaine, Ronald Reagan, jelly Beans and the team and Magnum. But he kind of transcends the eighties. Really, if you ask me, he's just

a man of all times, never gets old. Um. The weird thing is this, since I guess maybe the mid nineties or whatever, you don't hear about any of those things except for Magnum any longer. Yeah, because of course global warming took over and everyone's afraid we're gonna melt now, and so they said, well, we don't need to worry about acid rain anymore. We fix that problem. Right. I think there's a perception that, you know, acid rain was fixed and taken care of, and astoundingly in a lot

of ways, it has been. Yeah, they've come a long way, baby. Those Onlaer, by the way, has not been. As a matter of fact, another one opened up in the Antarctic. Now we have two. But that's a that's another topic of discussion. Acid rain let's get back to it though. Is a very Uh. It's a nice success story in a lot of ways. And it came from a comprehensive understanding of a problem and a comprehensive will to address it.

That's right, that's how you take care of stuff. There is still a long way to go, though, I was bringing me back down earth. Not completely fixed, but it is good. It's heartwarming to know that you can see a problem and and reduce something like acid rain precisely, so, Chuck, what is acid rain? Acid rain, Josh, is a transboundary issue, which means even though it just occurs in the mainly occurs in the Northern Hemisphere, it still is going to

cross over and affect the rest of the world. And the reason that's worth mentioning is because for many years, up until the nighties, um, they thought it was a very local problem. Uh, and then they realized, oh no, it's not, and everybody kind of got on board with fixing it. That's ry Um. But like you said, Northern Hemisphere, it occurs mostly there because we're the dirtiest, more industrial, most polluting. Yeah. So specifically, what it is, um is

rain with acid in it. Literally, Uh, emissions of sulfur dioxide, s O two, nitrogen oxides and O X from things like cars and factories, power plants, all those nasty things, Lightning strikes, volcanoes, the natural ones. Um. They will actually react with water vapor in the atmosphere and turn into acid, sulfuric and nitric acids, and they can fall in the form of wet rain, um, snow, sleep, bog or they

can be deposited as particulates and gases. That's dry acid rain. Well, the whole dry things called acid depositions because it can be wet or dry, right, and it's being deposited exactly on the earth. Yeah, that's what that word is. It's branched from deposit, isn't it. I think so, Yeah, it didn't even occur to me. Um and so you so bravo unexplaining acid rain, and bravo Sarah Dowdy who wrote this. Yeah,

she did a very good job on this. UM. And when you can't just be like, well this this rain seems a little hanky, So we're gonna say that that's acid rain. They actually know. Um, there's a there's a very um strict definition of what constitutes acid rain. And then they use the pH scale to determine it. Good old pH scale. So the pH scale is um this spectrum between highly acidic and highly basic, right and um.

Acid rain obviously falls towards the acidic side of the scale, and in the middle of this scale is pure water. And that's at a seven point. Oh, it's not at zero. It's entirely neutral. It's neither basic nor acidic. Yeah. I just find it interesting that it's a scale of zero to fourteen with seven being in the middle. Seven's in the middle of zero to fourteen. Yeah, but I mean it just for me, I would say zero is neutral

and anything above would be negative. But whatever. In the grand tradition of Um civilization established by the Romans, though, the pH scale starts at one rather than zero. Um. But yeah, I see what you're saying. Actually here, I like the fact I think it goes from one to fourteen. Well, then Sarah got it wrong. Um, in the the graph here says one to fourteen. I wonder, um, but back to its seventh in the middle either way, seven, Yeah,

so it would start a zero. I guess. Um. So the more acidic is the lower numbers, and the more basic is the higher numbers. Right. The thing is is rain isn't neutral. Normal rain still is slightly acidic, and it hits about five point six on the pH scale. Right, Um so why well, it combines with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to form a slightly acidic um carbonic acid deposition,

which is branch from the root word deposit um. So uh so acid rain is something like five point three to four point oh as far as um acidity goes, right, four point three to five okay, Um, yeah, that's a big difference. Um, And it's something like what the acidity between orange juice and black coffee? Yeah, which Sarah is keen to point out, which is a bit of a misnomer.

While that's true, you can't say, well, like well it's just like coffee and then you're like that's not gonna still coffe in your grass and it's not gonna kill it. See I'm and yeah, my hat was off to her for saying, like what what what? We don't just be like orange juice is fine, coffee is fine, because if you think about it, if a rained orange juice all the time, you'd probably have the same impact. Would be awesome about just like all the old cup out the

window each morning, I'd be like, oh, it's with pulp today. Um. The problem with acid rain though, Josh, even though it is has the acidity of a coffee or an orange juice, it um can wreck small parts of an ecosystem. And as we all know, if you wreck small parts of an ecosystem, there's a domino effect that occurs that spreads throughout an ecosystem. One of the most valuable things on the planet is something like plankton. Yeah, plankton is high currents.

It's like honey buns in prison, but for the yeah, you know pretty much. And when plankton, which is very very sensitive to changes in pH um, especially when it becomes more acidic, when plankton dies and small invertebrates die, then yeah, it starves out the larger animals, fish and frogs, and then we start to get hungry, especially the French we frog legs e g. Acid rain is a huge problem in France, that's right, And eventually it's just mass hysteria.

Pretty much got some dogs living together kimberally from different strokes and up with green hair. That's right. Uh. There are a couple of UM programs UM that monitor this UH in the US, the National Atmospheric Deposition Program and they handled the wet deposition and the Clean Air Status and Trends Network. UM handled the dry And what they're looking for is trying to determine the critical load, which is how much an ecosystem can UM take before it

starts saying, man, I'm breaking down. You're killing me with this stuff. UM. And the pH scale is determined by UH the concentration of hydrogen ions right in a substance. That's what makes it either UM acidic or basic. Right. So what these programs are doing is measuring the concentration of hydrogen ions to determine acidity. And they say, oh, well, this is this is too much science. I would just walk out and be like, look at this. This plankton

is not looking very healthy. This is acidic. I don't even need to measure this stuff. You can just spot unhappy plankton pretty much. It's not how you Once you know what to look for, I'll teach you sometimes it's not hard. When you've met happy plankton, your life will never be the same. The difference is like night and day. So UM surface waters are where acid rain is to hit you most initially, um, precipitation, and you don't really think about this. You think it, well, it rains in

a lake, what in a and in a river. What it does is it rains on the ground. And although sure it rains on the water surface, it's also going to run through soil to get to water. Right. One of the purposes of soil. One of the functions that provides is um buffering uh water that percolates through it toward groundwater, towards bodies of water. And what's buffering me? Well,

it has the ability to neutralize acids. Yeah, and then awesome, yeah, um, I think it brings everything more toward purified water or neutral pH right. Yeah, but I think specifically with a lot of like the um, the minerals that are in the soil, like say calcium, they counteract acidic um rain acidic water to bring it more toward neutral right. The problem is is when the soil's buffering capacity is a reloaded,

there's just too much for it to handle. A lot of that unneutralized acid gets passed along into the body of water, and then you start to have those big problems with the little unhappy plankton. Yeah, it's almost like a water filter that's past its date. You know, it just can't filter anymore. Nice analogy, thank you. UM. So we've talked about what happens where the French end up with a lot of big problems in UM coastal areas. Uh nitrogen, Remember we have UM what is it sulfuric

acid and what acid? Yeah, nitric acid. Okay, So nitric acid is based on nitrogen. Nitrogen has a really interesting impact on coastal waters where when it's deposited UM, it

supports algae blooms because algae love nitrogen. And when algae blooms take place, algae starts to die eventually, and they sustained bacteria, specifically aerobic bacteria that flourishes itself and sucks up all the oxygen in the water, starving fish, shellfish, um plants, and eventually like leading to at the very least a strain, if not a collapse on coastal ecosystem.

So too much acid rain will increase algae. Increased algae means increased dyeing algae, and increased dyeing algae means increased bacteria and they rob fishes of their oxygen. That's a domino effect. One of the things I love about acid rain is just how elegantly understandable it is. It is very basic and simple. I love it. It's not basic acidic. Um. So this we're not done with the soil too, by the way, in a in an addition to UM, I

guess decreasing its buffering capacity or overloading its buffering capacity. Um. Acid rain has the terrible habit of drawing aluminum out of the soil. Yeah, it's normally locked in the soil. Acid rain draws it out, which means that tree roots can suck it up, and that's poison to them. That's a toxin. Yeah. And Sarah makes a good point here.

It's not like a it's not a situation where you're gonna find a rainforest is leveled all of a sudden because of acid rain, or you're gonna find a lake or a river that looks nasty and decaying and disgusting water might actually look cleaner. Yeah. And then ironic it is. It's ironic and beautiful. And um, what it's gonna do to your forest is it's gonna stunt its growth and over time it's gonna have an effect. Yeah, like you're

gonna have bald trees. Um. Because in addition to this, toxins coming out in the soil on low lying areas from acid rain um, and it also degrading helpful minerals like we said, like calcium and other things that trees also used. Um. In higher elevations, that acid rain turns into an acid fog. That is a did that's crazy to me that that I'm going to say at this

time that is a great band name acid yeah. Uh. But so just imagine like trees bathing in that all the time, um, that that strips their leaves and basically makes them chili. Yeah. And that's why when you see mountains in the Appalachian Mountains that have bald peaks, it's not because trees can't grow up there. They could grow up there if they weren't sucking in and being surrounded by acid clouds. That's nuts. Just it doesn't you have to be raining, right, yeah, you know, it's just in

particulates in the air. Uh. And that that kind of leads to how it affects us because we are not nearly as sensitive to these kind of changes um with acid that that acid rain brings. Right now, it's not gonna burn. You know, you can swim in a lake, uh, an acid lake and you will be fine. Um, but an acidic lake, let's say, and yeah, because it's just above battery acid. So you couldn't swim in a battery acid like that. That's terrible. Um, But you could swim

in an acidic lake as far as acid rains concerned. Um, the problem comes with that dry deposition. The UM sulfuric and nitric ox or nitric acids combine UH in low lying areas with ozone yeah, VOCs and create small which is bad for your respiratory system ground level baby. Um. It can also do things like if you've ever seen an old building that is UH, or a monument that's got these little smooth grooves that could be acid corrosion

for like years and years to wear away stone. It'll It's no friend to your car paint job, that's sure, which I mean if you're into your car, it's a big deal. Yeah. That tree, sap, pollen, bird droppings, and acid rain are the four enemies of your of your auto paint. They're considered corrosive, environmental fallout, and friend of Mako. Yeah, Micho loves that stuff. Um so, uh, the idea about acid rain, consider this that stone statue you're just describing.

That takes a long time. A lot of orange juice rain has to fall on that thing for it to become pock marked and weathered prematurely, right, Um, and it's had actually plenty of time to do that. What the statue of Edward James almost you'd be like spinning image. So sorry, um so the man you got me with that?

So cool? The reason the reason it's had a long we've had a long time, or that that statue was weathered over very long times because we've had acid rain for quite some time, ever since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, they think pretty much because remember they thought it was very localized problem. And the reason they thought it was local was because it had such quick rapid effects. But the acid rain, I don't know who who coined the term acid fog, but acid rain was coined by

an Englishman named Robert Angus Smith back in eighteen seventy two. Yeah, and it was the monuments that made him say, what in the heck is going on here? And there weren't a lot of people back then, like I was thinking when I read this like, man, it would have been great if during this boom of ingenuity and industrial revolution there were just as many people concerned with the impact it might have. But it just couldn't have worked that way.

It's almost like they just had to do their thing and then leave us to figure out how to fix it, how to clean up the mess sort of. I don't know if those things to two things could have evolved. So I think you're onto something. I mean, maybe we wouldn't have um, I don't know, the iPhone. Maybe, who knows, Maybe we would I don't know. Maybe we'd be better off, yeah, a lot better off. Maybe we would have more stuff.

Maybe it would have changed the way of thinking rather than just get get get, you know, it would have been get. But also, how's this going to affect other people? So Smith was a man alone. An early ecologist will say, yeah, it's so good for him. Man, you've been coming up with some great, like off the cuff, creative solutions. Well, that's not a solution. If we had a time machine, it would be okay, Yeah, the way back machines in

the shops. Uh. So scientists did determine um by what the seventies nineteen seventies that acid rain was a problem, and it was transboundary, it's not just local. And so then in night thankfully the Acid Deposition Act, I said you know what, we're gonna study this for ten years and we're gonna see what's going on ten years later in nineteen nine and they said, yep, that's a big problem. Yea, So we need to do something about it, and they

did very quickly. Congress um took the already established Clean Air Act and added UM sulfur dioxide and UH nitrous oxide, nitrogen oxide right to the list of like most wanted reduction people materials. And this was in with the Clean Air Act and the Acid Rain program. So this is when everything really starts to come into effect, right UM. And it I guess at least as far as sulfur dioxide emissions went, it was wildly successful. Compared to nine

eight levels in two thousand ten. The the sulfur dioxide emissions have been reduced by that's good. That's astounding. That is astounding because consider this, that's not from hitting this. Since that's hitting we already got it back down to seventeen years. That's amazing. And the way they did that is through a cap and trade scheme. I kind of like the old cap and trade. It makes a lot of sense cap and trade, Josh. Basically what they say is we're gonna set a cap for how much s

O two that your power plant can create. It's a limit, um, but they set the cap, and they says, you know what, you've got these allowances though, if you come under, you get these credits and you can actually sell those to other companies that are in need. And it just I don't know, so I'm about it makes sense to me. It makes a lot of sense. And then over time you decrease the amount that that people are allowed to admit, and when you're cutting it into these allowances, those allowances,

by by virtue of the scarcity of them, become more valuable. Yeah, it really incentivizes you to do something about it for your company exactly. So that worked really well for nitrous oxide or for sodium sulfur dioxide. Man, what are we even talking about here, um, And with nitrogen oxides, they didn't institute a cap and trade until like two thousand three, so it was lagging a little bit, but it too

is something of a success story. They um, they reduced it from twenty seven million tons in nineteen eighty to sixteen point three million tons in two thousand and eight. That's pretty good. And so this has had a discernible effect on the environment. UM. Apparently, Uh, let's see the acidic likes. The number of acidic lakes throughout the country have reduced dramatically. UM. There are seventy fewer acidic lakes and streams in Wisconsin and Michigan than there were in UM.

A third of the bodies of water that were acidic in the early nineties in the Adirondacks and the Northern Appalachians are now not considered acidic at all. So there have been like huge strides made other places there have not been. And also you found this really good little kind of overview about acid rain and what happened to it by Nina Rostogi from Slate. That's whose stuff I'm quoting right now. So there have been huge strides, but

there's still, like you said, originally a long way to go. Yeah. The National Acidic Precipitation Assessment Program said that. Um. Another another is what we need to hit to really restore these ecosystems, And I think we're headed there. It sounds like it like we'll check in in ten years and follow up on this. M Who am I kidding? We could? Well no, well, well well it'll be our comeback special.

Whatever happened to whatever happened to acid? Right? Great? Um, but Chuck, I think that this is a really valuable lesson. If you have a non polarized international initiative to take care of a problem, and you can shout down business interests and just say no, this is what you're doing and here's how you're gonna do it. Um, you can make things happen. Yeah. I guess no one was saying that should rain doesn't exist is really not bad. It

was pretty much nonpolarizing except for big business. And also where any jobs lost by this cap and trade scheme? Was industry hurt by this cap and trade scheme? I would wage, you're probably not I would wage or not. But they're still in business. They're just doing it with clean coal and wet scrubbers and yeah, all that all that good stuff. Yeah, it's interesting. And I'm not even an environmentalist. I hate the environment. I'm just fascinated by

this stuff that's not true. Well, if you want to learn more about acid rain or acid fog. You can type either of those words into the search bar at how stuff works dot com and that will bring up this very interesting article by Sarah Dowdy. And uh, I said, um, acid fog, which means the time for listener mail before listener mail quickly. We are going to Comic Con this year for the first time. Yeah, like we're like presenting

at comic Con. We're not just going as fans. And this is the one in San Diego, the original the original comic Con that is coming up in uh what mid July? Yeah, July twelve, Yeah, San Diego ce A and I guess what do We were not quite sure when we're going, so we just want to say stay tuned for details. Yeah, but we will be there. I mean like we have flights booked in every thing, hotels, the whole stup bank. Yeah, and it may or may not our presentation may or may not include certain other

I don't think we should go any further. You're gonna get us in trouble. Well, we're trying to land some some whales. Okay, I'm gonna call this m I t nerd alert. I got a very nerdy email from an M. I T student, and I teased her and said, I'm gonna read this on the air and make fun of you. Is that okay? And she went, oh yeah, And here's some other stuff you can make fun of me about. Um Hi, Josh and Chuck and Jerry. I love your

recent episode on how language evolved. But as an m I T. Senior graduating in a month which is probably like right now, actually, um, I felt it my duty to make a very important correction to your intro. We are called the m I T Engineers, not the m I T eggheads. I think I called a meg heads. Indeed, our unofficial school song is the m I T. Engineer's Drinking Song, which includes many nerdy jokes, some of the

expense of that small liberal arts school up the river Harvard. Additionally, our mask dot is Tim the beaver, Tim being M I T spelled backwards. It's so glamor because beaver's are nature's engineers. In fact, every class has a special ring called the brass Rat, which depicts a beaver on a bezel. Be eazy e l what is that? See, I'm so dumb. I don't even know what a bezel. We would not make it an M I T I suppose supposedly it's

one of the most recognizable rings in the world. Man um I started listening to the podcast during long, long hours and lab and grateful and I'm grateful to you guys for entertaining me during my past four years. In m I T PS and m I T we refer to everything by number, including majors and buildings linguistics. The field of Mr Chomsky is called Course twenty four The Inimitable Mr Talks gnome I believe uh and is housed in a pretty crazy looking building, Building thirty two, a

k a. The Status Center. Sorry to ramble on, I'm very proud of my soon of the Alma Mater and PPS. I thought of one more really geeky thing you might want to make fun of regarding M I T S mascot, the humble Beaver. One of our cheers for football games. It is called the Beaver cheer, and I will do that right now. I'm a beaver, You're a beaver. We are beavers all and when we get together we do

the beaver call. E to the U D you slash d x E to the x d x CO sign secont tangent sign three point one, four, one five nine integral radical m U d v IM. These are smart things that understand. Uh, slipstick slide rule m I T go tech. I feel like you just issued some sort of orders that only like three people understand, and now they're carrying out some sort of terrible mission. Yeah, like the nuclear suitcases, like heating up right now, the bomba side. Yeah,

I can't even say, you're beaver cheer. That's how dumb I am. It's okay, Chuck, who's it from? Laura? Thanks a lot, Laura. That was a good one, And I have one for you. You want to hear an engineer joke that my dad, who was an engineer, taught me a long time ago from the Herbal Elvis himself. Let's hear it takes a minute. When will you bear with me?

So an engineer, a priest, and a doctor are all playing golf one day, and um, ahead of them are these guys and they stink they're hitting there, they're driving in like the opposite direction of the whole. They're just really terrible at the game of golf. So the beer guy comes around on his cart and um, the priest is like, do you have any idea. Who these guys are there? They I've never seen anybody play golf this badly.

And the beer guy goes, oh, those are three firefighters, and um, they put out the clubhouse when it caught fire. But they all lost their sight in this fire. So we let them play whenever they want. And then priestly takes a step back and puts his heart on his or his hand on his heart, and he goes, Oh, Faith and Begora, just give me their names. I'm gonna go pray for them. I'm gonna have my whole my whole church pray for them at mass this Sunday that

they their sight is restored. And the doctors like that is terrible, Like, here's my card. Make sure that these guys get in touch with me because I know some really good eye surgeons and making we can do something about them. And the engineer goes, why can't they just play at night? Pretty good? Huh, very nice, Mr Clark, thank you very much. Like a good joke like that. It's a good one, just not a one liner, but it told joke. Yeah, I love it. Yeah. Um, so

let's see, Chuck, Oh, what were we gonna ask for? Um? Is that to be Oh, what does chocolate rain means? We want to know what chocolate rain means. Also, if your tas on day and you listen to this, if you tell us what it means that would hold a lot of water would be great. That'd be pretty special. You can tweet to us taison day or otherwise um at s Y s K podcast. You can also visit us on Facebook right Facebook dot com slash stuff you Should Know, and you can send us an email at

Stuff podcast at Discovery dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. M brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you