The Merchants of Doubt need to rev up their old vacuous doubter arguments against acid rain science.
They failed in 1970, because they were not believed and the clean air act was passed. The result, which proved their criticisms were wrong, was a big decrease in acid rain as coal fired plants were required to clean up their polluting stacks.
Now new studies show that the increased CO2 from our fossil fuel burning (the smoking isotopes have been found) is altering the hydrology and water quality of forested watersheds–in much the same way as acid rain.
It seems that there may be many repercussions from loading up the atmosphere with CO2. So far, the only good one I’ve read — “it’s good for the plants, they like it” — has proven false in a study of plants in a controlled CO2 increased environment.
So it appears that Global Warming is just one of the problems coming as part of global change. This month, scientists issued a new study concluding that global warming has dramatically increased the likelihood of severe heat and drought – days after a heat wave across the Plains and Midwest broke records that had stood since the Dust Bowl. There is the rapid deterioration of the ecosystem, observed in soaring temperatures, droughts, floods, crop destruction, freak storms, melting ice caps and rising sea levels; acidification of the oceans, disappearance of Arctic sea ice and the resulting positive feedback of no ice to warming and methane released from the ocean; a myriad of biological observations such as the tree migration northward and upward to cooler locations, and on and on. The one thing that all of these observations and published studies have in common is that they correlate with increasing of atmospheric CO2 and a warming of the planet. It is being called an anthropogenic caused Great Extinction (of life forms).