Swapna Krishna: The other day I was like “you know something we heard a lot about as kids was acid rain, why don’t we hear about it anymore” TURNS OUT we fixed it???

The other day I was like “you know something we heard a lot about as kids was acid rain, why don’t we hear about it anymore” TURNS OUT we fixed it???

We! fixed! acid! rain! And we can fix climate change 🧪 www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-...

The World Solved Acid Rain. We Can Also Solve Climate Changewww.scientificamerican.com Lessons from how we tackled acid rain can be applied to our world today

And the hole in the o-zone layer

And we cleaned up a whole bunch of rivers that used to be close to death.

And quicksand. Though now we have a problem with lava based floors.

Yes, and we really need to do something about that vine swinging over a pond filled with alligators. It's really the worst part of my commute.

If you are careful you can fall in the hole and just get all the way through under there. Just be careful of scorpions

🤣

The amazing thing is that the river notorious for catching fire (the Cuyahoga) is close to being completely restored. They are working on yeeting the last dam, which is causing stagnation and messing up fish migration. The fact that it’s taken 50 years is a testament to the commitment involved.

we did that in the UK (the only way you used to get salmon in the Thames was in a tin) and then the for-profit water companies started discharging sewage and killing them all again. it takes continuing vigilance and regulations with actual teeth, I guess

Unfortunately we got rid of the regulatory bite when we told the EU to jog on

I’m almost to the point I would feel safe falling into the Chicago River.

Chicago has done a lot of work with native plantings along the river!

Rewilding Rivers: A Tale of Floating Wetlands in Chicago | Shedd Aquariumwww.sheddaquarium.org Cities across the globe are exploring ways to rewild their rivers. With much success, Shedd has worked with Urban Rivers, another Chicago nonprofit to bring this effort to the Chicago River. Hear abou...

They did a stunt a few years back where a bunch of officials jumped into the river. It’s not SAFE safe, but nobody’s going to grow a third eye

Still need to unreverse the flow and re-separate the Mississippi watershed from the Great Lakes. The Asian Carp are coming.

Have you seen the Tom Scott video about the carp defense? youtu.be/t3oLeSPINOk?...

Why the US Army electrifies this wateryoutu.be The Chicago and Sanitary Ship Canal is the path that invasive carp would take to reach the Great Lakes. So to stop them, the US Army Corps of Engineers has i...

Just as long as there wasn’t a Dave Matthews Band tour bus nearby.

Avoid being under the bridges downtown is already a rule, but thanks for the reminder.

The Bay in Baltimore has shellfish again

And crabs (but you probably shouldn’t eat them).

The Hudson River is getting oysters back (also not yet fit to eat)

Just north of NYC, the river is swimmable! I remember when you couldn't fish it and it smelled all the time.

Half a century ago, the Cuyahoga river was so polluted it regularly caught fire As of four years ago, fish from that river has been declared safe to eat

oh did we stop eutrophication? Neat we studied that when I was a teenager as an ongoing issue

Just in case people want to read up on that one: www.unep.org/news-and-sto...

dont believe the hype..

2023 ozone hole ranks 12th largest on record, find NOAA and NASAwww.noaa.gov Hunga-Tonga eruption likely contributed to this year's ozone depletion

Can't regulate volcanoes!

true, but that does not discount the fact that there is still a huge ozone hole.. It causes Aotearoa NZ to have the highest skin cancer rate of any nation on the OECD. There are still dozens of chemicals in use today that damage the Ozone layer

Yes, just like any problem, it's not over even when it's better than it used to be. To borrow from Malcolm, the knife isn't all the way out yet, and that means the wound hasn't really healed

It turned out acid rain, ozone layer depletion, leaded gas and lead paint were all readily preventable ecological and health problems with solutions that didn't cost that much in the long run. (And that were fought by vested interests every step of the way.)

This one. The entire economy would not collapse by fixing many of those issues. Not saying we shouldn't "fix the climate" just that it's literally a global issue. We need a global movement.

there's actually some people who have a conspiracy theory that they think the sun was changed somehow because the color isn't the same as they remember it because of smog and acid rain. they grew up under sulfurous clouds that made the sun look sickly yellow rather than white

i'd heard that conspiracy theory but i hadn't realized they had grown up under smog, i just figured they had bad memory for color. neat!

i've seen the horrific smog in Beijing, during the summers when the dust storms combine with the smog to make terrible air, where the sun is just a hazy disk you can look at all day

Nah, they just upgraded the sun to LED.

The worst of these remains Y2K. I have numerous colleagues that worked night and day to prevent disaster. Their reward for success? Many people believe that Y2K wasn't a problem at all.

*waving from the geek seats*

just like y2k or the ozone layer. we just aren't with climate change becuase moneyed interests said no.

*cough* SARS-CoV-2

The malthusians won this round even if the vast majority of them don’t know it yet.

Victory from beyond the grave for some!

Getting flashbacks to my high school science project about acid rain, the title was abbreviated to "The effects of acid on grass" and I feared the judges were going to get a very different, much more square project than they might have expected based on that.

Acid rain, smog, littering—all things that we fixed or completely changed our opinions on as a whole. The odds are not insurmountable. We can fix the world!

Littering was largely overplayed as a significant issue, in an effort to shift responsibility for pollution onto the general public and off of big corporate and government sources that are far more harmful. Similar to focus on plastic straws when they comprise a tiny amount of plastic waste.

Yeah but it’s still a good idea not to litter. And the fact that we completely reversed public opinion on this fact in less than a generation is an example of how a coordinated positive campaign can change collective behavior for the better.

Yeah, no intention to imply people should throw trash wherever. The aesthetic improvement alone is laudable.

Recycling is the modern day equivalent of this. Yes it's great that we're doing it, but it 𝘩𝘢𝘴 let the companies making billions out of waste product off the hook from responsibility for their product and packaging lifecycles.

"Our seventeen layers of packaging are marked with (the most obscure and difficult) recycling identifiers! This is on YOU now! Thanks for your business!"

Imagine if all the money and energy put into tracking pirated copies of billion-dollar movies had instead been put into tracking waste products back to their source manufacturer. The technology exists, but the legislative will does not.

Also the hole in the ozone layer, 1970s levels of smog, the Cuyahoga River catching on fire … The idea that government intervention only makes things worse has ruled for a generation, but trying to fix problems usually helps more than *not* trying to fix problems.

same with the hole in the ozone layer. we never did a huge "we fixed it" party so it just feels like it went away on it's own, which is part of the fuel for people who deny the need for action now.

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