In 1980, the Environmental Protection Agency asserted that the average lake in the northeastern United States had been acidified a hundredfold in the last 40 years by acid rain. And the National Academy of Sciences claimed that acid rain would double the damage again by 1990.

But the 10-year National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program (NAPAP), conducted under the auspices of the EPA, has completely discredited these claims and shown them to be baseless. The $500 million study found that:

• The average lake in the Adirondacks was no more acidic now than it was before the Industrial Revolution.

• There had been no measurable change in the acidity of lakes over the preceding 10 years.

• Only 35,000 of the 200 million acres of U.S. lakes are too acidic to support sports fisheries - and most of this acidity is natural.

Acid rain may also be good for crops. Despite the fact that EPA officials and environmental groups have continued to target acid rain as a threat to the environment, scientists have found:

• The nitrogen and sulphur that make rain acidic are essential in large quantities to making crops grow.

• The world's first national acid rain program - in Sweden - determined that the principal effect of acid rain was improvement of crop yield and crop protein content.

What about forests? The good news may outweigh the bad.

• Acid rain may be damaging less than 0.1 percent of U.S. forests by exposing red spruce at high altitudes to cold damage and making it grow too long into the winter.

• On the other hand, acid rain fertilizes 300 million acres of eastern forest in the United States.

Source: Edward C. Krug, "The Corrosion of Science," Liberty, Vol. 5, No.4, March 1992. ea mj 92d