so what do you think about it
well
uh i've noticed some changes over the past uh thirty years
um for the worst i would assume
that
that it's gotten worse
yeah
i can remember uh back in the early sixties when i first started flying a light plane
it was quite common for me to take off from uh local airport here and see the uh Appalachian mountains and the Chesapeake Bay at the same time
uh-huh
and in the you know fifteen years later it was a rare occasion that i could see both at the same time
uh-huh
you're probably lucky to see the end of the runway by now
yeah i know uh lot of times when i was coming back home i would uh file instrument flight plan just to get into the Washington area
um
but i counted on North Carolina having some good weather for me
well i'll tell you i don't know i i don't know whether i i i count the stink as part of air pollution and it stinks down here
well down there you get uh uh some more aromatic aromas like the uh the smell of the pine forest and uh
it depends on where you are now if you're over
then you get down wind of a paper mill once in a while
yeah if you if you're over by Asheville you're pretty good because you're up there in the mountains and you've got some nice ozone and all that
over here in Raleigh it's kind of flat and stagnant and
just yucky
um
it's fine over on the coast because you've got the you've got the breezes off the off the water there
yeah
but uh seems like it's just dull and uninspiring here
well i'm not sure that we're going to be able to uh solve much of the problem
no i don't know they're they keep doing things and it doesn't seem to be doing any good
i was i was really amazed because i never would have expected you know this problem somewhere like in Atlanta
uh-huh
and i drove through Atlanta uh couple of weeks ago and it was unseasonably warm
and you could see the smog just sitting on top of the city
yeah
and when i drove through i it it was terrible i i had to keep the windows up
uh-huh
it was just so thick and uh
heavy
uh i couldn't believe it i because i mean i used to live in Atlanta years ago and it was always fairly clean i mean you you always you didn't have problem with stagnant air like like LA does
uh-huh
but boy it was really bad that day
and it
well one of the reactions i have is that uh they put so much emphasis on the private automobile
yeah
uh as being a major source of pollution and they've uh ignored the trucks entirely
yeah right
so i i get to going down the expressway in the morning and uh i don't see very many cars smoking
but you see all these all these trucks belching out this black smoke
but
then i i get surrounded by twenty or forty trucks and they're just laying out a pall of black smoke
yeah i know it's
i i i i don't understand where the priority is it's uh like in Atlanta they have um they have mandatory catalytic converter inspections
yeah
there's only three places in Georgia that requires that
and uh even with that it hasn't done any good
yeah
i mean obviously it's gotten a lot worse
but you know just like you say you go through there and you watch all these trucks and they're just coughing out all kinds of stuff some of them spitting it out so thick you can't even see past it
uh-huh
yeah
you know i don't know
yeah i know along route sixty six the uh people who have residences there
uh they can't paint their houses without cleaning them first
uh-huh yeah because of the stuff settles on it
uh
if they're within a block of a major expressway the houses get coated with oil
yeah
yeah
i don't know things like you know well like acid rain and all these sulphur dioxides being dumped out there
i i'm more worried about that than i am just about anything else
yeah
because uh
uh it's it's all i mean it's just like it's just like a big avalanche you know you start putting sulphur dioxide in the atmosphere and you end up with acid rain acid rain kills
the trees trees don't scrub the air and there you are
uh-huh
and then of course you've got all these folks cutting down on the rain forest as quick as they can
yeah i'm not sure that we're not seeing some of the effects of that already
i wonder too you know they keep talking about ozone depletion and all this
it it seems funny that it's coming around at the time when we're losing the most most of the forests
uh-huh
because i i i think that a lot of the pollutants and stuff are being taken out of the air
uh
you know by the plants and the trees and all that good stuff and here we are losing it and now the now it doesn't have any where to go
yeah
but ozone
well we've sort of been seeing a little climatic shift here on the East Coast or at least it seems that way that uh the winters have been milder for the last five years and uh
uh-huh yeah well it's like our winter here i mean it was the winter that wasn't you know we were having having hot days in December and January
yeah
and got in
yeah the first the first winter i moved out here i had a big snow plow on the tractor and i had to use it we had three uh fourteen inch uh snows
uh-huh
uh-huh
uh-huh
and i haven't used it since
yeah you might you might as well sell it for scrap or something because you probably never will use it
it's a shame too because i miss all the cold weather i i enjoy winter
and at the same time i i see some colder winters in the Midwest i think they've gotten more snow in the past five years than we're having here on the East Coast
yeah
yeah well it was an interesting day the other day uh i think it was um yeah it was last not not this past Friday but Friday a week ago
yeah
we had i don't know i think you had some bad weather up there too we had tornadoes and everything down here
uh-huh
um that was the most historic weather day in recorded history for severe weather in the country
oh i didn't know that
on that one day i mean you know of course you always have severe weather somewhere
but there was more of it on that one day than ever recorded before over four hundred reports of tornadoes hail and heavy winds
huh
amazing
it's a little bit scary
well it may have been uh the fact we had this early season warm spell
yeah
that did that because i know that the the preceding the preceding day Thursday i got my first sunburn for the season out on uh Ocean City Beach
um
i read an article a couple weeks ago they were talking about uh talking again about the ozone layer they said that the uh
the ozone deteriorate is greater than they had originally thought over some of the major metropolitan areas that's a little bit scary to think about
because that's certainly not going to improve things around there
yes
i didn't notice that uh know that they'd discovered any thinness or over metro metro areas i'd only heard about the uh North and South Pole
yeah
well that's that's yeah that had that had been the thing that had always i mean i i i have always thought about the ozone layer as sort of like a layer and it would move around i didn't know that the hole just stayed there
you know i guess i i don't i'm not that much of a meteorologist
but uh yeah i was a little surprised at that too because up to that point all i'd heard about was the one over the pole
yeah
and i said well i'm not too awfully concerned about that if it's going to start melting the ice cap it's not going to be for a long time yet
but opening opening up over major metropolitan areas now that's uh that's
yeah that that doesn't uh fit my picture of uh of uh meteorology i can understand the Poles because they're uh a permanent high pressure area
yeah yeah
and uh you know there isn't that much uh circulation
but uh the temperate zone is uh a constant moving uh wind system
yeah course the ozone is up there so
and it's i'm surprised that the ozone doesn't have it's own wind pattern
yeah i i mean didn't i don't even know i don't even know if the ozone layer does move i mean apparently it doesn't but
of course it it might be just a couple of scientists trying to get their name in the paper sort of like cold fusion
yeah
cold fusion right
the same thought flashed in my mind
yeah i'll tell you i i was real excited when i first heard that i said hot dog they finally did it you know
yeah i uh
i may have put out an exclamation here at home when i heard that news
um i too
and uh everybody wanted to know why i was so excited and i tried to explain to them
i mean i'm
yeah i mean i'm an old science fiction buff from way back when i was a little boy and this is the kind of stuff that science fiction was made out of
yeah
uh-huh
and it's the days that i keep looking for that aren't going to happen in my lifetime
but
you know we're supposed to have moon colonies by now
but uh yeah cold fusion would have been great
yeah
could have gone might have started making a little inroads on air pollution with that
i think so
but who knows
except we might have uh bad case of paladium poisoning now
yeah
yeah there's there's always a drawback to everything i mean
i don't know
well
i know there was uh a pipeline going in up in uh
southern Pennsylvania
and there was a group
in uh Bucks county that was fighting it
and uh one of the women that was leading the group said well they say they're going to pump uh oil through there but before long they'll be pumping radioactivity through it
okay
