[HN Gopher] Ten Million Deaths a Year: David Wallace-Wells on Po...
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Ten Million Deaths a Year: David Wallace-Wells on Polluted Air
Author : Glench
Score : 152 points
Date : 2021-11-30 19:06 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lrb.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (lrb.co.uk)
| NoblePublius wrote:
| Here is an idea: stop all the kids from going to school, fire
| half of the people of color from their jobs, and then add to
| Amazon $1 trillion in market capitalization. This will reduce
| pollution and save lives.
| godelski wrote:
| I think the article does a really good job at highlighting why
| solving challenges like these are so difficult. They are
| abstract. It drew a parallel to nuclear and we often have fights
| here about safety of it.
|
| > More recent estimates run higher, with as many as 8.7 million
| deaths every year attributable just to the outdoor particulate
| matter produced from burning fossil fuels. Add on indoor
| pollution, and you get an annual toll of more than ten million.
| That's more than four times the official worldwide death toll
| from Covid last year. It's about twenty times as many as the
| current annual deaths from war, murder and terrorism combined.
| Put another way, air pollution kills twenty thousand on an
| average day, more than have died in the aftermath of all the
| meltdowns in the history of nuclear power: Chernobyl, Three Mile
| Island, Fukushima and all the others put together.
|
| It is hard to see these deaths, but the numbers are undeniable.
| They also draw connections to covid, which are harder to see than
| nuclear disasters, but still can be seen. But I think one of the
| big differences is the coverage. When we talk climate change we
| only talk about things like forest fires or hurricanes, but not
| these things that affect people daily. Coal ash alone, in
| America, kills tens of thousands a year. But these people are
| impossible to see because it takes years for them to get to that
| point. This is a slow moving pandemic.
|
| The article then shifts to economics and does a good job
| explaining it there.
|
| > According to the National Resources Defence Council, the US
| Clean Air Act of 1970 is still saving 370,000 American lives
| every year - more than would have been saved last year had the
| pandemic never arrived. According to the NRDC, a single piece of
| legislation delivers annual economic benefits of more than $3
| trillion, 32 times the cost of enacting it - benefits distributed
| disproportionately to the poor and marginalised.
|
| Put in these terms it is impossible to argue against the Clean
| Air Act, but it is one politicians and certain organizations
| often argue about, ignoring these numbers and only looking at the
| costs (ignoring the benefits). They also talk about improvements
| in schooling (many many studies support this), but the coup d eta
| is this
|
| > Last year, Drew Shindell of Duke University, an expert on
| pollution impact, appeared before the US House Committee on
| Oversight and Reform. By further cleaning up America's air over
| the next fifty years, Shindell's research shows, the country
| could prevent 4.5 million premature deaths, 1.4 million
| hospitalisations, 1.7 million cases of dementia and 300 million
| lost work days. The result, he calculated, would be $700 billion
| a year in net benefits, 'far more than the cost of the energy
| transition'. In other words, a total decarbonisation of the US
| economy would pay for itself through public health gains alone.
| The American Environmental Protection Agency has an official
| measure for the value of a single human life: $7 million in 2006
| dollars. If you take that number seriously, the annual value of
| saving the 350,000 lives a year lost to pollution would be $2.45
| trillion.
|
| These are incredible numbers! But they are so abstract it is
| still hard to understand with our meat computers. Our minds
| weren't designed for this, but we have these amazing tools to
| determine things like this. I guess the question really is how do
| you make stories like this convincing? They are wildly complex
| and so often people will think there's lying and deceitfulness
| going on. After all, charlatans often hide deceit in complexity
| (for clarity, I 100% believe in climate change and agree with the
| author, just recognizing human factors).
| x3iv130f wrote:
| It comes down to which content news and social media algorithms
| favor.
|
| With the constancy and immediacy of news, it takes more
| willpower than most people have to reason against a tide of
| misinformation.
| curiousgeorgio wrote:
| To summarize: A lot of correlations between negative things
| happening and increased levels of air pollution, very little of
| which is rigorously causally linked. Case in point:
|
| > Stock market returns are lower on days with higher air
| pollution
|
| I can't take this kind of article seriously. It presents a
| completely one-sided argument, and it's worded carefully so as to
| avoid outright statements of causality, but imply it nevertheless
| by pointing to a large number of weak correlations that together
| sound convincing. The overall conclusion was decided first, and
| the so-called evidence cherry picked to try and support it.
| paulgb wrote:
| I think the study referred to is this one:
| https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/5/2931/pdf (there have been a
| few studies, but that's the only one that fit the "this year"
| criteria).
|
| I'm generally skeptical of papers that involve correlations
| with equity returns (because there is a reverse publication
| bias -- if you find a true source of alpha, your incentive is
| to trade it rather than publish it). But besides my general a
| priori skepticism, I don't see any red flags at a glance.
| [deleted]
| authed wrote:
| https://archive.md/ArqSz
| pengaru wrote:
| I'm fairly certain after most the vehicles become electric we'll
| see a precipitous drop in all sorts of illnesses/mortalities.
|
| Future generations knowing that factual history will look back on
| the people of the combustion engines era as ridiculous, willfully
| self-poisoning rubes, driving around in noisy, stinky, slow,
| expensive to own operate and maintain turds.
| megablast wrote:
| Cars will still kill 1 million people every year directly. Many
| more injured.
| sva_ wrote:
| In some sense, you can already make this observation when
| looking at early industrialization, in which in particular coal
| smoke was a pollutant in places with factories. We look back at
| those times now, and think it to be ridiculous that people
| lived under such conditions, but surely (or rather, hopefully),
| people in the future will consider it ridiculous, that we lived
| our lives amidst combustion engines and their exhaust
| pollutants. In particular, I think people will find it
| absolutely ridiculous that we tolerated Diesel fumes in densely
| populated areas. So I agree with your point.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| >We look back at those times now, and think it to be
| ridiculous that people lived under such conditions
|
| Honestly, I don't. I'm glad I'm alive now and not then, but
| it isn't too difficult to acknowledge that industrial
| pollution in urban areas (which absolutely did kill people
| both passively and during smogs) was a necessary evil for the
| era and helped us get to where we are today.
|
| I'm sure people will say the same thing about internal
| combustion engines in 50 years' time.
| sva_ wrote:
| I would claim that thinking those conditions to be
| ridiculous and considering them necessary are not mutually
| exclusive.
| lostmsu wrote:
| It is neither funny, nor foolish or absurd.
| sva_ wrote:
| Something that might at some point be considered foolish
| might later be considered absurd, by having new
| information that informs it to be (very) hazardous.
| sloreti wrote:
| Unfortunately, moving from ICE to EV isn't a silver bullet.
| Look up non-exhaust emissions (NEE). When car tires and brakes
| wear down, they spit out particulate matter pollution. The OECD
| estimates NEE will constitute the majority of road emissions by
| 2035 [1], and it already constitutes the majority of
| particulate matter emissions on the road today [2]. EVs even
| make the problem a bit harder to solve, by being heavier than
| similar sized ICE vehicles.
|
| [1] https://www.oecd.org/environment/non-exhaust-particulate-
| emi...
|
| [2]
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13522...
| jhgb wrote:
| > ridiculous, willfully self-poisoning rubes, driving around in
| noisy, stinky, slow, expensive to own operate and maintain
| turds
|
| Maybe they'll look at similarly as we look at the people of the
| time of the Neolithic Revolution (and perhaps a long time
| afterwards), with their lifespans decreased due to poorer diets
| and zoonotic diseases from domesticated animals.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Guns, Germs, and Steel
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel) argues
| that proximity to domesticated animals is a win for all
| species for immunological reasons.
|
| The general idea is that similar virus strains exist across
| species, but only a fraction identically spread across
| species. So a human may be exposed to a similar but
| noninfectious virus from (for example) a dog or a cat, and
| will gain an immunological advantage compared to someone
| living apart from other species, because the human immune
| system will remember the foreign protein sequences to which
| it can react when exposed again.
| jhgb wrote:
| That's an interesting argument but we know that the
| transition to agriculture has been horrible to humans,
| health-wise. Even if there are some minor immunological
| upsides (which I'm not sure Diamond is the one to convince
| me about), that's not the whole picture. Also the page you
| linked says "immunity to diseases endemic in agricultural
| animals", which sounds like this being a solution to a
| self-inflicted problem.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| I don't happen to know the reason transition to
| agriculture has been horrible to humans, health-wise.
|
| why is that said to be so?
| jhgb wrote:
| > why is that said to be so?
|
| Uh...because that's what the archeological findings are?
| For example, from https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/view
| content.cgi?article=1... :
|
| "Cities and other large settlements appeared for the
| first time during the Neolithic. Pathogens require a
| large host to thrive and these large, crowded populations
| provided a human host population that had not previously
| existed among hunter-gather societies (Armelagos et al.
| 1991:15). Now able to spread easily from person to person
| in the crowded conditions of cities, pathogens were able
| to exploit entire groups and reach endemic levels
| (Armelagos et al. 1991; Papathanasiou 2005).
|
| "Crowded conditions paired with human settlements in
| close proximity to animals also contributed to high rates
| of infectious disease. In many early agricultural
| communities, animals were kept both near to and inside of
| houses. This proximity allowed some zoonotic diseases to
| transfer from animals to humans (Armelagos et al. 1991;
| Eshed et al. 2010). Contaminated water sources and close
| contact with human waste also facilitated parasitic
| infection in both animals and humans (Armelagos et al.
| 1991; Larsen 2006; Papathanasiou 2005)."
|
| "The increase of infectious disease associated with the
| adoption of an agricultural lifestyle did not necessarily
| increase mortality (Eshed et al. 2010). Those most likely
| to suffer fatal infections would have been infants, young
| children, and the elderly. Individuals who reached
| reproductive age had likely developed a resistance to
| such diseases (Armelagos et al. 1991). However, it must
| be noted that nutritional deficiencies can reduce
| resistance to infections which can further contribute to
| nutritional deficiencies (Armelagos et al. 1991; Larsen
| 2006). This interplay between nutrition and disease can
| increase mortality in populations and inhibit an
| individual's ability to work and/or reproduce (Goodman
| 1993)."
|
| Basically until we learned about the implications of
| sedentary urban lifestyle with agriculture, and until we
| learned how to do something about it, we'd been
| unknowingly suffering from major quality of life issues.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| thanks
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Or we will be able to see how much pollution asphalt rubbing
| against rubber tires contributes.
|
| (disclaimer: driver of EV for many years, so i think of that
| because tires still wear out)
| _dain_ wrote:
| Electric vehicles are not that much quieter than ICE vehicles.
| At high speeds, the dominant noise component is from the tires
| against the roads, not the engine. At low speeds, they are
| intrinsically quiet, but many (all?) jurisdictions legally
| mandate a noise-making device so that pedestrians can hear them
| coming. They are comparably expensive to own and operate as ICE
| vehicles. It is also a myth that they do not emit unhealthy
| pollutants, see this paper:
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13522...
|
| Then there's still the direct mortality from collisions with
| pedestrians and cyclists, and things like obesity from
| encouraging a sedentary lifestyle. I think future generations
| will look at car-dependency in general as ridiculous, whether
| ICE or electric.
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| >I think future generations will look at car-dependency in
| general as ridiculous, whether ICE or electric.
|
| I hope future generations will be capable of nuances.
| aqme28 wrote:
| Don't cars only account for like 10% of pollution?
| dsizzle wrote:
| I had never heard of the quote attributed to Summers, which seems
| really bad, to the point I questioned if it was real, but in fact
| there's a Wikipedia entry just on the memo in question!
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summers_memo
| j7ake wrote:
| Although I agree that air pollution that is a hidden problem that
| needs to be addressed, I would push back on the argument that
| people should be comparing deaths from coronavirus with reduced
| life span from air pollution.
|
| The first source of death grows exponentially, while the latter
| does not. Therefore, they should not induce the same types of
| immediate panic.
|
| This means that if an event ever arrives that destroys half the
| human population over one year, the chances are much higher that
| the event was a pandemic rather than from air pollution.
| Glench wrote:
| This article is absolutely gutting, but makes an insightful point
| I haven't heard much before -- polluted air from fossil fuels
| _already_ causes millions of deaths a year even without all the
| other medical, economic, and cognitive impacts.
| zajio1am wrote:
| Not only from fossil fuels. Burning (renewable) wood is
| significant source of particulate pollution, while burning
| (fossil) natural gas is not.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Fair, but hardly relevant in a western context-- the push is
| to close coal-fired power plants in favour of gas and
| nuclear/solar/wind. No one's talking about a wood-fired power
| plant, much less pitching it as renewable.
|
| In any case, Schellenberger makes this least-harm argument
| vigorously in _Apocalypse Never_ , that communities in Africa
| and India where people are currently burning wood, coal, or
| even animal dung for heat and cooking must be upgraded as
| quickly as possible to gas-based infrastructure, and NGOs and
| celebrities wringing hands about "building new pipelines" to
| facilitate that as a stepping stone is ridiculous and
| counterproductive (and ultimately just leads to maintaining
| the status quo).
| trailbits wrote:
| In many western cities, the air is heavily polluted with
| wood smoke. Walking around suburbs of Seattle I see many of
| the older homes emitting thick white woodsmoke from their
| chimneys. This is very bad for everyone's health. If it's
| not raining or windy, the air is bad most of the cooler
| days during the year. It seems absurd to me living in the
| very wet pacific northwest that more homes are not using
| renewable hydro power to efficiently warm their homes with
| heat pumps.
| hollerith wrote:
| >hardly relevant in a western context
|
| Quite a few people burn wood for heat in the suburb of San
| Francisco I live in.
|
| I cannot prove the resulting smoke is harmful, but it sure
| feels that way.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| This is something I'm having a hard time figuring out,
| whether burning wood or natural gas for heat is net
| worse. If people are burning nat. gas for heat instead,
| that is still resulting in emissions around you, but can
| anyone confirm wood emissions are worse healthwise? On
| the other hand, won't burning natural gas greater
| contribute to CO2, since it's taking long dormant
| reserves and releasing them, rather than wood which is a
| short term cycle? That wood will be decomposed/burned
| sooner or later anyway, just maybe not in a populated
| area.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I think wood is considerably worse in the local area,
| probably enough-worse that it's better not to do it at
| all unless you're quite remote.
|
| Honestly, this business about people in suburban
| environments burning wood for heat is news to me-- are
| there like actual high efficiency wood burning furnaces
| [1] people are using for this? Or is it single-room
| solutions like a Franklin stove or open fireplace? The
| only time I've encountered an open indoor fire has been
| at Christmas at Grandma's house, and that was always for
| ambience more than heat-- most of the heat was going
| straight up the chimney, and that was despite it making
| the room smell like smoke for the next two days.
|
| [1]: For example:
| https://www.drolet.ca/en/products/furnaces/heat-
| commander-wo...
| yosito wrote:
| I'm really confused about how air pollution can be measured in
| deaths. I get how air pollution can shorten lifespan, but how do
| you attribute a specific death, other than extreme cases, to air
| pollution? When someone claims that 10 million deaths a year
| should be attributed to air pollution, what exactly do they mean,
| in a nutshell?
| dsizzle wrote:
| What would really help is if they reported lost person-years.
| 90 year-olds dying vs 30 year olds would both be "premature
| deaths," but these are very magnitudes of tragedy!
| colechristensen wrote:
| I think you're right in that, especially for things that
| generally kill you towards the end of a normal life span,
| counting deaths by attributing the thing that wins the race to
| kill you doesn't make much sense. If you're murdered, eaten by
| a bear, or contact some rare infection and die early, it's not
| like some other cause of death was just a few years off. It is
| however an easier to digest statistic than some of the others
| like DALY.
|
| What you want is some statistic about how much life was lost in
| absolute terms of years and how much quality of life was lost
| due to air quality related diseases.
| sjg007 wrote:
| Go forth and learn!
|
| https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/indicators/indicator-detai...
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Not an expert in the area at all, but it seems to me that if a
| particular factor shortens 10 lives by 7 years apiece, and life
| expectancy is 70 years, then in a statistical sense it has
| "caused" one death, and that this is the case even if no one
| exactly died _from_ it, in the acute sense that a car crash or
| firearm causes a death. I 'm not sure if that's what's going on
| here, but even a slight harm multiplied across national or
| planetary population scales could easily get you to a number
| like 10M/year.
| tshaddox wrote:
| I don't think these studies are just taking the average life
| expectancy (let's say 70 years) and considering each 70-year
| reduction of life expectance to be 1 death. I think it's more
| like each time a person dies in a given year where event A
| occurs who would not have been expected to die in that year
| if event A hadn't occurred, that counts as 1 death caused in
| that year by event A.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Isn't that just about the same, in aggregate? 60 years from
| now, 7 people die at age 60 instead of 70, "caused" by air
| pollution. Smoothing it out, that's one death per year from
| now until then.
| tshaddox wrote:
| I suppose it works out to be the same if the cause of
| death is distributed evenly among all ages, but I suspect
| that's rarely the case. If something causes a lot of
| people to die at 90% of average life expectancy you
| wouldn't want each one to only count as one tenth of a
| death.
| bjt2n3904 wrote:
| They're making it all up.
|
| There are more tactful ways of saying this, but at the end of
| the day, it's functionally equivalent to pulling a number out
| of their hat.
| epistasis wrote:
| > And while none of these estimates is meant to suggest a
| single cause of mortality, such as a gunshot wound or a dose of
| poison in your morning tea, the calculus for air pollution is
| the same as for obesity or smoking: take the problem away, and
| the number of premature deaths will fall by many millions.
|
| They mean that if air pollution was not there throughout our
| lifetimes up until now, we would have 10M fewer deaths per
| year. Longer lives translates into fewer deaths per year.
|
| When diseases like COPD and lung cancer are extremely
| prevalent, we may not notice the deaths as caused by air
| pollution, but they are. Everybody should get rid of their gas
| stoves, but we instead have full on sale pr campaigns for them.
| IncRnd wrote:
| > Longer lives translates into fewer deaths per year.
|
| Of course that's not true. Everyone dies, regardless of
| individual lifespans.
| epistasis wrote:
| We are not talking about steady state dynamics, we are
| talking about specific numbers of births each year in the
| past, and an intervention that would shift the distribution
| of life spans.
| IncRnd wrote:
| The way it was stated in the article was correct.
| epistasis wrote:
| My paragraph of text was also correct, but your response
| to me was incorrect.
| curiousgeorgio wrote:
| > Longer lives translates into fewer deaths per year.
|
| Are you sure about that?
| y4mi wrote:
| I mean your technically right to question because the only
| thing which can increase deaths are births ultimately as
| everything else 'just' moves them forward, but I think it
| was quiet clear what they meant.
| yosito wrote:
| Think of how many lives we could save if we could just
| reduce births!
| tshaddox wrote:
| All else being equal, then very clearly yes. You could
| perhaps try to incorporate predictions of more indirect
| effects of longer lives (like increased reproduction rates
| and population) to argue that it could somehow cancel out,
| but that would take a lot of work to be convincing.
| nojs wrote:
| I think their point was that if everyone lives to 150,
| the rate of deaths per year will eventually converge to
| the same as if they live to 50. Lengthening the pipe
| doesn't mean more water flows through it per minute.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Not true.
|
| If there are 9 billion people (just to keep the numbers
| round), and they all live to 50, then every year 9
| billion / 50 = 180 million people die (and the same
| number are born). But if they all live to 150, then every
| year 9 billion / 150 = 60 million people die (and the
| same number are born).
| nojs wrote:
| Only if the birth rate proportionally drops, which seems
| unlikely.
|
| On the other hand, if the birth rate remains steady then
| the _percentage_ of people alive that die in a given year
| decreases, which is maybe the more relevant metric as it
| seems like there's less death around.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| >just to keep the numbers round
|
| That's not "just keeping the numbers round", that's
| putting a huge assumption on a complex system (births =
| deaths, no change in overall population over time).
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| The 9 billion was just to keep the numbers round. 8
| billion would be a more accurate number, but it's not
| divisible by 3, and therefore not divisible by 150.
|
| What you seem to be quibbling with is the assumption that
| the population was steady. That's an assumption that
| could be argued with, but it's not the "keeping the
| numbers round" part.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| Fair enough
| littlestymaar wrote:
| When the population is growing, yes. A bit of hand-wavy
| calculation to illustrate the phenomenon: if people die at
| 80, then people dying today are those born in 1931, if they
| died at 85 it would be people born in 1926, which were less
| numerous => less death. (Of course, not every one die at
| the same age and all, but you get the idea)
| [deleted]
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > Everybody should get rid of their gas stoves, but we
| instead have full on sale pr campaigns for them.
|
| Huge +1 to this btw. If you are in the position of owning a
| gas stove, make sure to always run the range hood vent
| whenever using the stove.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Here's the 2017 study mentioned by name in the article:
| https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
|
| I don't pretend to understand fully, but these seem to be some
| sentences explaining their methodology:
|
| > Ambient PM2*5 was the fifth-ranking mortality risk factor in
| 2015. Exposure to PM2*5 caused 4*2 million (95% uncertainty
| interval [UI] 3*7 million to 4*8 million) deaths and 103*1
| million (90*8 million 115*1 million) disability-adjusted life-
| years (DALYs) in 2015, representing 7*6% of total global deaths
| and 4*2% of global DALYs, 59% of these in east and south Asia.
|
| > Attributing deaths and disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs)
| to ambient air pollution requires spatially and temporally
| resolved estimates of population-weighted exposure,
| specification of a theoretical minimum risk exposure level
| (TMREL), estimation of relative risks across the exposure
| distribution, and estimates of the deaths and DALYs for
| diseases linked causally to air pollution. We combined
| estimates of exposure and relative risk to estimate the
| population-attributable fraction (PAF), the proportion of
| deaths and DALYs attributable to exposure above the TMREL. The
| numbers of deaths and DALYs for specific diseases were
| multiplied by the PAF to estimate the burden attributable to
| exposure. A more general description of the methods used to
| estimate the PAF and attributable burdens in GBD 2015 has been
| reported previously;3 here, we present details specific to air
| pollution.
|
| While I don't know enough about this methodology to defend this
| study, I would just point out that no matter what you consider
| to be a cause of death, no matter how "direct" you think that
| cause is, is still "merely" a death of someone who would have
| died later anyway. This mode of argument gets used all the time
| to minimize deaths of e.g. COVID-19 ("most of the deaths are
| old people with multiple comorbidities"), but this is a weak
| mode of argument precisely because it could apply just as well
| to literally any situation. We generally wouldn't apply this
| mode of argument to minimize, for example, a serial killer at a
| nursing home.
| godelski wrote:
| You can do comparisons. If you can make good comparisons
| between places and the only major factor between them is
| pollution you can just compare average death per 100k citizens
| and then draw conclusions from there. You can also do the same
| for places that did not have a coal power plant and then when
| they did. Or the reverse!
|
| Note: this is vastly overly simplified and there are other ways
| to do this and you need to do major and complex error
| calculations, but this will give you the highly abstracted
| view.
| nvader wrote:
| One approach that comes to mind:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort
| zaptheimpaler wrote:
| Well that was a fun detour. The clincher is here, a Global
| Burden of Disease Study in 2010:
|
| https://sci-hub.mksa.top/10.1016/S0140-6736(12)61766-8
|
| That is where they draw a line from air pollution to risk, with
| lots of statistics to cancel out other factors. Its beyond my
| depth.
|
| ----
|
| This page was useful:
|
| ttps://www.who.int/data/gho/data/indicators/indicator-
| details/GHO/ambient-air-pollution-attributable-
| dalys-(per-100-000-population) -> Metadata
|
| > Burden of disease is calculated by first combining
| information on the increased (or relative) risk of a disease
| resulting from exposure, with information on how widespread the
| exposure is in the population (in this case, the annual mean
| concentration of particulate matter to which the population is
| exposed). This allows calculation of the 'population
| attributable fraction' (PAF), which is the fraction of disease
| seen in a given population that can be attributed to the
| exposure, in this case the annual mean concentration of
| particulate matter. Applying this fraction to the total burden
| of disease (e.g. cardiopulmonary disease expressed as deaths or
| DALYs), gives the total number of deaths or DALYs that results
| from ambient air pollution.
|
| ----
|
| And the overall methodology is something called DALYs -
| Disability Adjusted Life Years
|
| https://www.who.int/data/gho/indicator-metadata-registry/imr...
|
| https://www.who.int/healthinfo/statistics/GlobalDALYmethods_...
|
| That second link was a good basic read on what DALY means - its
| deaths due to a cause, weighted by "lost years" (so if life
| expectancy is 92 and someone died at 30, that would be weighted
| higher than someone dying at 80 for the same cause) PLUS years
| of healthy life lost even if it does not result in death -
| which is sort of a weighting based on severity of disease,
| where like say a person living with a disease severity of 0.2
| would mean each year counts as 4/5th a year of a healthy life.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| It can't. Anyone credible is using an age adjusted metric of
| some sort. YPLL or something like that. Of course none of the
| activists, journalists or editors use those numbers because
| they are boring and don't grab headlines like "a bajillion
| deaths" does.
| kbelder wrote:
| Right. As a thought experiment, assuming a 75 year lifespan,
| what if air pollution causes EVERYBODY to die one day earlier
| than they would have otherwise?
|
| Is the death rate 100%? Or is it .00365% (1 / (75 * 365))?
|
| But an age-adjusted metric can give non-intuitive results.
| Thanos' snap, randomly killing 50% of everybody, would have
| had a 25% lives-lost-equivalent.
|
| How you calculate death rate has real consequences in how you
| evaluate something like Covid.
| authed wrote:
| The biggest problem with covid was the crazy restrictions that
| some countries implemented... (they didn't have any effect).
|
| Take for example Israel's Government spying:
| https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/rights-groups-peti....
|
| Or Quebec's quarantine.
| ankit219 wrote:
| There is a recent article by Max Roser on air pollution,
| providing a much needed context on what is happening:
| https://ourworldindata.org/data-review-air-pollution-deaths
|
| One key point:
|
| > More recent studies tend to find a higher death toll than
| earlier studies. This is not because air pollution - at a global
| level - is worsening, but because the more recent scientific
| evidence suggests that the health impacts of exposure to
| pollution is larger than previously thought
|
| Most studies est the death toll to be around 7M per year. In no
| way a low number. Problem is articles like these serve to create
| panic more than educate people. Maybe panic _is_ the way forward,
| and it probably works, just that it is unsettling and
| manipulative when you can read the correct facts elsewhere.
| Indoor air pollution - caused by burning coal etc to cook food
| mostly in poor household - accounts for 40% of the deaths. We
| dont even seem to want to address that.
|
| The mental image this headline creates is pollution by burning
| fossil fuels outdoor due to which air quality worsens. true to an
| extent, but there is indoor polluton, then natural causes like
| dust, fires, pollen, volcanic eruption, agriculture too.
|
| I wish we trust people to behave as adults, or at least have
| faith, and move away from creating mass panic to solve such
| problems.
|
| Edit: The number from natural sources is not insignificant. Out
| of 8.8M deaths, 5.5M were due to anthropogenic sources. Rest is
| natural causes of air pollution. And from anthropogenic sources,
| 2.2M came from indoor air pollution (by the same study I think)
| gameswithgo wrote:
| I sometimes wonder if sensible people tend to lose the war in
| politics because we will lament if something is not quite level
| headed and fair enough, if it is a little bit too much like
| propaganda. Meanwhile industries wanting to pollute will
| happily spend millions to scream lies and propaganda with no
| shame, buy politicians, create news networks that never paywall
| you to repeat the lies, meanwhile we bicker about whether
| someone was perhaps 20% sensationalist about their death
| accounting.
| zapataband1 wrote:
| This is true because "novel" news spreads faster than facts.
| So people will happily share doomsday predictions but not
| levelheaded news.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| There's also the folks that want to look smarter than
| scientists pointing out problems with the way we've done
| things. Finally, they have an advantage because of their
| secret or suppressed knowledge.
| ankit219 wrote:
| Partly agree with you. My issue is just that nothing good was
| ever achieved by creating mass panic in uninformed public.
| And, we have had more than a few cases like that with far too
| many unintended consequences. In this case you may know what
| is good and here propaganda is perhaps justified as you know
| a lot about this topic, and the rest of the world is not
| taking it as seriously as it should. Would that hold true in
| cases where you dont have a deep understanding and instead of
| giving you information, experts are hell bent on creating
| mass panic?
|
| It's a weird reinforcing loop. Institutions like WHO and
| others would publish a study with good research but also
| doomsday scenarios w low probabilities. Journalists and
| publications (institutions of trust #2) pick it up, and in
| order to simplify and get attention, focus more on doomsday
| scenarios. The other institutions (eg: govt. or non profits
| and advocacy groups) and fact checkers pick up same story
| believing the doomsday scenario to be the most likely one.
| They publish more opinions, studies, articles, reports etc.
| and end up creating a situation where no one can get a good
| understanding of the topic outside of her field. There is so
| much information that it is hard to gain a handle on that,
| and here is where I think even 20% propaganda may not be
| justified.
| UnFleshedOne wrote:
| On the other hand, there is nothing good propaganda has that
| could be reliably used to distinguish it from bad propaganda
| (if you are not an expert in the field in question). So
| unconditionally throwing out _all_ propaganda and discounting
| credibility of its sources is the only workable choice we
| have.
| vkou wrote:
| The first rule of political change is that if you want an
| inch, you have to vehemently demand a mile, and then
| compromise down to wherever you can get.
|
| That's the playbook your opponents will use - and if you want
| to get anything done, or prevent things from backsliding, you
| have to follow suit.
|
| Hate the game, not the player. People don't make decisions
| based on rationality, they do it based on emotional appeals.
| maybelsyrup wrote:
| > The mental image this headline creates is pollution by
| burning fossil fuels outdoor due to which air quality worsens.
|
| Yes, that's the mental image. That's what they're going for.
| It's not terribly controversial, I don't think: fuels burn, bad
| stuff goes into air.
|
| > true to an extent, but there is indoor polluton, then natural
| causes like dust, fires, pollen, volcanic eruption, agriculture
| too.
|
| What's your point? The article's about air pollution, and the
| author wants to do something about that. That's what he cares
| about right now. Those other things? Very bad. But: this
| article's about this specific thing. There are always lots of
| things in the world, but we can train our attention on only so
| many at once.
|
| > Problem is articles like these serve to create panic more
| than educate people.
|
| Create panic in who, exactly? I'm trying to figure out how you
| can speak for other people on this. Personally, I'm not
| panicked by the headline or the article. More sad, maybe, and
| curious about how I might be able to affect the problem
| positively.
|
| I'm not even sure what exactly it is about the article that's
| so manipulative to you. I read a lot of systematic reviews in
| my research, and the tone of this article is pretty similar to
| many of those. Just because the article's scary for you doesn't
| mean someone's out to manipulate you. Emotional responses
| between people "take two to tango": there's as much work being
| done by the reader as the writer, in this instance.
| zapdrive wrote:
| The Indian prime minister, Modi, just gave into the farmers'
| demand and has legally allowed them to burn stubble. The air
| quality all over North India and especially Delhi is shit right
| now.
| thriftwy wrote:
| > In Los Angeles, after $700 air purifiers were installed in
| schools, student performance improved almost as much as it would
| if class sizes were reduced by a third.
|
| This sounds like an impossible casuation. Either the class size
| reduction effect is tiny, or the claimed benefit of purifiers is
| not there.
| vlunkr wrote:
| Agreed. Maybe along with air purifiers they spent money on
| other new resources as well.
| y4mi wrote:
| I disagree. It depends entirely on what the purifiers did and
| how the air quality was before/after.
|
| The ability to concentrate really drops a lot once the CO2
| content goes above 1k for example. I'd expect at least that
| kind of change if these managed to get the CO2 from 1.5k+ down
| to 500 ppa or other similar metrics.
| lostmsu wrote:
| Can you link a study for CO2? I read previously that it does
| affect cognition, but some notion of the size of the impact
| would be useful.
| y4mi wrote:
| There are a lot around. One random example https://www.rese
| archgate.net/publication/265948386_Impact_of...
| StreamBright wrote:
| Sugar is another source of death that no government ever
| regulates.
| sschueller wrote:
| That's not true. The Swiss government sat down with its largest
| food producers and signed an agreement to reduce the amount of
| sugar used in products.
|
| https://www.blv.admin.ch/blv/de/home/lebensmittel-und-ernaeh...
| StreamBright wrote:
| I see, this is really a big impact on the subject.
|
| While in the EU:
|
| https://corporateeurope.org/en/pressreleases/2016/07/food-
| lo...
| detaro wrote:
| Special taxes on sugary drinks etc are not exactly unheard of.
| But people love their sweet stuff, so it's not exactly popular.
| anonporridge wrote:
| This is patently false.
|
| Seattle passed a sugar tax several years ago and has already
| measured a significant decline in sugary drink consumption in
| lower income demographics, https://sph.washington.edu/news-
| events/news/lower-income-sea...
|
| Incidentally, the people who fight these kinds of regulations
| tend to be the same conservatives who also whine about how the
| CDC is telling people to mask up, socially distance, and get
| vaccinated rather than exercise more and eat healthier.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > take the problem away, and the number of premature deaths will
| fall by many millions.
|
| I think this is a naive way to look at it. The majority of air
| pollution comes from burning fossil fuels. However, people don't
| burn fossil fuels just for the high(unlike cigarettes). Our world
| is built on fossil fuels. Without burning fossil fuels, likely
| billions would starve. There would also have been no way to
| transport the vaccines before they went bad. Fossil fuels and the
| economy of trade it created lifted billions out of poverty which
| has its own mortality.
|
| Should we try to do better, of course, but first we have to take
| a realistic view of the situation. Otherwise we end up like Joe
| Biden who goes to a climate conference and talks about the need
| to cut fossil fuels and then comes home and opens up the
| Strategic Petroleum Reserve to help make sure gas prices do t go
| too high.
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