By Bjørn Lomborg (via his Facebook page)
About a quarter of all deaths in the developing world comes from mostly easily curable, infectious diseases.
The biggest environment problem, by far measured in human deaths, is air pollution.
Global warming, which creates a lot of attention, is on an entirely different and smaller level. The World Health Organization estimate (a very maximal estimate) is about one-fortieth of the deaths from air pollution. Even if you assume all deaths from floods, droughts and storms, the number is an even smaller two-hundredth of air pollution.
And no, the number of deaths from global warming won’t increase, but more likely decrease over time, as many infectious deaths will disappear because of increasing wealth, and because fewer cold deaths will increasingly outweigh increasing heat deaths.
Source: Communicable deaths and air pollution deaths from Global Burden of Disease, doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(12)61766-8.
Infectious diseases are about 10m of 52.6m global deaths, and 9.2m of 39.7m developing world deaths.
Air pollution lies between 3.5m and 6.9m (indoor and outdoor air pollution is somewhat overlapping, because indoor air pollution contributes 16% to global outdoor air pollution, and because there is no good estimate of how close most people stay to homes when outside). Here, just using the mean, which is likely an underestimate.
WHO global warming estimate is 141,000 deaths (http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs266/en/). Lower estimate is just 28,266/year for the past decade , using estimates of deaths from flooding, droughts, heatwaves and storms, and assume they’re all from climate change, (http://www.csccc.info/reports/report_23.pdf).
Long-term development of deaths from Richard Tol’s chapter for my upcoming book, How Much have Global Problems Cost the World? A Scorecard from 1900 to 2050 (http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/economics/economic-development-and-growth/how-much-have-global-problems-cost-world-scorecard-1900-2050).
For now, see the estimates from Bosello et al. for 2050 showing global warming *saving* about 850,000 lives (1.76m saved from cold, vs 820,000 more dead from heat), http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800905003423.
Well, blow me down under.
On the subject of “Carbon Pollution” and Obama’s June 25, 2013 speech, I thought I’d see what changes might have happened in Google Trends on the search term “Carbon Pollution”
http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=carbon+pollution#q=%22carbon%20pollution%22&cmpt=q
Image capture: http://i39.tinypic.com/2ag56op.jpg
Apparently “Carbon Pollution” was a phase invented in Australia in July 2008, peaked Aug 2008, bounced around from 47 to 96 in Nov. 2009, then stays below 30 except for brief spikes Mar-May 2010, and May 2011. May-Jun-Jul 2013 was 17, 22, 18.
Looking at region: Australia 100. USA 4.
So Obama is getting on the “Carbon Pollution” bus just as the Australians are getting off.…. or maybe not.
If WHO says millions die from air pollution … I don’t believe them. It is just part of the war on coal.
It is possible they are right, but WHO and the other lefty organizations cannot be believed. They and the Lancet et al are serial liars.
Also, I’ll bet that most of those air pollution deaths are actually malarial deaths caused by the banning of DDT.
sunshinehours1 says:
July 20, 2013 at 11:36 am
Read the comments before commenting.
You would have learnt that the air pollution deaths are from indoor pollution caused by cooking with dung and using soot emitting lighting.
Jimbo, you are applying WAY too much logic…
Jimbo says:
July 20, 2013 at 10:27 am
How have they differentiated climate deaths as opposed to weather deaths?
The estimates of deaths from indoor air pollution (nearly 2 million per year) http://www.who.int/indoorair/health_impacts/burden_global/en/
are based on very solid data, including
(1)multiple studies measuring smoke from cooking and heating using wood and dung in homes without chimneys, and
(2) mortality statistics showing that most of the deaths occur among women and children.
China supplied about 800,000 improved cookstoves to rural communities, and other nations including Bangladesh and India are also working on this. The World Bank has a useful discussion of the latest technologies here:
http://climatechange.worldbank.org/sites/default/files/documents/Household%20Cookstoves-web.pdf
The Sierra Club got its priorities right. Take funding from the evil fossil fuel industry (NG in this case), fight coal with their money, then turn on them when they are being used to reduce carbon (dioxide) emissions from a coal fired power plant. It works for them, and they still say that evil oil and coal fund skeptics. Here is the article from Buffalo, NY on this issue:
http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130714/CITYANDREGION/130719505/1109
@Gene Selkov at 9:30 am:
“Show us the bodies. Even if they include those killed by Sarin in the air pollution category, that won’t make 5.2M.”
@TRM at 9:39 am:
“SANITATION!!!!!!! There is nothing like clean water to drink/cook and excrement handled intelligently to fix that first column or at least most of it.”
I have to agree with both of you. WATER pollution/contamination, yes. Air? Come on! If 5.2 million people died every year from air pollution it would be in the news BIG TIME.
But sanitation? Absolutely.
The source, “Communicable deaths and air pollution deaths from Global Burden of Disease” (no link provided), wouldn’t include a discussion of sanitation deaths. Sanitation deaths are neither communicable nor air pollution.
One ALSO has to ask if they are using the EPA’s recent “CO2 is pollution” dictate. REAL pollution – like the world USED TO HAVE – is rarely really included in discussions, even here.
I agree with Gene Selkov. I doubt if even at the time of the Killer fogs in London 5.2m died in a year from air pollution. If so, where?
Let’s see… I didn’t find that exact title, “Communicable deaths and air pollution deaths from Global Burden of Disease,” but I found “Global and regional mortality from 235 causes of death for 20 age groups in 1990 and 2010: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010” [Lancet] and it showed these:
Those were the only main respiratory deaths included, and they total up to 5.5 million.
How one distinguishes what portion of each of those to assign to air pollution? WHO the heck know? (pun intended)
TB is a communicable disease and comes from a virus. Cancer does not have any provable connection with air pollution, but certainly not all the trachea, lung and bronchus cancer deaths can be assigned to air pollution; to do so is as unscientific as one can get. A great number of them come from tobacco. Lower respiratory? Various causes – some could be from air pollution, but which and how many?
Again, I have to agree with Gene Selkov. That air pollution number is bull.
5.2m out of those 5.5m are supposed to be from air pollution?
In what alarmists’ wet dream?
I wish you wrote this article becasue I didn’t understand what he was saying.
Was this kind of reporting special WHO speak? Becasue it whizzed past my feeble brain: “Infectious diseases are about 10m of 52.6m global deaths, and 9.2m of 39.7m developing world deaths.”
If you are going to write in shorthand, it would help if you gave us a glossary.
And a sentence like this: “Here, just using the mean, which is likely an underestimate.” That isn’t even a sentence, So hats off to John West who understood it, because I certainly didn’t.
Do the figures for air pollution deaths include Obama’s “toxic” CO2 ?
Apparently it’s toxic “like mercury and arsenic” except that there is not 400 ppmv or arsenic or Hg vapour in the atmosphere, so there must already be millions dying from this “toxic” air-borne poison already.
How long before the EPA starts fulfilling it’s legal obligations and fines the 640 million American citizens who a deliberately and flagrantly breaking the law thousands of times each day, releasing toxic gases into indoor and outdoor environment by exhaling?
Those not able to pay the fines should be physically restrained from polluting in the future.
Air pollution BS. If there is any problem with air pollution it in-house air pollution from open fire places burning wood, coal, kerosine, etc, in combination with bad ventilation. In the West we see an increase of lung problems thanks to the insulation epidemic causing increased dust, moist and mould and mould spurs among other problems like toxic emission from insulation materials like pur foam. The greener the solution, the deadlier.
Raw numbers of people killed by each type of hazard are only step 1. Now show us the steps you propose we take to alleviate each one, and be sure to show their costs per year of life expectancy saved, especially costs in lives.
EPA’s clean air regulations, for instance, kill thousands every year by forcing people into smaller cars where they are more likely to die in wrecks. That dwarfs any believable number saved by the reduction in emissions.
Gene Selkov says:
July 20, 2013 at 9:30 am
Show us the bodies. Even if they include those killed by Sarin in the air pollution category, that won’t make 5.2M.
Lomborg is talking about burning the warmists’ dream biofuel, dung indoors for cooking. Or low grade coal in home stoves for heating.
If you use dung as a fertilizer instead, burn coal in power plants cleanly and deliver abundant healthy food to homes along with electricity for cooking (or natural gas extracted by fracking from almost anywhere), air pollution (both indoors & outdoors) goes down sharply.
There is such a thing as air pollution, that’s how its global distribution looks like. It has nothing to do with CO₂, which is not a pollutant (except in EPA regulations and EU directives), but a fertilizer. I can still remember the time when in the city I live most homes were heated by coal fired stoves. It was not pretty, believe me, it stank. On calm winter days one could hardly breathe. It is not the case any more, coal is burnt in power plants in a controlled environment with all kinds of filters installed, releasing nothing else to the environment than water vapor & plant food. Also, 40% of our electricity comes from a nuclear power plant with no emissions whatsoever. And, of course, we have an extensive natural gas delivery network now. That stuff can be burnt cleanly even in home utensils, releasing only H₂O & CO₂ to the environment again.
Unfortunately in the countryside poor people still burn biofuel (wood) or even recycled stuff (plastics) from sheer necessity, which releases heavy smoke, with thousands of unidentified chemicals in it.
Péter, everybody knows pollution is bad; we know that some kinds of pollution are very bad.
The problem is, it is almost always impossible to point your finger at a dead body and say, “This person died of air pollution by X”. A near exception to this is tobacco smoking, and even that is controversial, depending on whom you ask. Having seen hundreds of post-mortem lung samples from smokers, I can tell you I don’t need statistics to conclude that smoking is bad and can kill. But people die from all sorts of things, and it often happens that smokers die from stroke, from alcohol abuse, or in a car accident before their self-inflicted harm by pollution has a chance to kill them. But smoking is an extreme form of pollution. It is even harder to link any deaths with milder forms of it, like secondary smoke, diesel exhaust or dung burning.
So when you see any figures named, you can be certain they are not based on measurements. These figures are no more credible than the number of deaths from climate change.
Air pollution does increase the risk of lung cancer and stresses the heart (oxygen less easily absorbed when reflex expulsion of particulates takes place).
So (CONTROVERSIAL); smoking tobacco was healthy until about the 1960s, in the UK. Air pollution was more harmful than the tobacco. And the tobacco was toxic to bacteria that would have exacerbated the problems.
Tobacco is better than TB from a health viewpoint, in a dirty-air environment.
Not now obviously.
Steve Garcia says:
July 20, 2013 at 12:33 pm
TB is indeed communicable, but it is caused by bacteria:
–Wikipedia
Abundant power solves many problems, and is one of the main pillars of modern civilization.
As a Progressive, I take the rare position among my kind of agreeing with Lomborg.
For the life of me I cannot understand how Progressives can misunderstand their own priorities.
I believe there is plenty we should be doing that could mitigate the effects of global warming and the best part of it is that, if global warming isn’t the problem most Progressives think it is, they are all things that we should be doing anyway.
We should be investing in alternative energy technologies because eventually we will need them. It be five, ten, fifty, or more years but eventually it will make economic sense to not use fossil fuels.
We should be improving sanitation, water, and health services in the poor and developing world. Just because we should.
We should be improving agricultural and water management practices not only the developing world but in our own. Nothing good comes from the agricultural runoff waste we dump in the oceans and we can’t continue to grow our urban areas on finite water supplies.
http://broadspeculations.com/2012/08/26/climate-of-change/
Silly looking figures. It looks like this is the source “In their study, the researchers used an ensemble of climate models to simulate the concentrations of ozone and PM2.5 in the years 2000 and 1850.” Prove anything you want with a model.
Can anyone answer my question for me?
“If CO2 is at the same level as of 15 million years ago then why are we cooler by 5-10 degrees and sea levels lower by 75-120 feet? This would indicate there’s no CO2/temp/sea level relationship.”
Before you get conned by the PM10 / PM2.5 kills millions, read Ross McKitrick.
“According to Environment Canada, dust from unpaved roads in Ontario puts a whopping 90,116 tonnes of PM2.5 into our air each year, nearly 130 times the amount from coal-fired power generation. Using the Clean Air Alliance method for computing deaths, particulates from country-road usage kills 40,739 people per year, quite the massacre considering there are only about 90,000 deaths from all causes in Ontario each year. Who knew? That quiet drive up back country roads to the cottage for a weekend of barbecues, cozy fires and marshmallow roasts is a form of genocide.”
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2011/05/16/ontarios-power-trip-the-failure-of-the-green-energy-act/
Kevin Schurig says: July 20, 2013 at 9:43 am “So let’s revisit an oldie but goodie, air pollution.”
Bad-air’s earlier name was MIASMA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miasma_theory
@Mark Bofill at 9:45 am:
“Or, if there isn’t, then why are we talking about both air pollution and easily curable infectious diseases in the same breath? I’m a little confused.”
Lomborg’s POV on all this is that the massive amounts of money being spent now and the much more massive amounts proposed to fight global warming could be much better spent on fixing things that are “easily curable” with enough money, such as many infectious diseases.
He makes a lot of sense. IMHO. Throwing money at Kyoto or its offspring for something that has iffy payback and long lead payback is not the most common sense way to spend the money.
O/T, but personally I think the same arguments can be made about massive military expenditures. In the early 1960s there used to be a big conflict/controversy about “Guns or Butter.” I still think butter is better, but I get outvoted anytime I bring it up. Still, much the better part of a trillion a year for a military-industrial complex that is big enough to invade Jupiter, but that is so incompetent that it can’t beat Iraq or Afghanistan, or build effective interceptor missiles – are we spending wisely? And we have to go around picking fights just to justify it all. Not smart.
Snip if you must, Anthony.
James Cross says:
July 20, 2013 at 2:33 pm
we should be building more nuke plants, because we should….
(LMAO)
Bjorn is off the mark. The biggest environmental problem(s) are POVERTY and IGNORANCE. They kill far more people, indirectly, than anything else, but they DO kill them.
But, but dung is a renewable resource. Burning it may kill the people who breathe the polluted air from the cook fire, but dung is constantly produced by “natural” means. Death cattle forever! No more coal trains!