From the “US and European manufacturing was exported to China and India department” and the UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA:
New research shows that more than 5.5 million people die prematurely every year due to household and outdoor air pollution. More than half of deaths occur in two of the world’s fastest growing economies, China and India.
CREDIT Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), University of Washington
Power plants, industrial manufacturing, vehicle exhaust and burning coal and wood all release small particles into the air that are dangerous to a person’s health. New research, presented today at the 2016 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), found that despite efforts to limit future emissions, the number of premature deaths linked to air pollution will climb over the next two decades unless more aggressive targets are set.
“Air pollution is the fourth highest risk factor for death globally and by far the leading environmental risk factor for disease,” said Michael Brauer, a professor at the University of British Columbia’s School of Population and Public Health in Vancouver, Canada. “Reducing air pollution is an incredibly efficient way to improve the health of a population.”
For the AAAS meeting, researchers from Canada, the United States, China and India assembled estimates of air pollution levels in China and India and calculated the impact on health.
Their analysis shows that the two countries account for 55 per cent of the deaths caused by air pollution worldwide. About 1.6 million people died of air pollution in China and 1.4 million died in India in 2013.
In China, burning coal is the biggest contributor to poor air quality. Qiao Ma, a PhD student at the School of Environment, Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, found that outdoor air pollution from coal alone caused an estimated 366,000 deaths in China in 2013.
Ma also calculated the expected number of premature deaths in China in the future if the country meets its current targets to restrict coal combustion and emissions through a combination of energy policies and pollution controls. She found that air pollution will cause anywhere from 990,000 to 1.3 million premature deaths in 2030 unless even more ambitious targets are introduced.
“Our study highlights the urgent need for even more aggressive strategies to reduce emissions from coal and from other sectors,” said Ma.
In India, a major contributor to poor air quality is the practice of burning wood, dung and similar sources of biomass for cooking and heating. Millions of families, among the poorest in India, are regularly exposed to high levels of particulate matter in their own homes.
“India needs a three-pronged mitigation approach to address industrial coal burning, open burning for agriculture, and household air pollution sources,” said Chandra Venkataraman, professor of Chemical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, in Mumbai, India.
In the last 50 years, North America, Western Europe and Japan have made massive strides to combat pollution by using cleaner fuels, more efficient vehicles, limiting coal burning and putting restrictions on electric power plants and factories.
“Having been in charge of designing and implementing strategies to improve air in the United States, I know how difficult it is. Developing countries have a tremendous task in front of them,” said Dan Greenbaum, president of Health Effects Institute, a non-profit organization based in Boston that sponsors targeted efforts to analyze the health burden from different air pollution sources. “This research helps guide the way by identifying the actions which can best improve public health.”
###
Background:
The research is an extension of the Global Burden of Disease study, an international collaboration led by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington that systematically measured health and its risk factors, including air pollution levels, for 188 countries between 1990 and 2013. The air pollution research is led by researchers at the University of British Columbia and the Health Effects Institute.
Additional facts about air pollution:
- World Health Organization (WHO) air quality guidelines set daily particulate matter at 25 micrograms per cubic metre.
- At this time of year, Beijing and New Delhi will see daily levels at or above 300 micrograms per cubic meter metre; 1,200 per cent higher than WHO guidelines.
- While air pollution has decreased in most high-income countries in the past 20 years, global levels are up largely because of South Asia, Southeast Asia, and China. More than 85 per cent of the world’s population now lives in areas where the World Health Organization Air Quality Guideline is exceeded.
- The researchers say that strict control of particulate matter is critical because of changing demographics. Researchers predict that if air pollution levels remain constant, the number of deaths will increase because the population is aging and older people are more susceptible to illnesses caused by poor air quality.
- According to the Global Burden of Disease study, air pollution causes more deaths than other risk factors like malnutrition, obesity, alcohol and drug abuse, and unsafe sex. It is the fourth greatest risk behind high blood pressure, dietary risks and smoking.
- Cardiovascular disease accounts for the majority of deaths from air pollution with additional impacts from lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and respiratory infections.
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http://junkscience.com/2014/11/fact-sheet-epas-claim-that-its-coal-plant-co2-rules-will-save-lives-by-reducing-particulate-matter-emissions-is-false/
Poor air quality is certainly a factor in many diseases, but that does not mean it is the only cause or even the main cause. Poor health is a complex topic made more complex by all the competing, biased groups involved in trying to blame something other than their vested interest.
The whole “catastrophic anthropogenic global warming via CO2” scare story has made me even more skeptical that there are any honest scientists left in the world. (sure there are some, but how do I tell which ones???)
‘ … but how do I tell which ones???’
There’s a spectrum. The more h0onest scientists are found toward the single subject end while the dubious congregate at the multi-disciplinary end.
That said, CAGW advocates aren’t even on the ‘scientist’ spectrum anyway.
Probably a lot of double counting — if “(c)ardiovascular disease accounts for the majority of deaths from air pollution” how is it the we in the states are only told the best way to decrease risk factors is through healthy eating, exercise, avoidance of tobacco smoke and limiting alcohol intake. No mention of air pollution.
Only very limited studies have been done on PM2.5 (larger can be coughed up for the most part) and at best the data suggests an 8-18% increased mortality risk gradients, hardly distinguishable when the baseline number for CVD accounts for over a third of all deaths worldwide. Curiously though, not if Africa, given their higher propensity to cook over open fires (but may be due to little need for supplemental heating or energy for industry, which happens to be virtually non-existent).
The chart could have easily been a list of population rather than premature deaths from pollution. I’d guess that there are more deaths in China and India for each possible reason because there are that many more people available to die in any given year. All the smaller population countries are in the blue end of the spectrum only because there are fewer people available to die.
That was my immediate thought too. India and China have between them about half the world’s population so it’s not surprising they have about half the number of deaths. That map needs re-drafting as a rate – something like deaths per million of the population – to have any meaning.
David: according to Google India has a population of 1.2B whereas Africa is at 1.1B. Yet the ‘study’ shows Africa close to European levels. That’s hard to believe. Also, was it a ‘study’ of models or demographics? I wonder.
Someone should ask them what has happened to life expectancy in India and China. It is possible that there are more people dying of pollution, but far fewer dying from malnutrition, cold, heat, and other climate related causes. As for Africa, my guess would be malaria kills the vulnerable before environmental pollution can get them.
They also have poorer health care, poorer water quality, and much, MUCH worse pollution. London-smog levels.
Let’s not carry skepticism too far. I seriously question the accuracy of their quantification. There are valid questions about the damage (or more accurately, lack thereof) of low-level pollution. However, it’s just nonsensical to not believe that extreme pollution does not affect health.
Having lived in China for several years, I can assure you that the air pollution in Beijing – and many other cities in China – is outrageously bad. Like, I can’t see 50 feet because the pollution (black/grey soot) in the air is so thick. Some cities (like Shanghai, Hong Kong and Xiamen) have high population densities as well but due to their geographic location the air pollution never gets that bad.
When you’re walking down a Beijing street for just 1 block (about 3 minutes) and take your mask off and it’s got a nice big black spot where you were breathing through – you know it’s bad.
Link …
http://news.ubc.ca/2016/02/12/poor-air-quality-kills-5-5-million-worldwide-annually/
cum hoc ergo propter hoc
Apart from the fallacy, are you implying AW cannot post anything that has been posted before? Even the original media release? It would be a bit quiet in blogosphere if this were so.
Span Ows wrote, ” … are you implying AW cannot post anything that has been posted before?”
No. I didn’t see a link to the original press release so I posted one.
Sorry. And thanks.
How does this compare to lives lost through:
1) Malnutrition
2) Malaria
3) Poor sanitation
4) Lack of medical supplies.
None of the money spent to combat the phantom menace global warming will be spent to combat any of the above real and preventable causes of premature death.
You’re missing the point….man-made global warming causes THOSE things! Get with the program.
You can add a fifth – little or no availability of electricity which causes people to burn, well, just about anything they can find that will burn for cooking or warmth – wood, leaves, animal dung, etc. There is an almost perfect correlation between the availability of inexpensive and plentiful energy (mostly from fossil fuels, directly or indirectly) and average lifespan. I can’t believe that Africa wasn’t specifically mentioned due to the high number of illness and death caused by Indoor air pollution. Western envirofascists are insisting that developing countries must go “green” when generating electricity with apparently little care for the welfare of people.
The USDA and UN’s World Health Org., Kills by Far more people with their dietary advice for diabetics, heart and most other chronic diseases. Day 5 in the trial: – to spin their products, and influence dietary guidelines, nutrition advice and our ideas about obesity and weight loss. He showed how food and soft-drinks industries have made low-fat, high-carb foods the dominant ‘conventional’ dietary paradigm without any science to back it up, contributing to global epidemics of obesity, heart disease, diabetes to name but a few; disease, Noakes took special aim at the sugar industry, but had many other targets, including his own profession, saying doctors were telling patients diabetes was incurable when they had the means to reverse it: ’We are practising medicine of failure, sponsored by Big Food and Big Pharm? Follow The Money.http://www.biznews.com/low-carb-healthy-fat-science/2016/02/13/tim-noakes-i-wont-practise-medicine-of-failure-banting-lchf/
More doesn’t this sound like Climate Scientists !!! Bhoopchand was powerless to stop Noakes in full sail as he waded into these vested interests worldwide, showing how they are embedded in academia, have bought off top scientists and academics, sponsor dietitians’ associations – including the Association for Dietetics in SA (ADSA), whose former president, Claire Julsing Strydom, laid the complaint that led to the charge against him.
On a Roll on who is killing people :https://youtu.be/nsI6oQN8fdE?t=16
As ‘green energy’ and ‘environmental’ policies in the West are exporting manufacturing to third world countries which don’t worry about air pollution and, as a result, killing millions of people will the Green Blob acccept responsibility for that ??? Don’t hold your breath.
The plot was horribly done. In a case like this you need to plot deaths per capita. Even if you went with deaths per country, looking at the scale it clearly needs to be a log scale so the colors are more evenly distributed.
Irian Jaya is really bad, but Papua New Guinea is good???? There must be bloody high fence along the border, or fans, or evil spirits.
This has UN written all over it.
“Estimated”
“calculated”
All formulaic steps to reach a guess. No real science performed.
http://www.who.int/gho/countries/ind.pdf?ua=1
Then, in order to make their numbers almost fit, they borrow casualties from related disciplines; heart disease, pulmonary, stroke, respiratory…
After all of their hyperbole about third world countries with polluted air, they manage to completely miss the first solutions; cheap plentiful relatively clean energy!
Their wonderful graphic for ‘global burden of air pollution’ even includes drawings of cooling towers emitting steam.
http://news.ubc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/AAAS_Air-pollution-infographic770.jpg
Back in the 80’s, an advocacy group released a report with a very large number for US homeless. Years latter another study group couldn’t duplicate that number falling far short. Going back to the advocacy group they were told that the number was not based on a study, rather was selected to create a sense of alarm.
As a result of that and other exaggerated alarms, one skeptic wrote an article that estimated that “advocacy research” overestimated things by a factor of five. That sounds about right for climatism too.
Fred. Agreed. Even if the numbers are right, there is no way to get context without deaths/100,000 . Getting statistics without control groups is also meaningless. I imagine there is some correlation …but even that is tenuous without accounting for things such as poverty level and acces to healthcare.
Ah. There it is. I just noticed that “Power generation” is at the top of the list of causes so we better deal with that first. Burning dung on an open fire in your living room seems to be last of the last of all world problems.
The West learned decades ago how to minimize (real) pollution from burning carbonaceous fuels by removing particulates and the combustion products of minor constituents; the countries noted could easily do the same, but as long as we/they are chasing the chimera of CO2 as a “pollutant”, which it isn’t, genuine pollution is not addressed.
Is it not also a FACT that all those environ-mentalists have stopped homes from receiving clean power and condemning those households to burn wood and dung to cook their meals ?
Those are the very people with blood on their hands and they are even PROUD of that achievement.
I’ve read that in the neighborhood of 1 million people die in Africa each year due to malaria. The judicious use of DDT could reduce that substantially, if allowed. It hasn’t been. Worshippers at the green alter block it.
Replacing indoor wood burning by kerosene stoves saves a lot of lives. But for the greenees wood burning is good and kerosene (=fossil) is by by definition bad.
The worst offenders are the environmentalists who restrict the production of electric power to the third world.
How many people die every year because their stomach is empty? You know, that dreaded disease called starvation!
Tilting at windmills will cost 1.5TRILLION per annum……to solve a modeled problem 100 years hence……spending that sum TODAY on the World’s destitute poor would be a real climate change.
Imagine that, there is a real pollution problem, that is actually killing people. What do the climate alarmists and the EPA have us focused on? CO2. How many people are killed by 400ppm CO2 in a year? Zero. The breath we exhale had a far greater concentration of CO2. Our blood is rich with CO2. Jets have CO2 as high as 4,000ppm, and submarines as high as 10,000ppm. This climate change nonsense is the greatest misallocation of resources I’ve seen in my lifetime.
Coal combustion is no doubt a major problem, but not in power stations, which are normally sited well away from urban areas, but in home heating and in small urban factories, as was the case in the famous post-war UK smogs.
Greens will exploit this for their anti-coal crusade, but the reality is that MORE coal-fired electricity is needed, so that fewer people are forced to use the dirtier alternatives for heating, cooking and manufacturing.
Coal combustion is in two forms: power stations (big stationary) and domestic. Domestic coal combustion is hundreds of time more polluting than a power station per ton because of really inappropriate combustion technologies.
“In the last 50 years, North America, Western Europe and Japan have made massive strides to combat pollution by using cleaner fuels, more efficient vehicles, limiting coal burning and putting restrictions on electric power plants and factories.”
This quote from the article is partly true and partly a big fib. Limiting coal combustion has NOT been major contributor. The mass burned has increased greatly. But it has been done very much more cleanly because of improved technologies, technologies not applied to the major problem in places like Hebei Province which surrounds Beijing, polluting the capital with drifting clouds of smoke from domestic heating stoves.
As you can see, the war on coal is embedded deeply in this air pollution narrative. The effort is to try to define CO2 as a pollutant which if reduced, will save lives. Obviously this is nonsense.
The ‘restrictions’ are on the minimum efficiency of combustion and the collection of flyash. Surprisingly, perhaps, domestic stoves that produce so much of the PM2.5 produce virtually no flyash. To improve the living environment requires burning more completely, not changing fuels, just like vehicle emissions.
Regarding the question of ‘is this models’, yes. The emissions are modelled on modelled consumption patterns. The airshed is then modelled. Exposure is modelled on the airshed model. Disease is modelled on the exposure model. Deaths are modelled on the exposure model. It is six layers of models with basically data underlying it. This is info from a WB emissions and exposure consultant.
Using this modelling approach it was claimed only a few years ago that 1600 people were dying annually in Toronto from the emissions of the (now closed) Nanticoke coal-fired power station 100 km to the south west.
5.5 million? Show me the bodies.
5.5 million seems a bit low, as we’ve all seen the reports that over 4 million children in poverty stricken areas die of respiratory problems due to open wood fires burned inside their huts.
JasonH
That claim (it is 4.3 million) about domestic stove emissions is also based on a set of models with no underlying data, particularly for China which starts with a blank sheet of paper.
The number of claimed deaths rises about 40% every 18 months with regularity. The brain behind it is in Berkeley. The rise from 4.3m , 5.5m is right on time, 18 months after t 4.3 number was claimed. The ‘solution’ is always to ban the combustion of solid fuels and promote electricity and LPG.
As there are now multiple examples of coal and wood and wood pellet burning stoves that have lower emissions of PM2.5 they are in a tight spot. Why go to LPG if it quadruples emissions and exposure? Watch this space. They will go after black carbon next claiming that it has one hundred times the effect of PM2.5 (which is is size, not a substance).
I like that Dire Straits album. It’s hard to believe it was released 34 years ago, in 1982.
Underdevelopment is a pretty effective killer of humans. You can reduce the particulates from a power station or motor vehicle, but you can’t make poverty more efficient.
To see what all humans really need and want, attend an Earth Hour function…and observe what people do immediately AFTER the hour is up.
Electrify the world. A power station making a bit of stink is also giving many homes immediate, controllable, safe, reliable heat and light without smoke, flame or smell. And power stations are only dirty if you don’t upgrade and modernise them. You don’t drive a forty year old Falcon as your regular drive, do you? (Hitachi-Mitsubishi make a nice coal power plant. I want a fleet of them for Oz.)
Exactly! I can remember urban power stations such as Balmain (Sydney) and East Perth (Perth, WA) operating without precipitators; now that was a real pollution problem. Given that modern coal burners are situated close to coal fields, in rural areas, and are fitted with very effective precips or bag houses, it is hard to consider power generation as a modern, major contributor to premature deaths.
More models, not facts.
Duh. Unventilated open dung fires are hazardous. Reverting to a third-world lifestyle will accomplish the goals of the Paul Ehrlich faction of the green blob–reducing the population.
No actual medical diagnoses, just estimates based on assumptions based on estimates. In the US criteria pollutants have decreased by 69% and respiratory problems like asthma have increased. When observations don’t agree with assumptions, you always ignore the observations, I suppose.
Judging from their (poorly ledgered) graph, it seems the US comes in at around 100 thousand deaths a year from pollution. Well, who are they? I assume with that many people dying they should be able to list some of them. Let’s make it easier. 1%. Show me the names of just 1,000 people who died in the US from pollution. And no, everyone who died of asthma, or the 3 pack a day smokers from lung disease, don’t all count.
Now I might allow a percentage of them to be used, IF I’m shown some actual data on how pollution levels might aggravate these conditions. I’ll need more then EPA style hand waving though. We do REAL science around here.
schitzree : lung surfactant is the problem with asthma. Please go to the 50 minute 42 second mark of the video the Doc will explain the issue and climate.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRe9z32NZHY
Schritzree
You are on the right track. For a claim of deaths to be true, one has to judge the global burden of disease, with one factor removed. That gives insight to the effect of the one factor. For PM2.5 this is judged by experts to be an impossible task. For one simple indicative example, the lifestyle of a now-60 year old who could have had zero exposure (or a daily average of 25 micrograms of PM2.5) v.s. a similar background person with 100 exposure, how is that to be interpreted in terms of the exposure to a young person who eats junk food and does no exercise and uses perfume and deodorant and cooks stir-fry daily? With a completely different diet and exposure profile it is impossible to judge what the impact of a reduction in exposure from 100 to 25 would be. That is just how it is. If a child dies of malaria in 2016 at the age of 8, how I that better than dying of complications of pneumonia at 75 in 2083?
The death claims are statistical unicorns – everyone has heard of them but no one has seen one.
That air should be cleaner is blinking obvious. To try to relate that to “reducing CO2 emissions” is silly, foolish. The anti-coal agenda is obvious throughout the sector. The claim is in essence that the emissions from bad combustion are inherent in the fuel. This is a critical point. Bad combustion is blamed on the fuel – imagine. Just like burning dung in a smoky open fire – the smoke is blamed on the fuel, not the open fire. Failing to have understood literally the first thing about combustion, they have not only modelled the death of millions, they have advocated ‘solutions’ that are off-mark, expensive and impractical. Sound familiar?