[Stoves] Entertaining DALYs ("Great Expectorations") - re: Crispin

[Traveller]

Crispin:

Be careful. Your animosity might show. To those conditioned to see
animosity.

You write, "In the back corridors both IERs and DALYs are laughed at,
meaning, not believed to be "real". That doesn't mean people won't take
them seriously, but I don't think there is much belief they represent
something real."

I didn't know you frequented "back corridors". Isn't that where GACC grabs
money and plants news items, away from pictures with Leo DeCaprio?  Or
where The Donald grabbed he-knows-what?

Anything can be BELIEVED to be real. Just needs faith. And Grace of Gods
(grant-givers).

********
You say some people believed "fuels have emissions"? I am shocked, shocked,
shocked!! All that Kirk Smith and Sumi Mehta - who I think did the first
paper on HAP BOD some 15 year ago - said (if I remember correctly), that
"solid fuel use" was a practical surrogate for emissions.

Now, it may be that the term "practical surrogate" was inserted by WHO only
recently, after pretending to the world that they have, ahem, DATABASE!
Whatever it is, I remember Smith-Mehta carefully listed their assumptions,
use of something like "ventilation factor", and computed some exposures and
attributed some BOD to HAP.

I saw little problem with that, but it seems that GACC-ian paradigm evolved
into "fuels kill".

It would be laughable nonsense if it weren't fraud - to create hysteria and
put money in the pockets of the Turner Foundation masquerading as some
"UN-backed" thingamajig.

****
You also say,

"This last error is what drives the whole nonsense about declaring an
individual stove user's life expectancy to be lengthened a little by
switching to a cleaner stove, or even longer by switching to LPG. That is a
linearity in that claim: less smoke guarantees a longer life. That is the
essence of the claim."


Maybe it is true. It is not provable for every individual. Maybe it doesn't
have to be.  What is provably false is the claim that a GBD ?number? can be
turned into a codified risk reduction and life extension for a particular
intervention. There is a mania sweeping the funding community hoping to
"monetize DALYs".  That would require calculating the averted DALY?s and
assessing a value on each averted disability adjusted life year.

Monetizing DALYs requires firmly tying smoke exposure to specific diseases
or sets of diseases. These had been assume before. Trying to nail it down
to specifics requires large scale medical observations. That is, as you
pointed out earlier, quite different from guessing that smoke aggravates
asthma or turns a cold into pneumonia."

I doubt anybody makes this claim about individual life expectancy with a
straight face. The CEO of GACC may just happen to know there's money in
lying through the teeth.

Because there are no projections of premature mortality of the current
cohort. Or projections of risk factors and their distributions.

All the IHME folks did - as one of them admitted - was "getting away with
murder".

They still do. Ron ought to read them.

I don't think "large scale medical observations" can be expected to do
anything. Premature mortality, DALYs, are manufactured in computers, not
labs, for the PAST COHORTs. Simply put, DALYs cannot be determined by
"firmly tying smoke exposure to specific diseases". GBD is NOT about
medicine, it's about the cult of "global public health". Rotten to the
core; just have them validate their "databases" and methods. (No, no; that
would mean another billion personhours billable to NIH and Gates
Foundation. Their monies ought to be spent on real health, not fictions.

Monetizing DALYs is about putting hands in others' deep pockets. When the
transaction is done, then hands can be waved. Furiously.

Can be very entertaining.

It's one thing to compute "averted DALYs"; anything for song-and-dance (in
Webinars of ill-repute). Quite another to assign a price to them.

I kid you not. I toyed with the idea 15 years ago, then dispensed with it,
recognizing it was impossible to compute "averted DALYs" without heroic
assumptions (which I am used to) BUT impractical to assign a price.

Unless one did some "cap-and-trade" nonsense as with GHGs - just flat out
assert an aDALY and let "the market" determine the price.

Because there is always the Paris of "Voluntary Carbon" - adult exchanges
in back corridors.

Thank you so much for brightening my morning. This is all very
entertaining.

Nikhil







Message: 20
Date: Thu, 8 Dec 2016 18:17:21 +0000
From: Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <crispinpigott at outlook.com>
To: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves
        <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
Subject: Re: [Stoves] report with dissapointing results from cleaner
        cookstoves (Crispin)
Message-ID:
        <YTOPR01MB0235D652216AE00D9EDD70ACB1840 at YTOPR01MB0235.
CANPRD01.PROD.OUTLOOK.COM>

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

Dear Nikhil

>I take it you are setting for me an example of sane, measured, respectful
analysis of the "stoves and health" claims and counterclaims.

I can?t set you up ? you have been there for years without any intro from
me.

>I tried to explain the phoniness of WHO "solid fuels use" database or
"emissions database".

There are serious problems with this matter going back to before the IWA
meeting. There were foundational errors that I think the students involved,
at the time, did not realise were errors. They had been led down the garden
path a bit by earlier, widely repeated and improper claims that ?fuels have
emissions?, that there were ?clean fuels and dirty fuels?, that fuels had
?a combustion efficiency? and that the GBD meant something about an
individual?s health risk.

This last error is what drives the whole nonsense about declaring an
individual stove user?s life expectancy to be lengthened a little by
switching to a cleaner stove, or even longer by switching to LPG. That is a
linearity in that claim: less smoke guarantees a longer life. That is the
essence of the claim.

Maybe it is true. It is not provable for every individual. Maybe it doesn?t
have to be.  What is provably false is the claim that a GBD ?number? can be
turned into a codified risk reduction and life extension for a particular
intervention. There is a mania sweeping the funding community hoping to
?monetize DALY?s?.  That would require calculating the averted DALY?s and
assessing a value on each averted disability adjusted life year.

Monetizing DALY?s requires firmly tying smoke exposure to specific diseases
or sets of diseases. These had been assume before. Trying to nail it down
to specifics requires large scale medical observations. That is, as you
pointed out earlier, quite different from guessing that smoke aggravates
asthma or turns a cold into pneumonia.

>(I did review their Reviews, and started writing, but sometimes couldn't
stop laughing, and sometimes got too irritated to continue.) I also tried
to explain the phoniness of EPA's PM2.5 approach - the assumption of
equitoxicity in particular. I then laid out the case against use of IER to
invent "relative risk" estimates.

The problems/dysfunctions of IER?s are well documented, perhaps not well
known. There is a lot of guessing buried inside. In the back corridors both
IER?s and DALY?s are laughed at, meaning, not believed to be ?real?. That
doesn?t mean people won?t take them seriously, but I don?t think there is
much belief they represent something real.

>And abuse of all such fiction, passing the pseudo-science off as an
advance.

Well, there is the question: do those doing the ?passing off? believe they
are real or not? If it can be dressed up a bit, will money flow?

>But that - in the eyes of Ron  - is sacrilege. Rant. Animosity.

He made his opinion very clear. He did not however present any evidence or
opinion that there is something real, valid, substantial, factual,
supporting the idea that there is a clear link between stove smoke and
specific diseases or the shortening of lives by calculable amounts.

>Ron has enjoyed the luxuries of stove science while some 400 million poor
people have died prematurely in the last 30 years.

They did, according to the standard definition (apparently now popular)
that all people should have lived to be 86 and that anyone who dies before
that dies ?prematurely?. Causes for that prematurity have been assigned,
and PM2.5 is one of the ?causes? assigned its due proportion.

>The poor must not have any great expectations.

If they look over the list of how they are supposedly dying, I think their
reaction will be great expectorations.

>I am happy to be a heretic. How can you not be one?

Sorry, there is nothing heretical about your position. Scientific
assessments and methods are canonical. The heretics are those who eschew
them. The modeling of exposure in kitchens (which is available on line ?
you can download the WHO committee notes) is downright humorous. I say that
because when I describe it to experts they all laugh.

Regards
Crispin
---------------------


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