[Stoves] personal pollution monitors (Andrew)

[Traveller]

Andrew:

You lived downscale from Chernobyl? (At least not near Windscale!)

COPD is Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease.

The LLIR (low-level ionizing radiation) method is relevant to how the PM2.5
theology has been constructed in recent years.

The way I see it, because SO2 levels went down, the regulatory fanatics
cannot use SO2 exposure for further tightening emissions and air quality
standards, so they NEED TO ASSUME that all PM2.5 is equally toxic. Or to do
WBT in stoves so that PM2.5 from foods and other sources in the kitchen are
ignored.

Back 20 years ago I was involved in PM10 work and I remember some research
starting at PM5 or PM2.5 level that some electric utilities were involved
in. I left that field and wasn't aware of this PM2.5  trickery till a few
months ago.

Leave that aside, the fundamental problem is that all the "global" numbers
on PM2.5 exposures from solid fuels are model estimates of dubious
validity. They are not even approximations; they are simply cooked up (some
I may have observed decades ago or contributed to).

When "health practitioners are citing concentrations from wood burning
stoves as being responsible for more particulate pollution than diesel cars
in my neighbourhood", they are probably doing good PM2.5 "source
allocation" for your neighborhood. How this particulate pollution leads to
health damage is - to use my favorite phrase - is GoBbleDygook.

Some day I will get around to posting USEPA 30-years long adventure to come
up with New Source Performance Standards for residential wood heaters. The
last I heard, Gina McCarthy was claiming that these standards will reduce
one statistical DALY (or premature death, I forget) per week in the whole
of US. When the existing stock of residential wood heaters will run out so
that all new heaters will make up the new stock - when EPA will come up
with a mandate to install wind-electric heaters in every home - is
anybody's guess.

I challenge WHO to enter this debate and produce the numbers, their
sources, and methods. (They have done that, but buried in the references of
their Reviews of Evidence or something.)

The emperor has no clothes. My posts on GBD ("we got away with murder," as
quoted in Lancet), EPA, and IER (Integrated Exposure Response) quoted from
the horses' mouths. Scientists are honest among themselves. But then WHO,
EPA, BAMG take over.

"Black Carbon" toxicity is unknown; blaming all PM2.5 for "7 million
premature deaths" (with 86 years as the threshold for every human) is a bit
like saying dust storms in the Sahara kill 300,000 people a year.

Heck, why not? If I had a PhD in Global Health and a grant of $100 million,
I could even say that myself. (Just kidding; about myself and about serious
researchers. One must always read as much of original literature as
possible; qualifications and cautions abound.)

Nikhil


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(US +1) 202-568-5831


On Fri, Dec 23, 2016 at 4:48 PM, Andrew Heggie <aj.heggie at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 23 December 2016 at 20:50, Traveller <miata98 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > What do these monitors measure and what do those measurements mean?
>
> Nikhil they measure particulates in micrograms per cubic meters of
> air. Various types and some claim to measure "black carbon" from
> diesel exhausts
> >
> > Once the assumption of equitoxicity of all PM2.5 is given up, and so
> long as
> > the concentration at any given time is not immediately irritating to
> eyes or
> > nasal passages, what do we know of predictability for individual dosages,
> > especially over short periods?
>
> I know nothing and I am neither recommending nor disapproving of them,
> simply put; health practitioners are citing concentrations from wood
> burning stoves as being responsible for more particulate pollution
> than diesel cars in my neighbourhood and I'd quite like to see some
> comparisons of my own using similar methods to theirs.
>
> Bearing in mind there are "lies, damned lies and statistics" a
> statistician interviewed on the local TV  suggested that banning all
> internal combustion engines in London (and this may or may not include
> jets flying in to Heathrow) would increase everyone's life by 30 days,
> he didn't say whether that was every Londoner or everyone living in
> England.
>
> I drove an open cabbed diesel engined machine for 35 years and I don't
> know what effect that added to my pollution intake, then again 30
> years ago I lived under the plume of the world's worst nuclear
> disaster and don't know the effect of that though I'm a long way
> through my allotted three score and ten so it doesn't really matter.
> >
> > Dosimetry of ionizing radiation distinguishes according to source,
> > composition (alpha, beta, gamma, X), and duration (one-time max,
> cumulative
> > max). Some of us remember the huge controversies in the 1960s about these
> > and the UNSCEAR, about RAD v. REM.
>
> OK this is a tangent and too far off topic, I was using it as an idea
> of the sort of thing I wanted to try but measuring daily particulate
> dose rather than radiation.
> <snipped>
> >
> > If the epidemiology of Black Lung is not that precise, where does that of
> > PM2.5 exposure from wood smoke, inside and outside the kitchens, stand?
>
> I don't know either but I guess  once indoor air pollution is cited as
> a problem then measuring it is a start.
>
> I do wonder why we have gravitated to PM2.5 when 15 years ago only
> pm10 seemed to be mentioned.
>
> > Of course, nobody need take me at my word. I
>
> I wouldn't dream of doing so
>
> > I have COPD,
> COPD?
>
> Andrew
>
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