[Stoves] personal pollution monitors (Andrew)

Sat Dec 24 17:30:04 CST 2016

Dear Andrew

I hope this is sinking in, not just for you but for the stove community in general.

When things were not very important – meaning, there was not much money involved – it didn’t matter much that the science was well represented or  completely misrepresented. Now that organisations are sniffing around for ways to bring in funding, they have to pick ‘issues’ to concentrate on, and make up based on a factoid here and there, or simply invent out of whole cloth (i.e. “fake news”).

The equitoxicity thing is an interesting story in itself – why was it necessary to make such an assumption when it is very obvious to anyone who looks that particles are not at all the same in their toxicity. Even looking at say, wood smoke from a typical stove in current use – that would make sense for that cohort of users.  Perhaps wood smoke from a typical stove is much more toxic than, say, Sahara fugitive dust. It would make sense to me to do that. Not even difficult because the particles can be characterised.

In Ulaanbaatar Prof Lodoysamba not only looked at the particle composition he was able to relate them to sources, based on the combustion temperature. Now that is a remarkable piece of work. He is able now to trace the drop in PM from domestic combustion in stoves relative to those from a power station or large scale boilers in factories. We should be doing that with stove smoke, right?

Last year I was in Beijing during the annual burning of the crop waste in Hebei (about mid-October). The PM level went up to 400 in Beijing. It was far worse on the eyes and nose than 1500µg/m3 in Ulaanbaatar from coal smoke.  The BBC blamed it on coal-fired power stations, of course.

It means the composition of the particles varies greatly depending on the source and combustion conditions. Perhaps we have a better argument to reduce wood stove smoke that we thought. Equitoxicity works both ways, so to speak. Burning damp wood badly can create a terrible set of toxins because of the organic nature of the fuel.

It would make an interesting investigation. Perhaps Philip Lloyd has already done something on this because his lab can track VOC’s.

Regards
Crispin

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<mailto:aj.heggie at gmail.com>> wrote:
On 23 December 2016 at 20:50, Traveller <miata98 at gmail.com<mailto: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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