[Stoves] Fwd: [stove and climate] Excellent new book

[Nikhil Desai]

Ron:

Pardon a spoil alert. This is another instance of hocus-pocus in service of
hysteria.

It's not that fuels don't produce pollutants or that pollutants have no
consequences. Just that the public health dogma of fuel-based PM2.5
causally linked to precisely quantifiable disease and death is junk science
with no evidentiary basis, just estimates based on assumptions based on
citations based on meta analysis and spurious protocols.

Let's keep some facts in mind:

a) There is no quantified evidence of reduction in PM2.5 exposure and
corresponding reduction in incidence of disease and disability over large
enough cohorts.
b) PM2.5 is of natural as well as anthropogenic origin, and sources,
emissions, transport, residence times, and dosages vary by place and time.
c) There is no quantified evidence of an increase in PM2.5 exposure and
corresponding increase in incidence of disease and disability over large
enough cohorts.

This takes common sense, not lab measurements. Remember, also, that air
quality monitoring in open areas (i.e., not at CEMs at smokestacks) are not
measures of human exposures and cannot distinguish between pollutants from
parks, sewage ponds, landfills, or chemical spills.

Humanity has known since cave days that fuel smoke is unpleasant and
dangerous. There are four specific processes whereby this common sense is
compromised and turned into zealotry for "clean fuels" or "truly health
protective" emission rates for cooking or transport.

All one needs is abuse of statistics to allege causality for what Kirk
Smith only calls "associations". (See the "Breathing Space" video from
2009).

If "associations" are enough for you, I am advancing the hypothesis that
the de-industrialization of America - first in cities and then in rural
areas - reduced air pollution but increased insecurities, non-communicable
diseases, opiate and alcohol abuse, and "deaths of despair". Cleaner air is
an obvious risk factor for premature death. Enough to stall and reverse the
gains in life expectancy in US.

You figure out the policy recommendations. Andrew Wheeler is eager. He has
a legal duty to manage air quality and human health.

There are four elements of this deceitful hysteria under the garb of
"science".

1. IHME and earlier reports on Global Burden of Disease. I have earlier
written that for bulk of the cases worldwide, GBD has assigned causes of
death and disability, via questionable routes, not identified them by
observation. GBD exercise was behind the nonsense about "expected
mortality" that has been questioned by public health people and laughed at
by medical practitioners (meaning, treatment of patients). What you think
is "known" about the spread of non-communicable diseases in low-income
country is only partially based on actual medical evidence; cohort-wide
quantification is GBD manufactured.

2. WHO has no data on exposures to so-called HAP or AAP, nor any
individual-level link to disease incidence, leave alone evidence of causal
link between the two. For HAP, it took spotty, one-time (six months,
winter) data for adults in 600 Indian rural households and then computed
Relative Risk from using IERs of dubious provenance, extrapolating between
tobacco and AAP. Some WHO reviewers, and the primary authors (Burnett et
al. 2014) themselves, cautioned against making too much of this fiction,
but heck, Gates Foundation and EPA have their own interests and incentives.
WHO and UN Foundation have compromised themselves in the process, but they
were presumably complying with their contracts.

3. The core and baseless assumption of equitoxicity has allowed the use of
IERs, equating SO2 and tobacco smoke with diesel and wood smoke (not that
there were data on PM2.5 from diesel or wood in the first place; cook one
number, then compute Relative Risk.)

4. Another baseless assumption of the homogeneity of cohorts - i.e.,
equi-susceptibility - so that victims of London smog in the 1950s can be
treated as appropriate comparison group for cigarette smokers of China,
cooks of India and Latin America, regardless of their nutrition and health
conditions, access to and quality of medical care, occupations, ecosystem
characteristics, or cultures and genetic stock.

Killing by assumptions. Terrorizing by science fiction.

What would they do about it? Control emissions for every source, including
natural, and control winds, individual mobility?

Relax. You only need worry about CDR. Just today I see this example of
fatal CO2 poisoning in Takoma, Washington - . https://www.
washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/07/31/
dippin-dots-deliveryman-left-dry-ice-in-the-back-seat-of-
his-car-it-may-have-asphyxiated-his-mother.

Nikhil


PS: Remember Ronald Reagan who said trees pollute? Looks like they do emit
a lot of PM 2.5 - see
https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/13/health/california-fires-air-pollution-trnd/index.html
and https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/ContributionPollution. And
remember that concentrations and mobility matter, not fireboxes alone.
Please.


------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nikhil Desai
(US +1) 202 568 5831
*Skype: nikhildesai888*


On Mon, Jul 30, 2018 at 12:29 AM, Ronal W. Larson <rongretlarson at comcast.net
> wrote:

> List:
>
> Yesterday, I could not purchase this.  Tonight I could (ebook < $20) — am
> now beginning Chapter 1.  Definitely has a lot on stoves.
>
> Ron
>
>
> Begin forwarded message:
> Particles in the Air: The Deadliest Pollutant is One You Breathe Every Day
> ·       By Doug Brugge, Tufts University
> https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-89587-1
>
>
> Introduction
> The book covers the three largest sources of particulate matter pollution
> in five chapters. These sources constitute three of the top ten public
> health problems in the world today and far outstrip any other environmental
> health threats in terms of health impact. The book begins with indoor solid
> fuel combustion for cooking in lower income countries and tells the story
> of how this problem was identified and recent efforts to eliminate it. The
> book next looks at tobacco smoking and second hand smoke, again reviewing
> the history of how these problems were identified scientifically and the
> fierce industry push back against the science. The last two chapters cover
> ambient particulate matter in the outdoor air. They address fine and
> ultrafine particles, describing the pioneering work on fine PM, the
> subsequent industry attacks on the scientists and then the emerging
> interest and concern about ultrafine particles, an area of research in
> which the author has participated. This book is geared towards
> non-scientists, including high school and college students.
>
>
>
>
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