[Stoves] Off-topic: Berkeley Earth - "To kill 1.6 million people.." (Was cigarettes and cooking smoke - Crispin, Andrew)

[Cookswell Jikos]

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> In last weeks newspaper here in Kenya,
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> ''The residents are also able to use the readings from the sensors to
>> advocate measures to improve the air quality. The sensors.AFRICA project
>> was set up in Mukuru Kwa Reuben at Reuben FM, 330 meters from Accurate
>> Steel Mills, a subsidiary of Bhachu Industries Limited. The readings
>> from 330m away were high, and we were there to see what the sensors would
>> tell us about pollution closer to the factories.
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> The data collected by the air quality sensors confirmed the residents’
>> claims that the factories regularly release emissions between 2pm and 6pm.
>> Using the World Health Organisation’s Air Quality guidelines, the data
>> showed that over a seven-day period with data collected over 24hrs,
>> residents living around the sensor at Reuben FM were seeing Particulate
>> Matter (PM) 10 values higher than the WHO-recommended levels over a 24-hour
>> period, four days of the week.
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> The values were so high, despite being over a quarter of a kilometre away
>> from the factory. The Code for Arica team went on walkabout to take
>> readings with a portable sensor closer to the factory.
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> Our first reading at Maendeleo Learning Centre at 2.59pm was 266 μg/m3
>> for PM 10, well above WHO air quality standards. The factory with the
>> chimney emitting to the right of the school was identified as Divani, but
>> that could not be substantiated. Its chimney is visibly lower than the
>> prescribed Nema guidelines, which is 40-50m high from the tallest building
>> in the neighbourhood.
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> An environment expert at the National clean air production Evans Nangulu
>> said following latest assessments of the Bhachu factory, they had directed
>> the company to raise its chimneys from 20m to at least 50m to increase the
>> dispersion rate of the waste gases.
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> Additional recommendations include: installing fabric filters to reduce
>> emission of fine dust particles, using electrostatic precipitators that can
>> tremendously minimise the emissions of sulphur and nitrogen oxides and
>> carbon dioxide.
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> On how these regulations are being enforced, Nangulu said: “The main
>> challenge is that we have so many papers on policies and regulations in
>> place, but enforcement and enactment remains a nightmare. When you go to
>> the ground, you realise very little is being done.”
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> Adding: “Enforcing these regulations is not a one-off idea. It should be
>> continuous, and if those in charge can tighten their ends to ensure both
>> developers and factories follow the law, we can reduce the unfortunate
>> situation that the people in Kwa Reuben find themselves in.”  Nangulu
>> urged factories to adopt modern technologies to help them manage their
>> emissions.''
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>> https://www.the-star.co.ke/news/2018/11/07/mukuru-fumes-put-60-asthma-patients-a-month-in-hospital_c1843071
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>> Teddy Kinyanjui
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> Sustainability Director
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>> On Fri, Nov 16, 2018 at 7:18 PM Nikhil Desai <pienergy2008 at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
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> Crispin:
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>> Wow. "To kill 1.6 million people  ..." says Berkeley Earth, the enviable
>> father-daughter Mullers enterprise.
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>> Earth?? They are loose fireballs. A front for the academia pushing shale.
>> None on their Team and none of their Directors seem to have an iota of
>> experience in health, just manipulating PM data. The Mullers are a
>> celebrities marketing fracking and nuclear waste disposal. By crowdfunding;
>> $5 million to date.
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>> With experts like these, who needs idiots? Arden Pope - the economist
>> doing "integrated risk function" for GBD - the junk of Burnett et al.
>> (2014) I have panned here several times? Richard Muller's quantification of
>> air pollution deaths in China is based on the same nonsense. Murders by
>> assumption.
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>> Get over it. There is no there there.  Stop looking for substance and
>> integrity from Berkeley this or Berkeley that. This is an ideological war;
>> these academics are the new suppliers of ICBMs, missiles, submarines. It is
>> not at all about tobacco or coal, biochemistry or public policy; it is
>> strictly about manufacturing hysteria and getting grants. They are Hell's
>> Angels of the academia-industrial complex.
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>> But it is getting both macabre and frightening; not easy to dismiss. Is
>> PM2.5 dust the new nicotine? (You know, "dust" is PCP, or Angel's Dust.)
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>> Macabre because it reminds me of the routine mass murders in US by
>> semi-automatic weapons. Models are semi-automated. For all I can tell, GBD
>> papers and press releases are written with Artificial Intelligence.
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>> Elizabeth Mueller's LinkedIn page says "Berkeley Earth is a
>> public-benefit organization that is using modern statistical techniques to
>> address major environmental concerns such as global warming and air
>> pollution. Berkeley Earth conducts all of its analysis in a transparent
>> way, and makes its data and analysis techniques available to the public. "
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>> Yeah, right. Her or her father's track record inspires no credence on air
>> quality analyses and management. This is like Kirk Smith Enterprise, except
>> that the Mullers know nothing about health and medicine. The dad was played
>> up because he was a skeptic who turned a believer in climate change;
>> nuclear and fracking businesses come in handy when you do that, as also
>> does a Berkeley professorship. Academic prostitution.
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>> IER (Integrated Exposure Response) is the new 007. Licensed to Kill.
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>> GBD is now Juul. (You know, one of the e-cigarettes.) Addiction for the
>> next generation.
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>> HAPiT is the new heroin. Gas and electricity are alternatives to food and
>> medical care.
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>> Frightening because these cabalistic recitations can be
>> counter-productive. No doubt pollutants cause diseases; that is the
>> definition of pollutants. But when you fail to, refuse to, identify
>> pollutants, ingestions, disease incidence, in real people and smoke them
>> away in the joints of dope rolled in peer-reviewed paper, what happens?
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>> At best, nothing. People will get inured to lies like they do to Trump's
>> tweets. Who'd've thought the Berkeley professoriat as Trump-in-disguise?
>> (Sycophancy to Modi was a clue.)
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>> At worst, a "compassion fatigue" would set in. "Another million murdered
>> by semi-automatic military grade assumptions? Who cares?"
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>> In the meantime, ten more PhDs will be generated and processed through
>> post-doc careers to turn into new frogs croaking aDALY songs for Goldman
>> Sachs and Gold Standard.
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>> California fires have been emitting millions of tons of pollution,
>> equivalent to a billion cigarettes an hour, for the last few days. Already
>> 63 people have been killed. Give IHME or Berkely Earth $500k and they will
>> automatically churn out how many additional deaths are attributable to
>> these fires. (Like what was done with Puerto Rico hurricane.)
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>> Maybe we needn't bother, and I should not ridicule WHO or IHME or CCA.
>> They are useful idiots for Modi, Trump, and the oil companies, and if I
>> believed that the ends justify the means, I should praise them to  high
>> heaven as I once did. No health minister is going to listen to WHO bombast
>> - harmless nuisance - and request subsidies for gas and electricity.
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>> I for one believe in subsidies for cleaner air. I am afraid Berkeley this
>> and that may lose the plot. For now, the Mullers are having a laugh of
>> their lives and pocketing kudos and money. ‎ Swindlers thrive because a
>> sucker is born every minute.
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>> Nikhil
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>> PS: Health Canada has bought into smoke generation too. See Burnett et al
>> (2018)  Global estimates of mortality associated with longterm exposure to
>> outdoor fine particulate matter, 9592–9597 | PNAS | September 18, 2018 |
>> vol. 115 | no. 38 www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1803222115. This
>> paper purports to rely on "cohort studies", something you referred to in a
>> recent post but I haven't reacted to. The fundamental problems are that i)
>> there are no exposure measurements; ii) the hazard ratios are derived from
>> non-comparable cohorts and applied indiscriminately; and iii) PM2.5
>> equitoxicity is assumed.
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>> This is preposterous poppycock, has no relevance to stove design, and the
>> ISO TC-285 needs to be shut down instantly. Even ANSI has abandoned the
>> Chair. Enough noise by illiterate professoriat mobs out of control. Tragedy
>> of the wretched of the earth.
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>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
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> Nikhil Desai
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> (US +1) 202 568 5831
>
> Skype: nikhildesai888
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>>
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>> On Thu, Nov 8, 2018 at 6:42 PM Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <
>> crispinpigott at outlook.com> wrote:
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> Dear Andrew
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>> >Crispin I was after a source for the amount of PM 2.5 from a standard
>> cigarette, I had already come across some comparisons with particulates
>> produced by a cigarette verses a diesel car idling
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>> I just Googled it and found various references. I was using 45 mg for a
>> while but later found there were some claims of 40 mg.
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>> The mass of tobacco in a cigarette is about 0.9 g. A PM2.5 mass of 45 mg
>> is the equivalent of 50 g per kg (exactly). This is a believable amount for
>> smouldering biomass that has no flame.
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>> The CO is 0.5% to 5% of the gas volume with perhaps a typical range of
>> 1.2-3.7%. (same source).
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>> As for the ridiculous (that is the only word for it) numbers give for
>> “exposure” I found the source document at Berkeley here. The argument,
>> which is foolish, presented is presented as
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>> “Now let’s consider air pollution. The most harmful pollution consists of
>> small particulate matter, 2.5 microns in size or less, called PM2.5. These
>> particles are small enough to work their way deep into the lungs and into
>> the bloodstream, where they trigger heart attack, stroke, lung cancer and
>> asthma. In the Berkeley Earth review of deaths in China we showed that 1.6
>> million people die every year from an average exposure of 52 μg/m3 of
>> PM2.5. To kill 1.6 million people would require, assuming 1.37 x10-6 deaths
>> per cigarette, 1.1 trillion cigarettes. Since the population of China is
>> 1.35 billion, that comes to 864 cigarettes every year per person, or about
>> 2.4 cigarettes per day.
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>> Thus the average person in China, who typically breathes 52 μg/m3 of air
>> pollution, is receiving a health impact equivalent to smoking 2.4
>> cigarettes per day. Put another way, 1 cigarette is equivalent to an air
>> pollution of 22 μg/m3 for one day.”
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>>
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>> This argument is so foolish one has to wonder what they are smoking in
>> Berkeley. One cigarette produces about 45 mg of PM2.5. Spread through 10 cu
>> m of air (what a person breathes in a day) would create air with 4,500
>> μg/m3 yet they claim it is 22. That is a big difference, an error of 200
>> fold.
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>>
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>> The calculation is based on a calculation that assumes all PM2.5 in China
>> comes from cigarettes – is that correct? Or only in the case of the 1.6m
>> they say die from…what exactly…air pollution?  There is no information to
>> support such statistic in China.  That have to have made it up.
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>> Conclusion: “In China the numbers are far worse; on bad days the health
>> effects of air pollution are comparable to the harm done smoking three
>> packs per day (60 cigarettes) by every man, woman, and child. Air pollution
>> is arguably the greatest environmental catastrophe in the world today.”
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>> Yeah well, the death of responsible statistics looks like a catastrophe
>> of similar proportion.
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>> There is a reference to another opinion: “Arden Pope, had previously
>> calculated that average pollution in Beijing is similar to smoking 0.3
>> cigarettes per day – and that this comparison is used to reassure people
>> that the pollution really isn’t that bad.”
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>> Well, let’s look at that “reassure” idea. Pope looked at the amount of PM
>> absorbed, but I have not read much of his work yet. He is pretty well
>> respected in this field and he disagrees profoundly with Berkeley’s
>> numbers. His methodology is well explained in that reference and involves
>> drawing “associations”, not getting medical diagnoses (because there is no
>> data on anyone’s personal exposure).
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>> From what I can understand, Pope’s China calculation is based on what PMO
>> absorbed from a cigarette, not the exposure to it (inhaled) as most is
>> exhaled (90%?). He seems to assume that ambient air pollution is absorbed,
>> not 10% of what is inhaled (which seems odd). He arrives at a 1/6th of a
>> cigarette per day for living in Beijing (2013). That reference gives as the
>> inhalation volume 18 cu m per day, not 10. (13-23). He correctly calculates
>> the exposure (inhalation) as the mean concentration * volume to arrive at
>> 90 µg/day up to 1,800 µg/day in a highly polluted city (100 µg/m3).
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>> An interesting observation can be made comparing the figure from the
>> Berkeley paper (22 µg/m3 = 1 cigarette/day equivalent) and Pope’s second
>> hand smoke value which is that living in an apartment with someone who
>> smokes 1 pack per day exposes other people in the flat to 20 µg/m3. This is
>> a very big mismatch. Pope has it that the total exposure in the breathed
>> air of a second hand smoke recipient is 360 µg/day, while Berkeley’s
>> calculation has it that living in the same flat breathing that 20 µg/m3 air
>> (Spengler 1991) is the same as smoking 16 cigarettes! So one guy smokes 20
>> cigarettes per day, and the other guy sharing the flat inhales another 16
>> in the form of second hand smoke? Now consider that the first guy who
>> inhales all that original smoke gets another 16 cigarettes worth just be
>> staying indoors. So he gets 36 cigarettes worth of smoke while only buying
>> and smoking 20?
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>> No wonder Pope doesn’t believe Muller’s calculations.  They are
>> unbelievable. They do not even consider ozone.
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>> Regards
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>> Crispin
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>>
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>> http://berkeleyearth.org/air-pollution-and-cigarette-equivalence/
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>> http://www.myhealthbeijing.com/china-public-health/air-pollution-or-smoking-which-is-worse-a-letter-from-dr-pope/
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>> Here is the Berkeley model applied to large cities based on the 22µg/m3:
>> https://www.citylab.com/environment/2018/04/how-much-are-you-smoking-by-breathing-urban-air/558827/
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>> Spengler JD. 1991. Indoor Air Pollution: A Health Perspective. Baltimore:
>> Johns Hopkins University Press, pp 33-67.
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>>
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