I didn't know this, guess I'd never thought to look it up.
If 16% of deaths can be attributed to pollution, and some percentage are vehicle related, accidents in general, preventable disease / infections, etc etc...
How many deaths per year should we expect if all of those things could be reduced / minimised / eliminated?
We surely would. But the gains may be more (or less) than you think.
I remember a gerontologist showing some math where if you prevented all heart disease you'd only gain about 4 years of human lifespan (since most of those people would soon get cancer); similarly if you prevented all cancer you'd only get about 4 years as well (since most of those people would get heart disease).
But if you prevented both, you'd get something north of 10 years of average lifespan.
> air pollution was the biggest killer, leading to heart disease, stroke, lung cancer and other illnesses
There's absolutely no way you can definitively link deaths from heart disease to air pollution with any substantial degree of confidence, at least not in 99.99% of the cases.
I guarantee that within a short amount of time, this whole "study" will be invalidated as baseless political-motivated pseudoscience.
> There's absolutely no way you can definitively link deaths from heart disease to air pollution with any substantial degree of confidence, at least not in 99.99% of the cases.
I have not read the detail of the report in question, but your assertion is not really true, because it assumes that each individual case needs to be definitively linked as "yes-or-no" as being caused by air pollution. That is just not how population studies like this work.
On the other hand, (and, again, it could be in the source of the report, not sure) but a more accurate/effective measure is years of life lost because of pollution. One of the most tragic consequences of heavy pollution is it's effect on the young. Pollution in some cities like New Delhi is so horrendous that it's like smoking a pack or two a day - imagine that effect on a young child.
> That is just not how population studies like this work.
I agree (that's not how these studies work), and that's kind of my point. If you're going to throw around phrases like "caused by" (or "responsible for", as claimed by the study), then you really should be able to definitively link the two.
Not really, if you look at lung cancer rates among non smokers they are not zero. So, you can't say a specific smoker got long cancer from smoking but by comparing populations you can find changes in rates.
Are you really comparing the relationship between smoking and lung cancer with a relationship between air pollution (especially outdoor) and heart disease? Seriously, they're not even in the same ballpark in terms of objective statistical significance. Not even close.
You may not be able to say with absolute 100% certainty that "a specific smoker got long cancer from smoking", but you can often be >95% certain. Can you (or anyone) say the same for outdoor air pollution and heart disease?
Don't move the goal post. If a very large populationa has 20%X vs 30%X, then only 1/3 of the cases are Caused by _. But, the difference is still very significant.
Again your example isn't even in the same ballpark as what you'd actually see in a rigorous study of the relationship between outdoor air pollution and heart disease, so please stop implying that it's somehow "very significant."
As mentioned in another comment, many of those studies are referring to indoor air pollution (or including indoor and outdoor air pollution in the same study), which is disingenuous at best.
I'm not calling into question the method of action, but I am saying that there is no evidence of outdoor air pollution having anywhere close to the same effect on premature death (via heart disease or otherwise) as smoking, nor would it even be remotely close to the other fictitious numbers you've mentioned.
Smoking on it's own causes ~6 million deaths per year and air pollution is linked to ~5.5 to 7 million deaths a year so they really are on the same scale. (And larger than my example 20% vs 30%.)
Yes, only a subset of the population smoke so the direct impact is higher. However, some areas also have vastly higher levels of air pollution.
Now, if you have some actual evidence then sure feel free to share, but I am just not hearing it.
Again, you're conflating indoor and outdoor air pollution, and if you look closely, even the WHO's own "facts" for estimates of outdoor/ambient air pollution deaths are full of weasel words and misleading claims.
Instead of merely reading the conclusions of these studies, I'd encourage you to look at the underlying data with a healthy dose of skepticism. Only then will you start to see all the holes in the research.
In door air pollution includes outdoor air pollution as most people don't have much in the way of air filtration. So, they are not exactly separate categories independent of each other.
You even have edge cases like parking lot attendants / toll collectors who have vastly increased disease risks.
Is the lancet politically motivated? I haven't heard about it before, but I am not yet really well versed in the climate science field.
It says in the abstract: Diseases caused by pollution were responsible for an estimated 9 million premature deaths in 2015—16% of all deaths worldwide—three times more deaths than from AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria combined and 15 times more than from all wars and other forms of violence.
That's a pretty heavy claim to make, and it says it without any doubt. Perhaps they can rule out all other causes of heart disease statistically? I don't know what sort of things cause heart disease that they might not know about in a population.
> There's absolutely no way you can definitively link deaths from heart disease to air pollution with any substantial degree of confidence, at least not in 99.99% of the cases.
We also can't definitively link specific cases of lung cancer to smoking. Would you also dismiss the link between smoking and lung cancer as baseless political-motivated pseudoscience?
Go ahead and visit your nearest hospital. Ask a cardiologist about heart disease cases they've seen in their career. Ask how many could have even possibly been a direct result of air pollution. Then ask how many were obviously linked to poor diet, lack of exercise, and/or smoking. Then you do the math.
> Ask how many could have even possibly been a direct result of air pollution.
That's now how this works. To go back to the smoking example, lung cancer is not a direct result of smoking. It's a combination of factors, smoking being one of them. Many people smoke their whole lives and are cancer free.
The question is, across the population, how many more people die of heart disease when pollution is present. That does not imply that pollution is the only cause, but simply an additional factor that pushes the number of deaths higher.
> Then ask how many were obviously linked to poor diet, lack of exercise, and/or smoking. Then you do the math.
Where in the article did it imply that pollution was a greater risk than poor diet and lack of exercise?
> how many more people die of heart disease when pollution is present
Exactly. And I'm saying that question is much more difficult to answer than some people probably think. Heart disease is so extremely prevalent, and there are so many variables at play that I find it hard to believe anyone can confidently answer that question definitively, at least so far as to claim that pollution is "responsible for" the deaths of X number of people.
It's especially hard to isolate because the dependent variable (pollution) and the independent variable (number of heart disease-related deaths) have both been increasing, and pollution levels are positively correlated with a lot of other risk factors for heart disease.
Bjorn Lomborg runs the Copenhagen Consensus centre. Lomborg is hated by many environmentalists because he says that the return on spending on Global Warming is not very good, He's not a far left environmentalist.
The Copenhagen Consensus link you provided is specifically referring to indoor air pollution from cooking and heating homes with open fires.
I haven't explored the Lancet Commission's study enough to know how much they ascribe to indoor vs outdoor air pollution, but in my opinion, using the indoor figure in the same context as Global Warming or any kind of global pollution problem is extremely deceptive. You might as well just call all smoking-related deaths "caused by air pollution" because cigarettes were polluting the smoker's own air supply.
Pollution kills everyone by shortening or reducing quality of life, it's near impossible to quantify, but what makes no sense at all is picking some arbitrary threshold, everyone is affected not 9M not 1B, but 7B.
It says premature deaths. I'm not sure it makes no sense at all, but it is an unfortunate thing to focus on. DALYs seem better, and are discussed throughout the article (which I've only skimmed so far), eg:
> The GBD study also estimates that disease caused by all forms of pollution was responsible for 268 million DALYs—254 million years of life lost and 14 million years lived with disability. This information is available by country and region and is presented in the appendix.
This would be far more useful if it’s measured in life years, than lives. There is big difference between pollution killing an healthy infant then killing a 86 year old suffering from a terminal illness.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 88.1 ms ] threadIf 16% of deaths can be attributed to pollution, and some percentage are vehicle related, accidents in general, preventable disease / infections, etc etc...
How many deaths per year should we expect if all of those things could be reduced / minimised / eliminated?
I remember a gerontologist showing some math where if you prevented all heart disease you'd only gain about 4 years of human lifespan (since most of those people would soon get cancer); similarly if you prevented all cancer you'd only get about 4 years as well (since most of those people would get heart disease).
But if you prevented both, you'd get something north of 10 years of average lifespan.
> air pollution was the biggest killer, leading to heart disease, stroke, lung cancer and other illnesses
There's absolutely no way you can definitively link deaths from heart disease to air pollution with any substantial degree of confidence, at least not in 99.99% of the cases.
I guarantee that within a short amount of time, this whole "study" will be invalidated as baseless political-motivated pseudoscience.
I have not read the detail of the report in question, but your assertion is not really true, because it assumes that each individual case needs to be definitively linked as "yes-or-no" as being caused by air pollution. That is just not how population studies like this work.
On the other hand, (and, again, it could be in the source of the report, not sure) but a more accurate/effective measure is years of life lost because of pollution. One of the most tragic consequences of heavy pollution is it's effect on the young. Pollution in some cities like New Delhi is so horrendous that it's like smoking a pack or two a day - imagine that effect on a young child.
I agree (that's not how these studies work), and that's kind of my point. If you're going to throw around phrases like "caused by" (or "responsible for", as claimed by the study), then you really should be able to definitively link the two.
You may not be able to say with absolute 100% certainty that "a specific smoker got long cancer from smoking", but you can often be >95% certain. Can you (or anyone) say the same for outdoor air pollution and heart disease?
The method of action is well supported and due to the inflammatory response. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3784920/
But, at this point it's clear you don't care about science when it conflicts with your gut feelings, a common failing.
I'm not calling into question the method of action, but I am saying that there is no evidence of outdoor air pollution having anywhere close to the same effect on premature death (via heart disease or otherwise) as smoking, nor would it even be remotely close to the other fictitious numbers you've mentioned.
Smoking on it's own causes ~6 million deaths per year and air pollution is linked to ~5.5 to 7 million deaths a year so they really are on the same scale. (And larger than my example 20% vs 30%.)
Yes, only a subset of the population smoke so the direct impact is higher. However, some areas also have vastly higher levels of air pollution.
Now, if you have some actual evidence then sure feel free to share, but I am just not hearing it.
Instead of merely reading the conclusions of these studies, I'd encourage you to look at the underlying data with a healthy dose of skepticism. Only then will you start to see all the holes in the research.
You even have edge cases like parking lot attendants / toll collectors who have vastly increased disease risks.
http://www.thelancet.com/commissions/pollution-and-health
Is the lancet politically motivated? I haven't heard about it before, but I am not yet really well versed in the climate science field.
It says in the abstract: Diseases caused by pollution were responsible for an estimated 9 million premature deaths in 2015—16% of all deaths worldwide—three times more deaths than from AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria combined and 15 times more than from all wars and other forms of violence.
That's a pretty heavy claim to make, and it says it without any doubt. Perhaps they can rule out all other causes of heart disease statistically? I don't know what sort of things cause heart disease that they might not know about in a population.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lancet
We also can't definitively link specific cases of lung cancer to smoking. Would you also dismiss the link between smoking and lung cancer as baseless political-motivated pseudoscience?
That's now how this works. To go back to the smoking example, lung cancer is not a direct result of smoking. It's a combination of factors, smoking being one of them. Many people smoke their whole lives and are cancer free.
The question is, across the population, how many more people die of heart disease when pollution is present. That does not imply that pollution is the only cause, but simply an additional factor that pushes the number of deaths higher.
> Then ask how many were obviously linked to poor diet, lack of exercise, and/or smoking. Then you do the math.
Where in the article did it imply that pollution was a greater risk than poor diet and lack of exercise?
Exactly. And I'm saying that question is much more difficult to answer than some people probably think. Heart disease is so extremely prevalent, and there are so many variables at play that I find it hard to believe anyone can confidently answer that question definitively, at least so far as to claim that pollution is "responsible for" the deaths of X number of people.
It's especially hard to isolate because the dependent variable (pollution) and the independent variable (number of heart disease-related deaths) have both been increasing, and pollution levels are positively correlated with a lot of other risk factors for heart disease.
I guess that, that it is especially hard, is what motivates some people to put in the effort to attempt to quantify these variables.
It's probably impossible to determine with absolute certainty, though it might be possible to determine with some level of confidence.
The wikipedia page has a figure of 5M
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_pollution
The Copenhagen Consensus puts the figure at 7M
http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/post-2015-consensus/air-p...
Bjorn Lomborg runs the Copenhagen Consensus centre. Lomborg is hated by many environmentalists because he says that the return on spending on Global Warming is not very good, He's not a far left environmentalist.
I haven't explored the Lancet Commission's study enough to know how much they ascribe to indoor vs outdoor air pollution, but in my opinion, using the indoor figure in the same context as Global Warming or any kind of global pollution problem is extremely deceptive. You might as well just call all smoking-related deaths "caused by air pollution" because cigarettes were polluting the smoker's own air supply.
The wikipedia page address both indoor and outdoor pollution. Presumably this new figure has both indoor and outdoor pollution.
Burning things for fuel is what causes a lot of air pollution, both indoor and outdoor.
The only reason I mentioned global warming is because Lomborg and the Copenhagen Consensus centre are far from most environmentalists on these issues.
Pollution kills everyone by shortening or reducing quality of life, it's near impossible to quantify, but what makes no sense at all is picking some arbitrary threshold, everyone is affected not 9M not 1B, but 7B.
> The GBD study also estimates that disease caused by all forms of pollution was responsible for 268 million DALYs—254 million years of life lost and 14 million years lived with disability. This information is available by country and region and is presented in the appendix.