Killer Ozone?

Tufriast writes "This will make you think twice about an H2... The BBC News has reported that the death toll in U.S. cities might have a correlation to the ozone levels in them. The article mentions several major U.S. cities, and notices the upward trend in premature deaths as pollution levels rise. The results can also be found in the Journal of the American Medical Association."

Not very scientific

[El]

Confusing correlation with cause again, I see... how is this for a theory: perhaps the same crowded conditions that create the accumulation of ozone also create stress in people's lives that makes them more prone to violence?

Re:Not very scientific

[benhocking]

Why I agree that using correlation to suggest causation is a very weak argument, there are several other studies that demonstrate that ozone is definitively bad for us. What I don't understand is, how is this news? I was taught this back in the early 80's, based purely off of human physiology data. It was made very clear to us that ozone near the ground was bad, ozone high up in the ozone layer is good, and there's no way (known) to move ozone from the "bad place" to the "good place".

pollution in cities is much better now

[terevos]

Uhh.. I see that people have failed to mention that pollution in cities has really gone down in the past 50 years. There was a period of time from the industrial revolution where the pollution was particularly bad. Now pollution in major cities is way down. I'm glad they've done the pollution control they've done so far, but there's no reason to get all crazy in thinking that we're totally destroying the earth by our air pollution right now. We're doing a whole lot better than we were about 50 years ago.

Some books like 'The Resourceful Earth' and 'The State of Humanity' by Julian Simon has plenty of facts and stats about how the air in cities is as clean is as it was in 1580. That's right - 1580! I'd say we're doing pretty good now.