WHO: Air Pollution 'Killed 7 Million People' In 2012 97
dryriver sends word of new figures from the World Health Organization that estimate around 7 million people died in 2012 as a result of their exposure to air pollution. "In particular, the new data reveal a stronger link between both indoor and outdoor air pollution exposure and cardiovascular diseases, such as strokes and ischaemic heart disease, as well as between air pollution and cancer. This is in addition to air pollution’s role in the development of respiratory diseases, including acute respiratory infections and chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases." The Organization says the bulk of the deaths occurred in South-East Asia and the Western Pacific Regions (PDF), with indoor air pollution causing more deaths than outdoor pollution in those areas, largely due to the use of coal, wood, and biomass stoves for cooking.
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1. Energy production
2. Nuclear power
3.Banning
If we count only the text, that's a low 2.3 words per strawman argument. A slashdot record!
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Biomass and wood are short-term renewables and coal is renewable too on a geologic time scale.
Biomass and wood from sustainable sources are indeed renewable. Coal isn't, because we are using it far faster than geological timescales.
For sure, renewable and clean aren't synonyms. renewables tend to be far cleaner than fossil fuels. But not all renewables are clean. Anything that involves burning pollutes.
Re:you wait for a new planet... (Score:2)
I think you need to wait for a supernova for everything beyond iron.
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The answer is renewables, everyone knows it, some people are too cowardly to admit it.
Wood isn't renewable?
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Every power source is really solar power (well, fission was enables by a different star, but still). Everything is "envirnmentally damaging, to some extent.
The problem here isn't some hand-wavy abstraction, the problem is people burning wood and coal indoors (plus the very existence of toxic city - eesh, burning dumped electronic waste to recover the metals). It's the same problem that caused "pea soup fogs" and killed enough people in London ~100 years ago to cause the first air quality-related laws.
Fiss
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Fusion isn't. Well sure, it's basically the same mechanism as solar power at it's source, but done far more efficiently without spewing the vast majority of the energy across interstellar space. And if we'd just stop cutting the research funding we'd probably have it by now - we're still pretty much on track for the initial "20 years to harnessed fusion" estimates, as measured in anticipated research dollars. We've just kept cutting the research budget so that what, 40+ years later?, we're still 20 years
Re:How terrible energy production is! (Score:5, Insightful)
Fusion would change everything, no doubt, but you can't really blame the lack of progress (only) on cutting budgets. The "always 20 years out" is as much about the fact that "20 years out" is the same as "no useful progress" as anything else. But there is, after all, a quite powerful fusion reaction going on overhead, and I suspect that the problems with harnessing that will be solved much faster. Mostly we just need a dense, safe battery, and progress on that is evident yearly.
As far as fission fuel reprocessing, we're just ultra-paranoid about nuclear proliferation. From an energy perspective it's quite silly, but as any veteran engineer knows: sometimes the non-engineering factors do need to determine outcomes.
As far as safety - I think we can make reactors fairly tolerant of operator abuse, if we can at least avoid really stupid shortcuts when the thing is built (no Chernobyl-style reactors). For all that Fukushima is a mess, it's still pretty trivial compared to the natural disaster that caused it. Three Mile Island was about as much operator error as it's possible to make, and still the failure mode just wasn't that bad. Modern designs are far safer than either - safer I suspect than a refinery/chemical plant.
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Actually while "20 years out" has become a popular vernacular for "someday, maybe", I think that may actually be due in large part to the poor progress of fusion research itself. And the fact is we've made a great deal of useful progress on fusion, from what I've heard we're actually at roughly where initial estimates put us this point in the research funding. But fusion funding has been falling steadily such that reaching the initial funding target has itself been perpetually 20 years away, and one can h
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One thing to consider: when the government is willing to allow stuff like nuclear plants to keep operating past their sell-by date, it's a cultural problem. Everything everywhere will have that problem, like bridges collapsing for lack of proper maintenance (which we've also seen). But no one has the political will to address that - people are just too easily distracted by nonsense like candidates positions on gay marriage, or some other trivial BS, and so corruption grows and grows.
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We've done a lot of research into fusion, and learned a whole lot. One thing we've learned is that it's harder than it looked. That's one reason for the "20 years out" rule.
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Pretty poor attempt at sarcasm, given it only reveals your ignorance to the number of radiation and cancer deaths from Chernobyl. Nuclear power is indeed one of the fatally polluting energy generation methods.
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A true nuclear reactor wouldn't cause any pollution.
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And no true scotsman would be killed by pollution anyway.
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And certainly no true Zombie would be hurt by any amount of radiation
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That was the joke.
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Yeah, I nearly split my sides.
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That was the joke.
So how come you didn't mod it "funny"?
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Add the quarter of a million Japanese murdered by President Truman.
Leave the shit in the ground lest a 'rogue state' break the truce of mutually assured destruction. *cough* Al Qaeda *cough*
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Pretty poor attempt at sarcasm, given it only reveals your ignorance to the number of radiation and cancer deaths from Chernobyl. Nuclear power is indeed one of the fatally polluting energy generation methods.
Bull.
The numbers around chernobyl are thrown around with much hysteria, but lets look at some actual facts. WHO estimates the estimated death toll for Chernobyl might hit 4000, and noted:
As of mid-2005, however, fewer than 50 deaths had been directly attributed to radiation from the disaster, almost all being highly exposed rescue workers, many who died within months of the accident but others who died as late as 2004.
http://www.who.int/mediacentre... [who.int]
If we do a bit of calculation based on the Bq radiation estimates from Wikipedia, the hardest hit region of the hardest hit country (Belarus) could have gotten radiation around 1480+ Bq of Cs-137 over an area of 2000 km^2. According to a Bq-to-Sv calculator [radprocalculator.com], if we do 1cm distance from a 1
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They are, and I dont think nuclear proponents are generally anti-solar or wind. I just think (and would assume most agree) that wind and solar have almost no chance of providing most of our power.
Ideally nuclear would provide the base, and solar / wind would contribute to that, along with whatever other sources happen to be economical for a particular area.
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Bull.
The numbers around chernobyl are thrown around with much hysteria, but lets look at some actual facts. WHO estimates the estimated death toll for Chernobyl might hit 4000
You're saying that 4000 killed from nuclear pollution from just one single incident somehow proves that nuclear isn't one of the fatally polluting energy generating methods? Logic fail.
I grant you it's not nearly as damaging pollution wise as coal. But the comparison with hydro is false. There are no pollution deaths from hydro.
If the question had been which forms of energy generation are safest overall, then that would be different matter. But it wasn't, so your call of "bull" is just plain wrong.
Personal
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You're saying that 4000 killed from nuclear pollution from just one single incident somehow proves that nuclear isn't one of the fatally polluting energy generating methods? Logic fail.
Total deaths from Nuclear as a power source over the last 40 years: under 100. Expected to maybe go as high as 4000 in the next 20 years or so.
Total deaths from coal mining ALONE (not even counting deaths from pollution in Chinese cities, which is probably pretty alarming): 1000 per year
Total deaths from Hydroelectric from a single dam failure ~10 years ago: 100,000+
Yea, Id say ~60 deaths per year (if WHO's estimate comes true) world wide is pretty darn good, all things considered.
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Again, your claim of "Bull" was to my point that nuclear energy kills through pollution. I never said it was more fatal than coal.
Your "bull" was just plain wrong. You're arguing a point I never made.
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~60 deaths per year (if WHO's estimate comes true)
Theres just about nothing else on earth with a global fatality rate that low, hence my "bull". Right now that fatality rate is sitting at under ~2.5/year globally.
Its the definition of "statistical noise".
Re:Really? (Score:5, Funny)
"Smug" is the filthy cloud you see around a Toyota Prius.
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I thought all the hipsters had switched to car-pooling in Teslas?
Judging by the number of slashvertisements...
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indeed, the WHO forgot to mention not only would the 7 million have died sooner without the fuel use, but so would hundreds of millions of others.
In short, WHO is spewing agenda driven nonsense
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Sounds like there's an assumption running amok - the people died come from those who are saved by fuel use.
Hmm.
More likely these people are simply those who have to work outside more or live outside, which is neither here nor there on benefiting from fuel use. Those who have the money can largely shield themselves from it -- and in the sanctity of their homes enjoy a good tin of Perri Air.
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news flash for you, those working people heated their homes. Of course, your suppositions are no more ridiculous than WHO's ....
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You make the mistake of confusing energy and fuel. As a human race we can stop using fuel, and still have all the energy we require.
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This is the problem in dealing with problems: people who are determined to be helpless in the face of a problem. There are other possibilities than doing nothing or forcing poverty on people.
In any case, if you actually travel around the world to places where there is an incredibly high rate of poverty, you'll find that poor places are frequently dirty and polluted. In part this may be because they can't afford clean energy and industry, but I think the fact that poor people don't have political clout has
Excellent (Score:1)
one in eight deaths? (Score:1)
This pretty much says that ~56 million people died in 2012.
Given that we have 7 billion people living on this rock, 56 million deaths implies an average lifespan of 125 years. While living to 120+ would be kind of interesting, I somehow doubt that that will be happening too often soon.
Re:one in eight deaths? (Score:4, Insightful)
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56M deaths implies an avg lifespan of 125 yrs (Score:2)
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Okay, so I was wrong.
Looking at the numbers for 2012, I find that 56 million deaths is entirely consistent with the population growth rate (just under 1.1%) and birth rate (1.915%).
This seems counterintuitive to me, since 0.8% of the population dying every year suggests a much higher AVERAGE lifespan than we empirically have.
Nonetheless, the numbers (birthrate, deathrate, and population growth rate) are consistent (assuming they are correct, mind you - no opinions on how accurate estimates of any of thes
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As others have said - for AVERAGE (arithmetic I assume) lifespan you also need to consider the average age at death. When infant mortality is a major contributor to the death rate it skews things considerably. Not to mention the large number of countries where thanks to war, AIDS and/or other factors the MEDIAN death age is only in the twenties or so.
AGW Douchebags (Score:2, Flamebait)
This Common Sense observation, that air pollution is bad, is my main, MAIN point of animosity towar
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its been said many times before, but the heart of the anti-global warmers are the religious idiots who think that the earth is our to use, abuse, and we won't be here very much longer since 'jesus v2.0' will be coming soon to take (some) of us up to heaven.
nutjobs! total whacked-out brains. but half of the US is like this; maybe more than half the US.
the other group is the greedy old rich men group; they care only enough for themselves and nothing really bad will happen in the next 10 or so years and they
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They must not have gotten the memo - Jesus did in fact return at the end of 2013 and transported all the worthy believers directly to heaven. Social demographics remained unaffected, in fact vanishingly few individuals were even reported missing, but the second coming and Rapture has come and gone. If you're still here you'd better make yourself comfortable, we've got another 2000 years to wait until the third coming.
On a less satirical note, I think you underestimate the greedy old men - I suspect most of
People like you increase pollution (Score:2)
We should be doing everything in our power to reduce the amount of air pollution we put into the air
Yes we should.
But AGW Warmist Fanatics such as yourself don't want to reduce the air pollution that causes health issues (Carbon MONOXOIDE, Sulfur dioxide, CFC, various particulates, etc) - they want to reduce CO2.
So you force efforts and money away from REAL pollution reduction to waste on reduction of a pretty much harmless gas that the entire biosphere of Earth has spent millions of years evolving to proce
Re:People like you increase pollution (Score:4, Informative)
First off I agree that considering CO2 at the expense of all other pollutants is folly. However...
There's *lots* of evidence that the global climate periodically shifts dramatically due in large part to instabilities in the carbon cycle - i.e. planet starts to cool, ice sheets spread, CO2 gets locked into the permafrost,etc. in a self-accelerating cycle until we reach a full-on ice age. Or alternately planet starts to warm, permafrost thaws releasing more CO2 into the air until eventually the ice sheets melt entirely. It's more complicated than that, but there's basically zero scientific debate that if something destabilizes the global climate badly enough we slide to the opposite extreme. The positive-feedback link between the ecological carbon cycle and global climate is firmly established, it's happened many times in observable history, and the combination of atmospheric CO2 levels and variations in solar irradiance, along with a few other minor contributors, pretty much explain all global climate shifts in the bast half-million years, though they're mostly all preceded by one or more major trigger events that destabilize things. And the fact that we're currently in an interglacial period within an ice age is equally firmly established.
The only question remaining is exactly how big a change in global climate is required to act as a trigger event to set the planet on a long-term warming cycle. Human CO2 emissions are vanishingly small compared to the environmental emissions that will be released if we cross the tipping point, but reaching the tipping point only seems to require, at most, a few degrees of temperature change to send us sliding to the opposite extreme. The question that remains unanswered is whether human CO2 emissions are causing sufficient warming to be a trigger event in their own right, and the evidence is strongly suggestive that it is. Depending on the assumptions made we may be able to have another century of warming before crossing the threshold, or we may already have done so.
So yeah, CO2 emissions are a big deal. Disregarding humans I'd be tempted to say lets just keep toxins out of the environment, and let things follow their course. But humans introduce two major problems:
1) Over the last few tens of thousands of years we seem to be responsible for one of the larger extinctions in our planets history - this on top of the extinctions due to being in an ice age - interglacial period or not. Adding a sudden dramatic climate shift - potentially faster than any in the geologic record, could be devastating to an already severely damaged biosphere.
2) We're unlikely to go quietly - if things get ugly I fully expect most every human on the planet to do anything and everything necessary to ensure their own survival, and/or ensure that nobody else profits from their death. Pollution will be a non-issue if weighed against survival, and WWIII could make things far uglier for millenia to come. In other words if we cross the tipping point I suspect we'll start emitting toxic pollution at rates to dwarf those seen before the environmental movement got started - to avoid long term hideous pollution rates we need to avoid crossing the tipping point.
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No, I understand perfectly well that we haven't reached the peak from being in an ice age - we're nowhere even close. That's the problem. All of human history has taken place during an ice age, we've been in an interglacial period within that ice age for recorded history, and if we cross the tipping point we're going to rapidly leave that ice age and transition to a global climate that our species has never seen before. Likely a heavily tropical + desert climate, neither of which is terribly friendly to
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But AGW Warmist Fanatics such as yourself don't want to reduce the air pollution that causes health issues (Carbon MONOXOIDE, Sulfur dioxide, CFC, various particulates, etc) - they want to reduce CO2.
So you force efforts and money away from REAL pollution reduction to waste on reduction of a pretty much harmless gas that the entire biosphere of Earth has spent millions of years evolving to process in mass quantities.
This is in fact really my only beef with AGW religious fanatics such as myself, otherwise I wouldn't care how much you lie or mislead to make your case. But you are harming the environment directly, which is why I work to stop your dark and twisted philosophy from taking root where possible.
Wow, where do I begin replying to this...
1. When did I say I "don't want to reduce the air pollution that causes health issues"?
2. When did I "lie or mislead" to "make my case"?
3. Explain how I am "harming the environment directly", anymore than you are...?
And now to the piece de resistance(this is too good for words):
which is why I work to stop your dark and twisted philosophy from taking root where possible.
Do you know how nutty that sounds?
"Dark and twisted" philosophy? You need to crawl back into under your rock...
Damn Kendall, you gave me the best laugh I've had in a while!
Go
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Clearly this has offended your subconscious prejudices rather than your rational mind, as you don't offer a scrap of reasoning or evidence for why it might be wrong.
Meaningless statistic (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a meaningless statistic. Serious medical researchers report this in person-years lost, not in meaningless "millions of deaths". To illustrate, let's suppose those 57 million people were infirm and about to die, but pollution hastened their demise by one second. Then this is not a big deal. Personally I would happily shorten my life for exactly one second in exchange for the conveniences of modern life. On the other hand if these people had their lives substantially shortened then this is a veritable tragedy.
However such misleading headline doesn't surprise me: the UN is a master of over-hyped sky-is-falling chicken-little statistics.
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You could say that of any category of death. It doesn't matter if people die of hearth disease if it only shortens their lifespan by 1 second. It doesn't matter if people are killed in road traffic accidents if they would otherwise have died a second later by something else.
But of course you would only say something like that if you were trying to diminish the importance of a category deaths for some reason. Like politics for example.
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You could say that of any category of death.
Precisely, which is why medical researchers tend to speak of person-years. They also readily volunteer that people dying of cancer or heart attack at age 55 is a completely different thing than people dying of the same illnesses at age 90, since the latter would have died of something else not much later anyhow.
Like politics for example.
The statistic, as I pointed out, is meaningless and it is not used by medical researchers. Who is playing politics you say?
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Precisely, which is why medical researchers tend to speak of person-years.
Sometimes. More often about number of deaths from a particular cause though.
Who is playing politics you say?
I think you are. To the extent of misrepresenting medical research.
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However such misleading headline doesn't surprise me: the UN is a master of over-hyped sky-is-falling chicken-little statistics.
I would love to see the statistic about how many people will use this statistic as evidence in their next argument.
Re:Meaningless statistic (Score:4, Insightful)
There are problems with the report (per Figures 4, apparently zero people between the ages of 5 and 25 died of air pollution), but there are also problems with your response:
#1. Pollution-related illnesses and deaths are rarely quick or pleasant. Heart disease. Lung cancer. Stroke. Respiratory infections. These are not pleasant ways to go.
#2. Relating to #1, "Person-years lost". If I stubbornly live to the ripe old age of 85, but the last third of that is spent choking on my own phlegm, being hooked up to machines on a weekly/monthly basis, and puttering about in my wheelchair whilst breathing with the assistance of an oxygen tank, apparently I haven't lost any person-years - in fact, by refusing to lay down and die, I've _improved_ my region's "person-years lost" statistic.
#3. So their headline "Air pollution killed 7 million people in 2012" is misleading whilst your conclusion "the UN is a master of over-hyped sky-is-falling chicken-little statistics" is not? Seriously?
China? (Score:2)
WHO: Air Pollution 'Killed 7 Million People' In 2012
How many of those were in China?
(and since it is the WHO which is part of the UN and thus kowtows to China, we'll have to subtract the numbers from Taiwan ourselves)
Getting there (Score:2)
If we multiply that by 10 we have balanced the excess births and stopped the population explosion :p
Oh please... (Score:5, Interesting)
OH PLEASE insulate me from this madness.
Yes insulation... we need more of it.
Lots more of it.
Dense living + acoustic insulation lets you sleep in quiet while your neighbors party
yet be able to walk to most markets. Dense living can save on many energy fronts
and not impact the environment by a sprawl out on farm land.
Hot or cold thermal thermal insulation is undersold for locations that need heating and cooling.
Windows are so bad thermally that it makes sense to replace most with insulated
wall and with a small camera invite view of the outside in. LED TV with an aero-gel
backlight for some locations.
Review your local building codes. Remove penalties for improvement and
demand better total insulation packages for homes and businesses.
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If the LCD is 100 watts we are close today:
Found on the web: CHSM 6610P module 250-watt Module
Single Panel 250watts 8.27amp 30.30volts 65.04" x 39.13"x 1.77"
And yes this is partly why hyper insulating aero gel is interesting
as it can pass light.
Shutters may prove more cost effective today and in many
locations would not require a building permit for existing structures.
New construction needs to be addressed in building code ASAP.
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And with the right interconnect the ground floor could have a ten square inch camera easement
on the ridge poll of a multi family home. And yes a view of a tropical beach from Chicago
without crazy long telephoto lenses and mirrors on the moon or other orbiting mass.
Note that biomass is considered renewable (Score:2)
Of the electricity generated in the U.S. [eia.gov], 7% comes from hydro, 3.5% from wind, 1.4% from biomass, 0.4% from geothermal, and 0.1% from solar. So it's actually the third-
Round figures always make me chuckle (Score:2)
If doomsayers used a number such as 6,967,231 nobody would believe the report. Yet somehow saying 7 million is totally believable. Humans are such a gullible species.
Communism beaten (Score:2)
~7 million people? (Score:2)
Regardless of the "rounded" number, it all sounds like it is on track then! /facepalm @ maddening stupidity of the W.H.O.
wrong (Score:1)
Nucular power (Score:3)
Take a look at this graph: Nuclear Electricity Production [world-nuclear.org]. It's quite easy to spot 1986 on this graph (Chernobyl). That's where the trend of acceleration in nuclear power growth has reversed into deceleration. No such reversal has occured in demand for electric power, of course. The shortfall has been largely picked up by coal.
The number of people that have been killed by air pollution from coal as an indirect result of the nuclear stagnation after the Chernobyl accident is well into the millions.