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WHO: Air Pollution 'Killed 7 Million People' In 2012
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.
The problem is sorting itself out.
This right here is something that anyone who lives in a highly polluted urban area knows instinctively. You don't need studies and scientists to point out that pollution(air) is not healthy, and that exposure to it over time(years) is bad and probably contributes to Asthma and Emphysema(would appear obvious) and also things like Lung Cancer and Heart Disease... Common sense would dictate this observation.
This Common Sense observation, that air pollution is bad, is my main, MAIN point of animosity towards all the "there is no human caused global warming due to pollution or putting carbon into the atmosphere" douchebags.
Who gives a flying f*&k if the billions of tons of air pollution each year are causing climate change? Really! Why worry and argue about that when we know beyond any sort of Koch brothers funded propaganda that air pollution, the same air pollution putting billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere, is also killing the oceans via acidification, browning the forest and(drum roll please...) killing humans.
We should be doing everything in our power to reduce the amount of air pollution we put into the air, if not for what it is doing to the climate, at least for what it is doing to our health.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
That would be true if the number of people of each age was the same. But there are many more children than elderly, since the population is still rising.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I think you are assuming a uniform distribution of age. Not a good assumption.
Could you share the math on that?
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.
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.
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.
Biomass and wood are short-term renewables and coal is renewable too on a geologic time scale. All 3 were leading offenders here, so thi smakes no sense. * I guess uranium is renewable too if you wait for a new planet...
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 something to do with it. In any case, go to *rich* places, and they tend to be clean, which at least proves that a cleaner environment doesn't automatically lead to poverty.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
news flash for you, those working people heated their homes. Of course, your suppositions are no more ridiculous than WHO's ....
The answer is renewables, everyone knows it, some people are too cowardly to admit it.
Wood isn't renewable?
No sig today...
A true nuclear reactor wouldn't cause any pollution.
No sig today...
"Smug" is the filthy cloud you see around a Toyota Prius.
No sig today...
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)
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
Yes! Three by my count
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!
If we multiply that by 10 we have balanced the excess births and stopped the population explosion :p
thegodmovie.com - watch it
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.
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.
Fission isn't great, sure, but it's problems really are minor compared to burning coal or wood - but then, it's not going to help the very low-tech regions having these problems. Natural gas, OTOH, burns clean, and there's certainly no shortage of it, but it's hard to transport. Solar thermal is low tech and works, but it's capital-intensive for impoverished regions (still, it would make a nice charity endeavor) and a crappy choice for heating at night.
There aren't any easy answers, because anything you do requires infrastructure. And there are places in the world more developed than you'd think where running miles of copper wires for power distribution is just too impractical to keep in place.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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 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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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...
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, if we do 1cm distance from a 1480Bq Cs-137 source times 8765 hours (per year), you end up with a rate of Living in this 45km x 45km area would net you a whopping 9 mSv / year.
Fatal doses tend to be ~4.5 Sv. Worrysome annual dosages tend to be around 50mSv. 9mSv is like getting a CT scan once a year-- and this is if you're in the worst hit 2000km^2 of the worst hit country. In reality, the extra dosage you would have gotten from Chernobyl is just not that high.
Now compare Nuclear with hydroelectric which has killed hundreds of thousands of people in single incidents, or coal which year after year has mining accidents on its record (not to mention the pollution), and it looks pretty good. Not as good safety-wise as perhaps wind / solar, but its also a heck of a lot cheaper and a LOT more scalable.
There are potential issues and things to worry about with nuclear. Safety is not one,
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.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
The two biggest forms of biomass are wood, and methane reclaimed from landfills. They are considered renewable because it's "new" carbon and so is considered carbon-neutral. As opposed to the "old" carbon locked up in fossil fuels which is released when burned. This ignores the pollutants it releases into the atmosphere other than CO2.
Of the electricity generated in the U.S., 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-biggest form of renewable electricity in the U.S. For overall energy used (i.e. including wood burned for heating), it is the biggest form of renewable energy, accounting for almost half of renewable energy produced in the U.S.
So take the stats saying "we're getting x% of our energy from renewable sources" with a grain of salt. It may not be as clean as you think it is.
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 from reaching the funding goals projected to be reached 20+ years ago.
Fission could be handled decently, but so long as we subsidize new ore mining by not requiring timely reprocessing of spent fuel into fresh fuel and short-lived waste it can only be an ugly hack with horribly dangerous byproducts. We also need to eliminate the cost incentive for operating unsafe nuclear plants. Sealed modular reactors have the potential to change things, but aside from legally requiring all plant managers and CEOs to commit seppuku in the case of an environment-contaminating disaster I don't see any other possibility for promoting safe fission reactors.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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 hardly expect high-dollar research to progress any faster than funding allows.
I don't think avoiding shortcuts when fission reactors are built is enough - there's no shortage of evidence of reactors being operated long past when potentially catastrophic flaws develop, many of them still operating unrepaired in the US - so long as nothing *else* goes wrong it's a non-issue, but the redundant safety systems have been compromised. Sure, not building more Chernobyl-style reactors is a step in the right direction, but only a step.
Sealed modular reactors have to potential to change things since the reactors are built/maintained by an independent corporation selling reactors to many power plants, so they have incentive to avoid catastrophes. A power company generally does not - if they are held to account for any disaster they're completely out of business, so there's no economic rationale for considering the possibility. And since the individual reactor vaults will be taken offline regularly to allow the reactor to cool then be returned for refueling/refurbishing, there is a natural schedule for vault maintenance as well.
As for the extent of the mess of Fukushima - I really don't know what to think. Some of the stories I've heard suggest the real problems are still only beginning. Certainly I doubt China would have offered to cede Japan a slice of its western desert if the problem wasn't a lot uglier than widely believed, even if the offer were intended only as an insult.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
Air pollution kills more than communism did!
And certainly no true Zombie would be hurt by any amount of radiation
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
Regardless of the "rounded" number, it all sounds like it is on track then! /facepalm @ maddening stupidity of the W.H.O.
I think you need to wait for a supernova for everything beyond iron.
That was the joke.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Take a look at this graph: Nuclear Electricity Production. 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.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
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.
Personally I'm not anti-nuclear. I was just correcting an implicit assumption that nuclear doesn't kill through pollution.
Yeah, I nearly split my sides.
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*
I thought all the hipsters had switched to car-pooling in Teslas?
Judging by the number of slashvertisements...
That was the joke.
So how come you didn't mod it "funny"?
No sig today...
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.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
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.
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.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
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.
~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".