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38,000 People a Year Die Early Because of Diesel Emissions Testing Failures (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Diesel cars, trucks, and other vehicles in more than 10 countries around the world produce 50 percent more nitrogen oxide emissions than lab tests show, according to a new study. The extra pollution is thought to have contributed to about 38,000 premature deaths in 2015 globally. In the study, published today in Nature, researchers compared emissions from diesel tailpipes on the road with the results of lab tests for nitrogen oxides (NOx). The countries where diesel vehicles were tested are Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, the European Union, India, Japan, Mexico, Russia, South Korea, and the U.S., where more than 80 percent of new diesel vehicle sales occurred in 2015. The researchers found that 5 million more tons of NOx were emitted than the lab-based 9.4 million tons, according to the Associated Press. Nitrogen oxides are released into the air from motor vehicle exhaust or the burning of coal and fossil fuels, producing tiny soot particles and smog. Breathing in all this is linked to heart and lung diseases, including lung cancer, according to the International Council on Clean Transportation, which took part in the research. Governments routinely test new diesel vehicles to check whether they meet pollution limits. The problem is that these tests fail to mimic real-life driving situations, and so they underestimate actual pollution levels. The researchers estimate that the extra pollution is linked to about 38,000 premature deaths worldwide in 2015 -- mostly in the European Union, China, and India. (The U.S. saw an estimated 1,100 deaths from excess NOx.)
Considering that most Americans have less than $10,000 saved, dying early might actually be a good thing.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
38,000 out of nearly 8 billion is hardly worth worrying about.
It is one thing to present a problem, it is quite another to propose a solution. What immediately implementable solution do you have to replace diesel in the distribution of needed resources?
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
I'm not shedding one tear when you get fined into an early grave. As someone that got nauseated because I got stuck behind one of these assholes the other day I hope they all die in a fire.
but if those people had such serious breathing problems, weren't they going to die soon anyway? I know when I worked IT for Univ of Washington hospital that most of the people that trouble breathing because of the pollution in Seattle didn't do much better after moving to the middle of nowhere.
A. 'is thought to' does not mean 'is'
B. 'contributed to' does not mean 'caused'
I call bologna.
It's important to keep in mind that this is only an estimate, expressed as a round number. That doesn't mean that it's wrong, or that we should disregard it, it just means that we shouldn't take it too literally.
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Carbon is good for you! It doesn't like those rotten egg catalytic converters...
And in the same period, how many people died as a result of pollution from ordinary gasoline automotive emissions? Smog is a huge problem in the world but it's not all diesel engines. Removing diesels may help the problem but people are still going to die from health complications because of smog even if everyone just ran gasoline engines. So the deaths are tragic, but at the same time I'm not convinced they are statistically significant as a sole driver of public policy.
Reminds me of the classic scene from Yes Prime Minister where Humphries argues that preventing smoking would just cost the NHS more money and that it's far cheaper for smokers to continue to die at about the present rate. Morally Humphries is wrong of course, but economically he was absolutely correct.
https://www.nasa.gov/topics/ea...
According to a new paper by Ott and Pickering in the Journal of Geophysical Research, each flash of lightning on average in the several mid-latitude and subtropical thunderstorms studied turned 7 kilograms (15.4 pounds) of nitrogen into chemically reactive NOx. "In other words, you could drive a new car across the United States more than 50 times and still produce less than half as much NOx as an average lightning flash," Ott estimated. The results were published July.
When the researchers multiplied the number of lightning strokes worldwide by 7 kilograms, they found that the total amount of NOx produced by lightning per year is 8.6 terragrams, or 8.6 million metric tons. "That's somewhat high compared to previous estimates," said Pickering.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
One estimate is that 24,000 people are killed by lightning strikes around the world each year and about 240,000 are injured. Another estimate is that the annual global death toll is 6,000.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Because its not 38,000..
Its 'researchers (who want this to matter) 'estimate' it to be 38,000. Here is how this works.
They take the number of people who die from ANYTHING that can be distantly LINKED to this, and pick a number less than that.
Since this is 'linked' to almost any lung condition..... (not through any actual evidence of course, just because it is 'obvious' - it probably
does have an effect of course, and the magnitude is anyone's guess, because it would be impossible to actually measure..)
In fact the claims are not even correct - NOx is NOT the 'soot' that comes from diesel - the two are almost completely unrelated, and quite different in both effect and risk. this is just an attempt to cash in on 'dieselgate', whos actually effect is to reduce efficiency of diesel engines and actually increase total emissions if actually complied with (because they restrict based on percentage, not absolute output).
Let alone the fact that petrol engines actually routinely produce LARGER total amounts of NOx..
Why you ask? its easy, Diesel is a lot less profitable for suppliers.
Does that make it obvious enough?
Hell, breathing oxygen is 'linked' to 60,000,000+ deaths a year... its not hard to make up stupid numbers..
I struck some coal rolling rednecks nerve. Direct hit!
From dubious statistical extrapolations.
And here we have an idiot as president that wants to encourage burning coal. Yes, soot and air pollution murder people and whether it is from diesel, gasoline or coal it is nothing more than murder. But the right wing goes even further. Once they give a person heart disease or cancer from burning coal they also don't want them to have medical care. They excuse all this nonsense as a monetary issue. But nobody counts the costs associated with heart or lung cripples and the long term disabilities that eat up the national budget. One sick person can run up millions in public expenses.
Smoking causes 7 million premature deaths per year.
Second-hand smoke alone causes 900 000 premature deaths per year.
Not saying emission rules are not important and should not be enforced, but some perspective is important when making rules.
And how many people would have died had there been no automobiles?
The more fuel you put into the engine, the less gets burnt, leading to soot.
The less fuel you put in the hotter it burns, leading to more NOx.
So which is it, soot or NOx?
Mortality from Diesel Car Pollution in the UK attempts to provide an answer.
This is why I keep coming back here. There's nothing more entertaining than a good tar and feathering of a bad claim. Keep up the good work guys!
Further, there are multiple oxides of Nitrogen.
Nitric oxide, NO, is used by the body as a regeneration signal. An acquaintance has a job designing NO generators for battlefield use, either as part of an O2 delivery system (to help injured lungs) or to be directly applied to burned skin (to help with regeneration). He's associated with MGH in Boston. They will probably be seeing use in civilian hospitals in a couple of years.
The other oxides dissolve in water to form acids, but NO is actually beneficial.
I wonder if the NOx studies take that into account.
Here is how this works.
You didn't read the paper. I did.
The basic idea in the method is that they ran a number of simulations of where diesel vehicles are estimated to be driving in the 11 jurisdictions (based on real-world measurements), where emissions would end up being carried (and dissipated) by the atmosphere, and matching that up with population estimates. This was then applied to the current best estimates of the exposure-response curves to get an estimate of the number of deaths.
They ran with measured emissions to validate that it matches up with measured death rates. Then they reran with "theoretical" emissions (i.e. if the vehicle emissions actually were what they were supposed to be) and subtracted the two. Actually, they probably ran the simulation multiple times to get a confidence interval; more on this later.
NOx, ozone, and PM2.5 ("soot") were accounted for separately. This is clear from the paper, but not clear from the
The model was validated against real-world studies to make sure that it matched what we find in the field.
Now, if you're thinking that's a lot of assumptions, you're right. The 95% confidence interval is 23,000–47,000, which is quite a wide margin of error. Again, that is not clear from the writeup, but it's clear from the paper.
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And in the same period, how many people died as a result of pollution from ordinary gasoline automotive emissions?
The question you should be asking is: How accurate are the emissions tests for "ordinary" automobiles?
Because that's what the paper is trying to estimate. Not how many people are killed by vehicle emissions, but how many people are killed by inaccurate vehicle emission testing.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
I am gravely more concerned with bushfire pollution.
"is thought"
Sorry to burst the bubble of dishonesty over some activist hack's head, but there's no "there" there.
This is typical statistical garbage rather than real data. Is there a correlation between bad air and people dying from respiratory failure? Almost certainly - HOWEVER there is not a specific direct link in any of those deaths. This is unlike the statisical case against cigarettes. In the case of cigarettes we know the mechanisms, the hows and the whys, and we can pin the names of actual individuals and connect their deaths directly to smoking. In the case of these activist-driven quasi-science stories however we have a different thing: NOBODY can specifically have his/her death pinned on diesel engine exhaust (well, except for people who kill themselves with a hose from the tailpipe of their Mercedes...but that's a different argument about mental health)
This is like those Obama EPA era studies that said farm dust had to be regulated because people were being killed by the dust kicked-up when farmers in places like Kansas plow their fields (a sort-of necessary activity if you do not want the general population to starve to death). Sorry, but if you cannot pin the death of a specific person directly to the specific specified cause, but you are insisting you know how many people are killed by that very same cause, then you are probably doing junk science.
Although here in the U.S., we do have a problem with excessive Vin Diesel emissions.
#DeleteChrome
Particularly if I have to drive my bike behind one. It's the obNOxious smell that bothers me.
Well, we already have had fun, seeing some other comments. If you haven't already reached your fun quotient, consider this:
38,000 People a Year Die Early Because of:
crotchrot
Buffalo Shuffles
inseptivated conjunctimonius
piffle
Glaubner's disease
aggravated slashdot readeromious
...omphaloskepsis often...
If some publication is going to write about a scientific article, shouldn't they get a journalist with some vague understanding of science to do the writing? Just as an example, this kind of leaps out at the reader:
"Nitrogen oxides are released into the air from motor vehicle exhaust or the burning of coal and fossil fuels, producing tiny soot particles and smog."
Soot is carbon. NOx does not contain carbon, nor can it create carbon. Also, what is the difference between "motor vehicle exhaust" and "burning fossil fuels"?
As far as the scientific article itself is concerned, it seems a bit obvious. Everyone already knows that the testing standards do not reflect real-world driving conditions. If they only find that "more than half" of the light-duty vehicles emit more pollution in real world condition than in testing conditions, that's actually better than I would have expected.
The conclusion: "Adopting and enforcing next-generation standards...could nearly eliminate real-world diesel-related NOx emissions" assumes that such standards are actually achievable. From the cheating scandals, it appears that the current standards are already on the edge - more stringent standards may not be realistic.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
An emissions test does not have to emulate real world driving conditions; it only has to have a relationship to real world driving conditions and provided a standard baseline to check whether a vehicle is in good repair.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Assuming it's all true then 38,000 is a pretty small number in the grand scheme of things. Sounds like we should just tax the car manufacturers at a rate much less than the costs to improve designs to remove those emissions and invest it in research into Cancer, Obesity, Dementia etc. all those things which affect far more people per year.
The European Union is not a country. It's actually 28 countries.
Remember, there are no stupid questions. But there are a lot of inquisitive idiots.
For some reason, the focus in automobile emissions has recently shifted from particulates to the much less harmful nitrous oxides (NOx). Why? Industrial interests? There is evidence that Toyota (who do not have competitive diesel engines at the moment) are funding some of the organisations that take active roles in the war on diesel (e.g. DUH). Economical warfare against European companies by the US?
The worst part is that the war on diesel has already caused an increase in the percentage of petrol cars, which emit far more cancer-causing ultra-fine particulates and volatile organic compounds, as well as more carbon monoxide. It probably benefits someone, somewhere, but it is costing lives.
Where we declare coal to be a good thing and diesel engines to be a bad thing.
Maybe we should build cars with steam engines? Would that be Zeitgeist enough for you?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"And in the same period, how many people died as a result of pollution from ordinary gasoline automotive emissions? Smog is a huge problem in the world but it's not all diesel engines. Removing diesels may help the problem but people are still going to die from health complications because of smog even if everyone just ran gasoline engines."
Gas emissions in the developed world is tiny, since the first car emissions legislation focused on gas cars, it's why catalytic converters were introduced, to reduced NOx emissions from gas vehicles by 99%. After the low hanging fruit was solved they moved onto diesel vehicles, which can't use 3-way catalytic converters. The next remaining source in coal power generation without stack scrubbers.
Almost every car forum I have read through has people explaining how to bypass the emission devices to gain better performance. We would have been better off to allow engines to work naturally at their best then to choke the off so as many find it necessary to adapt. We also have one of the oldest automotive fleets in the civilized world as people cannot afford new cars.
1.25 million killed by automobiles in 2013.
38,000 killed by automobile NOx.
I see a few reporters that need to be kicked in the nads until death.
http://www.who.int/gho/road_safety/mortality/traffic_deaths_number/en/
It's time to just accept that emissions testing is never going to work right and will always be cheated, so it's just push for zero emission vehicles and move the problem away from population centres to places where it can be more easily controlled and mitigated.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Just as many people get massacred by american bombs every year, and perhaps even more.
Yes, that's right 3,500 people a day die in car accidents.
So that's 11 days accidents = 365 days of "diesel emmissions testing failures" deaths
'Zero emission' vehicles still have tyres, which nowaday produce the majority of health-damaging emissions in cars with internal combustion engines. In extremely heavy cars, such as those with batteries rather than an engine and a fuel tank, tyres produce even more particulates.
To put it in perspective, there are 6 million deaths per year caused by smoking.
That's one Jewish-part-of-the-holocaust every year.
#1 If you're going to make holocaust comparisons keep in mind where this scandal originated.
#2 The affect on everyone's health are worth considering more than the relative handful that can be more definitively related to this as a cause of death. Diesel cars and Dieselgate is everywhere, it was pretty obvious before the scandal because it stinks, but we've been breathing that shit in as pedestrians for decades... i'm a young healthy individual, but it will definitely have damaged my lungs, I can't quantify it but in the future I will have decreased lung capacity, I may be less active depending on the significance, it will also have increased my chances of lung cancer... even though I don't smoke. I didn't ask for this, Diesel fumes are the only significant source of NOx in this country.
Do smokers really die early on average? It seems like every one that I've known kept hacking and wheezing miserably to a ripe old age, ultimately costing the health care system more in the long run.
It's time to just accept that emissions testing is never going to work right and will always be cheated,
As I read the article (not having read the referred-to paper):
This wasn't about cheating. This was about the government-prescribed test cycles not correctly modelling the actual average driving cycle of the world's fleet of vehicles, the academic's model of the actual fleet emissions being somewhat off, the error happening to be on the low side, and recent measurements updating the model.
The mandated emissions testing cycle was KNOWN FROM THE START to be only roughly representative of overall vehicle usage. (That's why "your mileage may vary". Though on-the-road emissions are hard to measure, mileage is easy, and mileage during the test cycle falls out of a simple calculation of carbon emission as CO, CO2, unburned hydrocarbons, and exhaust volume. And it is - that's where sticker mileage comes from. When they systematically mismatch you know the test cycle mismatches average usage.)
And this was FINE. As long as the testing was REPEATABLE, ROUGHLY PROPORTIONAL to the actual cycle emissions, and covered all the common driving modes, it was an effective tool to drive emission-reduction engineering and legislation. The engineering might tend to improve the test results slightly more than fleet average (because that's where the selection pressure of the evolutionary algorithm happens to be). But it still drove a DRASTIC than fleet average (because that's where the selection pressure drop in emissions and a resulting drastic, and measurable, improvement in air quality.
Cheating consists of having the engine control recognize whether the vehicle is running the test cycle and changing its behavior - being good on emissions during the test, bad on emissions but better on performance and/or mileage when not on the test.
Voice of experience here: I wrote emissions analysis and engine control software for two of the Big Three during the 70s and 80s.
We all knew that it would be possible to write cheats into the code. And we all knew not to do it - because it would not only be bad for the environment, but it would also eventually be caught, and cause the company massive trouble. So the engineers were very careful not to do it, the managers were careful not to give the engineers an incentive to do it, and upper management put in drastic organizational controls to both prevent and detect it.
Fast forward a couple generations of executives and you find:
- A German automaker with executives who decided that cheating was the way to go.
- An American automaker (the former big-three company I didn't work for
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The ultimate "nimby"
Fast forward a couple generations of executives and you find:
- A German automaker with executives who decided that cheating was the way to go, and actually detected whether there was a driver (e.g. steering wheel moving) and did the same cycle differently.
- An American automaker (the former big-three company I didn't work for back in the day, now owned by an Italian automaker) accused of cheating because they didn't do as well in some extreme conditions outside the testing regime as they did within it, and have a difference of opinion vs. the regulators on what some of the law means.
The first is cheating. The second is up for debate (and being debated in the legal system). But neither is what this "Testing Failure" article was about.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Do smokers really die early on average? It seems like every one that I've known kept hacking and wheezing miserably to a ripe old age, ultimately costing the health care system more in the long run.
Yes, they do.
It's sampling bias: You just happen to know a bunch of old, hacking, smokers because they're the ones that didn't die off yet - while the young ones mostly aren't yet to the hacking stage.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
NOx is only a small part of the problem. Petrol engines produce far more particulates, volatile organic compounds and carbon monoxide, all of which are more damaging to human health than NOx.
Want, schmant. Behavior matters more than stated intent.
Maybe Lenin and Stalin didn't want those people to starve to death, but they did what they did and its outcome was predictable.
Especially when you get to Stalin. That guy was totally a killer. I name Stalin and while I think your "wanted to" isn't appropriate, Stalin lets me play with that handicap. He wanted to kill people. When Russ Hanneman met Stalin, he was all, "This guy kills! Am I right?"
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Stop the lightning.
Reducing emissions like NOx makes sense in places like the Los Angeles basin where there is reduced air circulation and concentrated population centers. But it literally makes no sense in other areas where CO and HC emissions need to be targeted, even at the expense of some more NOx.
When I search for articles about NOx, I find information about the nitrogen cycle and how plants depend, in part, on the NOx produced in the atmosphere by lightning. So, it's plant food.
Have gnu, will travel.
So what? The only emperor is the emperor of CO_2. All hail CO_2, the only true satan.
0
No one died. In order to get to this number, the researchers had to tap dance with numbers and forget to consult with wmbriggs.com
Doing that might have reduced the chance of their next paycheck though.
God: "I don't leave footprints!"
We mention that specifically in the paper (I'm a co-author). In Europe, the human health impact of the excess diesel NOx emissions is estimated to be 1/4th that of the total impact of all land-transportation sources of pollution (as estimated in Silva et al., Environ. Health Perspect., 2016). I think that's a pretty significant portion of the problem to be coming just from this particular source!
You say that as if it were a bad thing.
Didn't that result seem a bit unlikely to you and your co-authors, given how much worse for human health other pollutants are and how much more of them is produced by road vehicles?