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More Than 95% of World's Population Breathing Unhealthy Air, Says New Report (cnn.com)
More than 95% of the world's population is breathing unhealthy air and the poorest nations are the hardest hit, a new report has found. From the report: According to the annual State of Global Air Report, published Tuesday by the Health Effects Institute (HEI), long-term exposure to air pollution contributed to an estimated 6.1 million deaths across the globe in 2016. The report says exposure to air pollution led to strokes, heart attacks, lung cancer and chronic lung disease, causing many of those premature deaths. It also says that air pollution is the fourth-highest cause of death among all health risks globally, coming in below high blood pressure, diet and smoking.
I am just wondering where to find those 5%. Any one with a clue?
Southern Australians?
Table-ized A.I.
i dont think theres 365 million people in Australia :p
It's not a typo if you understood the meaning!
And yet the USA has currently the cleanest air since the industrial revolution.
Aside from living in China (which is a nasty business by itself), a whole lot of folks get their "air pollution" by cooking over smoky wood fires in their houses, huts, or shacks.
As mentioned above, the US is currently pretty darned clean, air-wise. I remember watching the smog roll over the hills from L.A. to the High Desert in the early 1980s. It looked like an overdone special effect.
Yet people are worried about Global Warming, while they choke on the air they breathe daily. Humans.
Damn chalupas
I wonder if Charles Darwin ever considered the possibility of human-generated environmental poisons being a contributor to natural selection.
Let the smog-choked prols die off or evolve into CO2 recyclers. A true win-win.
I am just wondering where to find those 5%. Any one with a clue?
Just look at the map on page 3 of the report.
It shows most of Africa, the Middle East, and southern Asia with the worst pollution. Countries at higher latitudes have much cleaner air. Canada, the United States (apart from the San Joaquin Valley and areas of the midwest), and large areas of Russia, Northern Europe, and Australia have pollution below the WHO guideline. Western Europe is pretty good, but Germany and northern France have particulate pollution higher than the guideline.
Maybe 5% of the world's population is just holding their breath?
Pound! Bang! Bin! Bash! is this a shell script or a Batman comic?
I wasn't aware that air could be healthy or unhealthy. How does one do a physical exam on air to find out?
And yet the USA has currently the cleanest air since the industrial revolution.
That's a pretty low bar. It'll be wonderful if we could stop burning shit and emitting shit.
Peoples' health is suffering because business is basically transferring their costs onto the people. Why clean up their emissions when they can just spew it into the air and when regulation is mentioned just scream, "The costs to us! And jobs will be lost!"
And in the meantime, the people are burden with the poor health and in the US the outrageous medical bills.
Privatize the profits; socialize the costs.
Well, since TFA says 95% of them are in poor countries, that suggests the 5% are in places like the USA and EU mostly.
Of course, TFA also says there were ~54 million deaths of all causes worldwide in 2015. Which is consistent with an average life expectancy of 140-odd....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I'm intrigued at the air quality being worse in the middle of the Australian desert than further out. I'm assuming it must be to do with dust or something, but considering that the darker regions are a tiny fraction of the desert, it would surprise me.
Druidia.
And yet lifespans increased an incredible amount during the industrial revolution. The same revolution that ushered in amazing technology, electrification, and medical advances.
So your argument is complete bullshit. People aren't dying from air pollution. They are dying because of old age and the limits of the human body.
I think a person 100+ years ago would have no problem trading their problems for ours.
I am just wondering where to find those 5%. Any one with a clue?
Just look at the map on page 3 of the report. It shows most of Africa, the Middle East, and southern Asia with the worst pollution. Countries at higher latitudes have much cleaner air. Canada, the United States (apart from the San Joaquin Valley and areas of the midwest), and large areas of Russia, Northern Europe, and Australia have pollution below the WHO guideline. Western Europe is pretty good, but Germany and northern France have particulate pollution higher than the guideline.
You got modded down for describing the map, and accurately answering the guy's question? Funky.
Peoples' health is suffering because business is basically transferring their costs onto the people...he people are burden with the poor health and in the US the outrageous medical bills.
Almost all of the US has clean air, except for the biggest cities. And the pollution there is primarily car exhaust, not businesses.
The biggest things people can do to reduce the cost of healthcare is to quit smoking, lose weight, and exercise.
Almost all of the US has clean air, except for the biggest cities. And the pollution there is primarily car exhaust, not businesses.
The EPA's National Emissions Inventory does not support your claim. And businesses use vehicles so...
Most of the particulates in the western world are dust. Is natural and unhealthy.
doesn't mean they are better now. I wish I could get more people to understand this.
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and mansions. Why do you think so few of them live in the cities, and why do you think rich folks tend to live so much longer? It ain't all that clean livin', let me tell you.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
but not in the cities. There it's smog, largely from cars stuck in traffic and (almost hilariously) idling in fast food drive thrus. You don't even have to question this. Apart from well publicized 'smog days' you can just drive outside any city and look at the smog cloud.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Facts and science are increasingly unwelcome, as they are toxic to propaganda and ideology.
Unfortunately, "the biggest cities" is where ~80% of the population lives.
No matter. The 95% gaspers can die-off ASAP ; No personal loss to we fortunate few cause we'll save a few hottsie bitches for amusement. And I like clean air when I trout fish.
"Life expectancy at birth." After the industrial revolution we got a lot better at treating illnesses that used to kill very young children, e.g. measles, polio, whooping cough. This skewed the statistic way up. Much more than people dying at 70 instead of 75 due to air pollution.
sustainable living
I sure hope the California air has the mandatory cancer label. The nerve of that air not being labeled. We can tolerate any number of illegals but on serious issues like Prop 65 we stand firm.
Actually no.
Urban life expectancy declined precipitously during the industrial revolution. It turns out that horrible pollution, long hours in an unsafe factory environment, and grinding poverty are pretty bad for human health. Who knew?!
We owe our current (declining, if you're an American) life expectancy to two advances occurring well after the industrial revolution proper: urban sanitation (water & sewer) systems, and antibiotics.
It's first now we're starting to see and feel the side effects of the industrial revolution. Don't get me wrong, it was very beneficial for humanity as our lives are much better today than ever before (same for agricultural revolution, stone/bronz/iron ages) but we need to go forward into the next stage of our evolution.
Most rural areas, except where heavy industries reside; northern populations (Lapland, Iceland, parts of Siberia), lots of insular countries, etc.
Numbers add up.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Tasked to cleaning up our environment you know 'Environmental Protection Agency' is working on dismantling works from the time of Nixon. That tells you who is paying Trump's bills.
I really didn't care for Clinton but Trump is worse.
cause it is so easy to breath in a healthy way; you breath in, then out, and repeat the process....
All RIGHT.
So I farted.
Sorry! (Geez..)
I don't trust atoms -- they make up stuff.
Ask if people washes their windows.
There are places up north where the air is so clean that you don't have to.
I guess that is the kind of air you get when you live so far off that a car only passes every odd week or so.
It would probably be a good idea to make people switch to EV in areas with high population density but you will still have particles ripped up from the road so further research into tarmac would be needed.
Anything that makes people drive less jerky would probably help a lot too.
Of course, TFA also says there were ~54 million deaths of all causes worldwide in 2015. Which is consistent with an average life expectancy of 140-odd....
You can't look at today's population and extrapolate the average life expectancies based on the deaths of a specific year in the past. The population is increasing. If you start with the 54 million deaths of 2015 and you assume a 70 year life span (which is most likely too high), you're assuming that on average the people dying that year were born in 1945. And the world population in 1945 wasn't 7 billion.
Coincidentally, this was the subject of a very worthwhile podcast from the BBC: "More or Less". As with all statistics, one has to understand what lies behind - how did "they" reach these numbers, what do they mean by unhealthy and who are "they" anyway? It turns out that "they" are WHO or some other reasonably reliable source; the numbers as such are sound as well, and what they are about is one pollutant: particulates, and the criterion for whether the air is healthy is an official guideline number: 10 (what? for the sake of the argument, let's 'particles per m^3', but it isn't essential for the discussion here). So unhealthy air would be an average of >10 units - if it is 12, as in some cities, it is counted as unhealthy, and if it is 150, it's the same, in this particular statistic, although I suspect we can all agree that 150 is a good worse than 12.
So, there is nothing wrong with the number, but one has to understand what it actually says; and unfortunately most news media have not bothered, but instead go on to explain how it shortens lifespans and make it hard to breathe - which is certainly true, as far as it goes. However, the effect is going to depend on exactly how bad the numbers are, and we also have to remember that what produces the pollution also in some cases contribute positively in other ways to people's health and quality of life: as an example, if London were to get rid of all motorised transport, it might add 30 days to people's life expectancy; on the other hand, that life expectancy now stands at somewhere in the 90es for millenials, mostly due to the technologies that pollute; how much would life expectancy go down, were we to abandon significant parts of technology? It is not a simple and straightforward decision to make.
Liberals don't buy bottled water. they use reusable containers. Those bottles are bought up by Walmart shoppers in red states.
That's me ... especially after I've had a beer and chile beans!
We exported many of our polluting industries to places that, lo and behold, now have poor air quality.
Now try getting an American or rich person to fly less, turn down the heating in the winter or cooling in the summer, or buy less manufactured useless stuff.
Trivial changes that could reduce our pollution 90% without lowering anyone's quality of life are looked at as, "What do you want us to return to the stone age and live in caves?" as if riding a bike to work or wearing a sweater indoors in the winter undid all of human civilization.
Everyone reading these words, including you, can do things today, here, now to pollute less.
Added to my hosts file, thanks. But why the redundant URLs? All I needed were the domain names.
If Burt is in the elevator in the morning for the trip up, we are definitely breathing dirty air.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
So, instead of building a wall, shouldn't we be constructing a giant spaceship transfer that turns into Mega-Maid with a vacuum cleaner? I hear the combination for Planet Druidia is 12345. Oddly enough, that's the same combination on President Trump's luggage.
Mostly sanitation.
Gotta say, this map made me happy to be an American.
The Spanish, Scandinavians, Aussies, Russians and Scots should be pretty happy too.
International Space Station
I am just wondering where to find those 5%. Any one with a clue?
Just look at the map on page 3 of the report.
How is possible the Amazon rain forest has worst air quality that USA ??
I don't think so.
They are dying because of old age and the limits of the human body.
Yep. 6.1million people in 2016 found the limits of toxic substances inhaled from the air which their bodies were capable of.
To put this into perspective, it's less than 0.1%. Before when we weren't "burning shit and emitting shit", to put it like a redneck, we were still "burning shit and emitting shit", except inside our own tents and caves. And there were a lot fewer of us so the percentage may have been more like 20-40%.
https://www.goodreads.com/quot...
In a world of personal beliefs, you don't have to think. Keep it up.
We owe our current (declining, if you're an American) life expectancy to two advances occurring well after the industrial revolution proper: urban sanitation (water & sewer) systems, and antibiotics.
... and antiseptics.
It is a common misunderstanding that a life expectancy of e.g. 35 years implies that most people die around that age, and e.g. sexagenarians are extremely rare. In reality, people in e.g. the Middle Ages regularly reached "old age" as well. That is: if they survived birth and infancy. Child mortality and childbed fever (killing the mother) used to be very high until Ignace Semmelweiss introduced hand disinfection before assisting in childbirth. At that time, it was not uncommon for doctors to perform autopsies and then go on to deliver babies without so much as washing their hands. Even though he saved thousands of lives, Semmelweiss did not fare well and ended up in the loony bin
Something similar happened in the world of surgery. Nineteenth century surgeons were unaware of microbes and did not work under sterile conditions. Here it was Joseph Lister who realised the importance of antiseptics and eventually changed medical practices.
Doesn't change the fact that the capitalist profit motive incentivizes corporations to continue using cheaper fossil fuels and do the bare legal minimum in terms of pollution prevention.
This is a HUGE opportunity to sell clean air to the 95%.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
That 5% opens their windows and don't breath canned air 124/7 from the A/c.
Losing weight can be difficult when many people are working multiple jobs and don't have time to shop properly and prepare their own food. Not to mention that it is increasingly uncommon that people are taught how to cook. Then they go to fast food which, to increase profit margins, is terribly unhealthy. It's a vicious circle.
Most rural areas, except where heavy industries reside; northern populations (Lapland, Iceland, parts of Siberia), lots of insular countries, etc.
Numbers add up.
Here's exectly where
I am just wondering where to find those 5%. Any one with a clue?
Just look at the map on page 3 of the report.
How is possible the Amazon rain forest has worst air quality that USA ??
I don't think so.
And you are right
Yeah, the World Health Organization is notorious for spreading fake news.
Also, the WHO supports Trump, so everything they say is a lie.
[Citation Needed] that shows that car exhaust is the main source of air pollution in cities and not truck exhaust, ship/train exhaust, power plants, or agricultural emissions.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
But that#s not a concern - only poor voters are likely to die in any significant numbers.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"