Claim: European coal pollution causes 22,300 premature deaths a year

This is junk science because…

Claims of deaths caused by particulate pollution are best debunked by the epidemiology of smoking.

Basically, smokers inhale vastly more particulate matter than nonsmokers breathing the most polluted air in the world. Yet smokers are not known to suffer sudden death from the inhaled particulate matter.

For more details, see Steve Milloy’s “What’S EPA Smoking.”

Read the claim (about a Greenpeace study to boot) in The Guardian.