Where are the bodies?
The BBC reports:
The Pollutant Standards Index (PSI) hit 401 at 12:00 on Friday (04:00 GMT) – the highest in Singapore’s history.
The index also reached 400 in one part of Indonesia, which is readying helicopters and cloud-seeding equipment in an effort to tackle the fires…
A PSI reading above 300 is defined as “hazardous”, while Singapore government guidelines say a PSI reading of above 400 sustained for 24 hours “may be life-threatening to ill and elderly persons”.
“Healthy people [may also] experience adverse symptoms that affect normal activity,” the government says.
In the north of Malaysia, about 600 km (350 miles) north of Singapore, the haze is not so bad as in Singapore. At noon today, visibility here was about 5 kilometers (3 miles). Sometimes it is down to half that distance and we cannot see the tall buildings along the seafront.
Fortunately, I don’t suffer from asthma and the ordinary symptoms, stinging eyes, nasal congestion, itchy skin, can be mostly controlled by an antihistamine. A little skin itch manages to get through the medication and my nasal passages have been a little inflamed for a couple of days.
I will escape all this when I leave for Jakarta in July for a month, because the capital of Indonesia is 6 degrees south of the equator and so misses out on the haze from Sumatra.
There does not seem to be any way to answer the question: How many people will die?
The same is true of many other health conditions such as malaria. Healthy people manage to overcome the stress to their systems while the old and the very young may already be stressed by other ailments.
Even when the combined effects kill, the cause of death from malaria may be reported as liver failure or ruptured spleen.
Respiratory failure is a generalized cause of death. I came very close once after coming into contact with rat excrement in Nepal. Fortunately the hospital in New Delhi had air conditioning that removed most of the muck from the city air.
While in the hospital, the Times of India ran an article about the carbon footprints of Washington D.C. and New Delhi, pointing out that the US capital has a carbon footprint 12 times greater than New Delhi.
I believe that the Times of India missed the point: CO2 is not a pollutant, thus the term “carbon footprint” tells us nothing about the air quality of a city.
No Singaporean or Malaysian is making an issue about the CO2 in the breezes coming from Sumatra: the concern is with the particulate matter and those products of combustion that cause the symptoms I described above.
While it is true that people in both Singapore and Malaysia believe in AGW, few are so foolish as to mistake the haze for CO2.
The world is still waiting for the proof of the death of millions caused by Chernobyl – the predicted mutations of children in all of Europe – the mutations and massive deaths after the two bombs in Japan during WWII.
They predict any huge number they can dream up to use fear and danger to scare the public into supporting the E=GREEN manure – Like the EPA any rule they use is supported by some silly notion of thousands of lives saved or extended.
End the EPA and the DOE – http://articlevprojecttorestoreliberty.com/take-action.html
Isn’t it obvious? All the people of Sinapoe are going to die (someday)? Why not from the air polution of June 21, 2013?