There is a Joel Schwartz the bad, physicist lefty enviro fanatic at Harvard.
Schwartz the good follows up on the Mike Honeycutt with some fine tuning that is extremely informative.
However that’s no big surprise, Joel Schwartz the good is always very informative. He has taught me many things, like how EPA researchers cheat with computers and slicing and dicing methodologies to get the answers they want.
But here is JS the good adding to Mike Honeycutt’s op ed at Houston Chronicle:
http://www.chron.com/opinion/outlook/article/Honeycutt-Proposed-ozone-standards-are-based-on-5258662.php
Michael,
One follow-up on your excellent op-ed: Outdoor monitors overstate ozone exposure not only because people spend most of the their time indoors. A more important factor for the purposes of setting the ozone standard is that the ozone concentration in the air people actually breath in while outdoors (“personal exposure”) is on average about 40% lower than the ozone levels measured at outdoor monitors(“ambient levels”). The main reason for this appears to be that ozone monitors tend to be placed several feet of the ground and away from any surfaces, while the microenvironment around people’s mouths has lots of surfaces nearby (skin, clothing, ground, foliage, etc.) that remove ozone from the air because ozone is so reactive. As a result, when an ambient ozone monitor measures, say, 80 ppb ambient ozone, personal exposure to ozone for people outdoors is more like 50 ppb.
This finding is key because the exposures in chamber studies are personal exposures. 60 ppb ozone in a chamber study is equivalent to about 100 ppb at an ambient monitor, but EPA treats 60 ppb in a chamber study as equivalent to 60 ppb at an outdoor monitor. So even if you consider the tiny effects in chamber studies to be “adverse”, they are actually relatively high exposures when compared with the ozone standard, because the standard is set based on ambient monitor levels.
Joel