A friend of mine e-mailed me a November 2015 report from the European Environment Agency claiming that the air pollutant called PM2.5 causes 432,000 deaths in Europe every year. Is this plausible?
PM2.5 is very fine soot about 1/20 the width of a human hair.
Typical outdoor ambient levels of PM2.5 are on the order of 10 to 20 micrograms (millionths of a gram) per cubic meter of air. For ease of calculation, a typical adult inhales about a cubic meter of air each hour, meaning that a typical adult inhales about 240 micrograms of PM2.5 over the course of a day. The EEA report claims that this level of PM2.5 kills 432,000 nonsmokers per year. These deaths are supposedly caused by heart or lung ailments, not cancer.
Now consider that in Europe, it has been estimated that smoking kills 695,000 per year. Based the American experience, about 62% of these deaths (i.e., about 434,000) can be assumed to be heart-lung related.
So smoking kills 434,000 per year while plain, ordinary, outdoor air-breathing kills 432,000 non-smokers per year.
But the juxtaposition is more astounding when you consider the PM2.5 reality of smoking.
In breathing fresh air, the typical adult inhales about 1 microgram of PM2.5 every 6 minutes.
But a smoker will inhale somewhere between 10,000 to 40,000 micrograms of PM2.5 from one cigarette… that is, in that same 6-minute period. So in the same brief time period, a smoker will inhale 10,000 to 40,000 times more PM2.5.
Somehow though, despite the much greater inhalation of the supposedly deadly PM2.5, only 2,000 more smokers die annually from PM2.5-related heart-lung causes that non-smokers — according to air pollution “science” anyway.
The EPA is a political organization that has been taken over by advocates and doesn’t engage in Science. This “study” is making not only the usual epidemiology error of declaring cause from mere correlation (and often with only one set of data; not to mention measurement by questionable proxy) but compounds it by extrapolating to the general population.
Part of the problem is that the so-called Hypothesis Test doesn’t actually test the hypothesis but instead is at best a correlation test. Until most realize this, we will continue to be inundated with this kind of nonsense.
Is this error of theirs’ due to an assumption of linear no-threshold at low dose?, or is the “science” even worse than that?
Well, if you put it like that then the bastards are lying to us. How ordinary.
Thank You. Much needed critical thinking not readily available .
If you are interested in reading about the 21st Century breakthrough science which debunks the GH radiative forcing conjecture and explains what determines temperatures in tropospheres, surfaces, crusts, mantles and cores of planets and satellite moons throughout the Solar System. For details see the linked websites, papers, videos and book on this blog: https://itsnotco2.wordpress.com.
As Steve Milloy would say: “Show us the bodies”
The number one cause of death is…..birth. It’s 100% fatal.