Posted on 07/09/2013 2:11:44 PM PDT by neverdem
Historical study links higher levels of pollution to higher mortality.
High levels of particulates from coal burning in China’s highly polluted north may have cut more than five years from life expectancy for the 500 million people who lived there in the 1990s, scientists report today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. The study can help to forecast the health effects of pollution in present-day China — where air quality has only gotten worse — as well as in other countries.
Chinese air pollution made global headlines during the 2008 Beijing Olympics and again this winter, when particulate levels in Beijing exceeded 700 micrograms per cubic metre — more than 50 times higher than those allowed by US air-quality standards.
But prior efforts to quantify the long-term risks of living in such conditions have been problematic, says Michael Greenstone, an environmental economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and a co-author of the latest study. That’s because earlier studies attempted to extrapolate health effects from US data, where even in the most polluted cities particulate levels are an order of magnitude lower than those found in China. Data for the health effects of high pollution levels are scarce, he says.
Clear view
To fill the gap, Greenstone and his colleagues looked into the effects of a Chinese government policy that from 1950 to 1980 provided free coal for heating to people in the region north of the Huai River and the Qinling mountain range, a fairly traditional demarcation between northern and southern China.
The goal of the Huai River Policy was to provide a minimum of heating resources to those who most needed them. But in the process it accidentally provided an unintended experiment in which people north of the river were exposed to air particulate...
(Excerpt) Read more at nature.com ...
BUT Obama keeps telling us (lying I mean) that China is so way ahead of us on green energy, and they are making all this money from it.
Obama lies all the time and I hear crickets from the GOP, when they should be calling him out as a fool.
Yep, coal is cutting their lives by years, I tell ‘ya. Probably decades. Gee, if only Sandra Fluke could have handed everybody condoms at the time they wouldn’t be here now to worry about this!
Ya gotta love Liberals. Is there anything they don’t know for sure?
People in free countries are all equal. And people in totalitarian countries they are also equal. In the former because the people are everything. In the latter because they are nothing.
we are hardly free then given there are so many special and protected classes that get different treatment under the law. our laws here don’t treat everyone as equals. i am third class here.
Bernie Cohen, professor emeritus of health physics at the University of Pittsburgh estimated that in 1975, burning coal caused an excess morbidity in the United States of 50,000 per year. He did not recommend shutting down coal fired plants, since the resulting impoverishment would have an even worse impact on mortality. He did recommend switching over to nuclear power, which has essentially no adverse health impacts, as coal fired plants reached the end of their useful life.
BTW, the study compared one population which coal for heat (and lived in a colder climate). We had coal heat when I was little, and the whole basement smelled like coal. Anyone living near a coal bin will inhale unburned coal dust, as well as a lot more soot than a person living near a modern U.S. coal fired plant.
We are rapidly becoming a totalitarian state. Obastard has decided that he is going to enforce only the laws he likes. He has proven he has no hesitation about using the NSA to spy on the citizens and the IRS to punish conservative organizations. And forget about enforcing immigration laws. And there are dozens of other examples and who knows hoe many we don’t know about.
No we ARE a totalitarian state. We aren’t becoming one. We became one ever since FISA and ever since the continuity of government (shadow govt) plans came about. Go back to Freedom From War, state dept pub 7277. we are going from phase 2 to phase 3 now.
“WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE?!”
No biggie. There's a billion more where those came from.
They dump that cr*p straight into the air. They’re not so environmental as we are. All coal fired plants have scrubbers and what not to clean the emissions.
“China’s coal burning cutting lives short by years “
As if the Chicoms cared a lick about the lives of their subjects... Since they are not going to run out of people anytime soon, they probably don’t care.
So, If China is dumping this crud into the air, Why do I have to gift wrap (sort,) my garbage?
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FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.
this looks like real particulate (and other) pollution in China. Not the fake kind of pollution (CO2 and others) ginned up by lo-IQ EPA drones to keep their Federale jobs
Drivel,
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