Volume 4, Number 45: 7 November 2001
In our Editorial of 5 September 2001, we conferred our coveted Distempered Brain Award upon the five authors of an article in Science magazine entitled "Hidden Health Benefits of Greenhouse Gas Mitigation" (Cifuentes et al., 2001), as well as the reviewers who recommended publication of the manuscript and the editors who accepted the reviewers' recommendations. Our reasons for taking this action are too numerous to be repeated here, but they centered on the horrendous inconsistency of the authors' disingenuous call to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases - primarily CO2 - in the guise of fighting the putative death-producing consequences of air pollution, which they claimed are commonplace in the world's major cities. It was our contention in taking issue with the thesis of Cifuentes et al. that if air pollutants are really as bad as they said they are, steps should certainly be taken to see that their atmospheric concentrations are indeed reduced; but those steps should not include curtailing emissions of carbon dioxide, which has no deleterious health effects at single-digit multiples of its current atmospheric concentration, and which is actually required for plant photosynthesis and, therefore, may validly be considered to be the very foundation of nearly all life on earth.
In this Editorial, we return to the subject of air pollution and its effects on human health for the purpose of discussing an article that calls yet another aspect of the Cifuentes et al. thesis into question, i.e., the widely-accepted assumption that even modest levels of air pollution can be deadly. In establishing the background for their latest work on this topic, Keatinge and Donaldson (2001) - who are associated with the Biomedical Sciences Department of St. Bartholomew's and the Royal London School of Medicine and Dentistry at Queen Mary and Westfield College in London - indicate that a number of studies have suggested that "current levels of atmospheric SO2, CO, or particulates in a variety of cities all increase mortality or illness." They also note, however, that the several studies claiming to make this point exhibit "marked inconsistencies," and they thus set about to resolve these discrepancies via a new and detailed analysis of a truly massive data set. Very briefly, the authors looked at deaths from all causes in people 50 years of age and over in Greater London from 1976 to 1995. Concentrating on periods when air temperature ranged from 0 to 15°C, their analysis considered the effects of a number of weather parameters, as well as the atmospheric concentrations of several air pollutants, specifically, sulfur dioxide (SO2), carbon monoxide (CO), and smoke (black particles less than 15 µm in diameter), plus the subset of airborne particulates with diameters less than 10 µm, which particles are often referred to in aggregate as PM10.
The results of the authors' complex analysis were truly astounding. In their own words, "no pollutant in that analysis, SO2, CO, or smoke, was associated with a significant (P < 0.05) increase in mortality." There was, however, a "large, delayed increase in mortality after low temperature," which was "specifically associated with cold and is not due to associated patterns of wind, rain, humidity, [or lack of] sunshine." Indeed, cold alone was found to be responsible for the excess deaths, although there was a small but "short-of-statistical-significance" increase in mortality with smoke, which the authors suggested might possibly have been due - if it really occurred (which is highly questionable) - to the effects of PM10.
So how does cold kill? Again in the words of the authors, "cold causes mortality mainly from arterial thrombosis and respiratory disease, attributable in turn to cold-induced hemoconcentration and hypertension [in the first case] and respiratory infections [in the second case]." They also note that "increases in mortality due to cold weather are large in many temperate regions, but effective protection against personal cold exposure virtually prevents excess winter mortality," be it even as cold as it gets in the heart of Siberia.
In light of this new understanding, we find it all the more incredulous that Cifuentes et al. would advise cutbacks in greenhouse gas emissions as a way of preventing the deaths they attribute to air pollution. Not only is air pollution likely not the dreaded killer they make it out to be, greater greenhouse gas emissions - if you buy into the global warming scare - would actually reduce the deadly consequences of the true killer, i.e., cold air temperatures, as there is general agreement among most students of the subject that CO2-induced global warming, if it occurs at all, would likely have its biggest impact on minimum temperatures during the coldest part of the year.
Based on these observations and the application to the topic in question of one of the climate alarmists' favorite concepts (see Precautionary Principle in our Subject Index), we thus and hereby take the unprecedented step of bestowing our second Distempered Brain Award upon the very same group of people that received the first award. They have clearly earned this unparalleled distinction for their doubly dubious prescription for planetary health.
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Dr. Sherwood B. Idso President |
Dr. Keith E. Idso Vice President |
References
Cifuentes, L., Borja-Aburto, V.H., Gouveia, N. Thurston, G. and Davis, D.L. 2001. Hidden health benefits of greenhouse gas mitigation. Science 293: 1257-1259.
Keatinge, W.R. and Donaldson, G.C. 2001. Mortality related to cold and air pollution in London after allowance for effects of associated weather patterns. Environmental Research 86A: 209-216.