The old air pollution boogeyman rides again
For many years now, I have been reviewing studies of air pollution. Both Greenies and health advocates abhor it. But the research results are always disappointing. The ideal research result would be a demostration that motor vehicle emissions give you cancer but there is no solid proof of that. Pollution repeatedly turns out to be peskily harmless. But no-one believes that. So they keep on doing studies to prove their point. One such is below. They hypothesize that air pollution sends you gaga.
Does it? It's another geography study. It tests your health according to where you live. It does NOT detect your personal exposure to air pollution. So that is a major flaw. But its conclusions are still amusing. They found no effect from most sources of pollution -- with one exception: Dust that farmers kick up when plowing etc. Avoid farms or lose your marbles!
As I said, the results are shaky anyway -- with their lack of personal data -- so I would not start demonizing farmers yet. The global warming folk demonize them enough already. And farm populations may be more prone to dementia anyway
I probably should note again why I think air pollution is so harmless: It is because human beings have been sitting around smoky campfires for about a million years. Over that time they have adapted to all the resultant pollution they inhale. Basically, they just cough it up. Looking at the big picture does help, doesn't it?
Comparison of Particulate Air Pollution From Different Emission Sources and Incident Dementia in the US
Boya Zhang et al
Question Are long-term exposures to particulate air pollution from different emission sources associated with incident dementia?
Findings In this nationally representative cohort study in the US, higher residential levels of fine particulate matter were associated with greater rates of incident dementia, especially for fine particulate matter generated by agriculture and wildfires.
Meaning These findings support the hypothesis that airborne particulate matter pollution is associated with the likelihood of developing dementia and suggest that selective interventions to reduce pollution exposure may decrease the life-long risk of dementia; however, more research is needed to confirm these relationships.
Abstract
Importance Emerging evidence indicates that exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) air pollution may increase dementia risk in older adults. Although this evidence suggests opportunities for intervention, little is known about the relative importance of PM2.5 from different emission sources.
Objective To examine associations of long-term exposure of total and source-specific PM2.5 with incident dementia in older adults.
Design, Setting, and Participants The Environmental Predictors of Cognitive Health and Aging study used biennial survey data from January 1, 1998, to December 31, 2016, for participants in the Health and Retirement Study, which is a nationally representative, population-based cohort study in the US. The present cohort study included all participants older than 50 years who were without dementia at baseline and had available exposure, outcome, and demographic data between 1998 and 2016 (N = 27 857). Analyses were performed from January 31 to May 1, 2022.
Exposures The 10-year mean total PM2.5 and PM2.5 from 9 emission sources at participant residences for each month during follow-up using spatiotemporal and chemical transport models.
Main Outcomes and Measures The main outcome was incident dementia as classified by a validated algorithm incorporating respondent-based cognitive testing and proxy respondent reports. Adjusted hazard ratios (HRs) were estimated for incident dementia per IQR of residential PM2.5 concentrations using time-varying, weighted Cox proportional hazards regression models with adjustment for the individual- and area-level risk factors.
Results Among 27 857 participants (mean [SD] age, 61 [10] years; 15 747 [56.5%] female), 4105 (15%) developed dementia during a mean (SD) follow-up of 10.2 [5.6] years. Higher concentrations of total PM2.5 were associated with greater rates of incident dementia (HR, 1.08 per IQR; 95% CI, 1.01-1.17). In single pollutant models, PM2.5 from all sources, except dust, were associated with increased rates of dementia, with the strongest associations for agriculture, traffic, coal combustion, and wildfires. After control for PM2.5 from all other sources and copollutants, only PM2.5 from agriculture (HR, 1.13; 95% CI, 1.01-1.27) and wildfires (HR, 1.05; 95% CI, 1.02-1.08) were robustly associated with greater rates of dementia.
Conclusion and Relevance In this cohort study, higher residential PM2.5 levels, especially from agriculture and wildfires, were associated with higher rates of incident dementia, providing further evidence supporting PM2.5 reduction as a population-based approach to promote healthy cognitive aging. These findings also indicate that intervening on key emission sources might have value, although more research is needed to confirm these findings.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2808088
****************************************The Maui wildfires are proof that carbon zealotry can kill
Ask the grieving families of Maui, the Hawaiian island ravaged by wildfires last week.
As the fires raged, liberal media blamed the devastation on climate change. “How Climate Change Turned Lush Hawaii into a Tinderbox,” announced The New York Times.
Sorry, the evidence is piling up that the opposite is true.
Zero carbon extremism diverted the island’s main electrical producer, Hawaiian Electric, from insulating wires, clearing areas around vulnerable transmission sites and taking other precautions to prevent wildfires it knew were likely to occur.
It dithered on prevention, while pouring funds and manpower into meeting the Hawaiian government’s mandate that all electricity must be produced from renewables by 2045.
The death toll from Lahaina Fire has reached 111, but will go higher, because much of the island hasn’t been searched.
The fire’s already the deadliest in US history. But wildfires ignited by inadequately maintained electrical transmission systems — uninsulated wires, flimsy poles, out-of-control plant growth — have also devastated Texas, Colorado and California.
Six out of 20 recent wildfires in California, including the 2018 Camp Fire, which killed 85, the Kinkade fire in Sonoma in 2019 and the Dixie Fire in 2022, were caused by sparks due to aging transmission equipment and poor maintenance.
California’s Pacific Electric & Gas boasts that it’s “helping to heal the planet” and is determined to achieve a “net zero energy system in 2040 — five years ahead of California’s current carbon neutrality goal.”
What about healing the families who needlessly lost loved ones in these fires? Pursuing zero carbon by sacrificing safety and the production of a reliable electricity supply is crazy. We all want to protect the planet, but at a reasonable pace.
As the grisly facts come out about Maui, that lesson is clearer than ever.
Though an official report on the fires’ causes will take months, photos and evidence from grid monitors point to a string of fires ignited as power lines hit trees, other lines or the ground because of wind.
“This is strong confirmation — based on real data — that utility grid faults were likely the ignition source for multiple wild fires on Maui,” says Bob Marshall, CEO of Whisker Labs, which monitors electric grids across the US, including in Maui.
Four years ago, in the aftermath of a damaging 2019 wildfire season, Hawaiian Electric concluded that power lines emitting sparks were a serious threat, and the company prepared a plan for fire retardant poles, monitoring technology and insulation.
Then it dithered, spending less than $245,000 on wildfire prevention, while it went whole hog launching big projects in renewable energy.
https://nypost.com/2023/08/18/the-maui-wildfires-are-proof-that-carbon-zealotry-can-kill/
***********************************************The EPA Defies the Supreme Court
In politics, inadvertently telling the truth is called a “gaffe.” Last year Michael Regan, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, made a remark in passing that gave away the Biden administration’s plans for enforcing its climate agenda through a “suite of rules” imposed under programs lacking any credible connection to climate. A few months later, a Supreme Court opinion transformed Mr. Regan’s indiscretion into justification for wholesale judicial repudiation of the Biden administration’s climate regulatory blitz.
Mr. Regan’s comment came on March 10, 2022, when he addressed the press following his keynote address to CERAWeek, a climate conference in Houston. A reporter asked about vulnerabilities of the EPA’s approach to installing climate regulation through the Obama-Biden Clean Power Plan, which was then awaiting judgment by the court. Mr. Regan replied that the agency had abandoned the idea of relying on any specific grant of regulatory authority. Instead it was in the process of tightening rules under numerous and varied regulatory programs all at once, pressuring disfavored operations to close and compelling investment consistent with the EPA’s desires.
Mr. Regan went on to cite rules to tighten regulation of mercury, ozone, soot, hazardous air pollutants, water effluent and coal ash under acknowledged congressional grants of authority. But he also called the “expedited retirement” of power plants “the best tool for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions” and opined that the “industry gets to take a look at this suite of rules all at once and say, ‘Is it worth doubling down on investments in this current facility or operation, or should we look at the cost and say no, it’s time to pivot and invest in a clean-energy future?’ ”
This already reflected something of a scofflaw position. Congress never approved what Mr. Regan described. It became a serious problem when the justices struck down the Clean Power Plan in June. West Virginia v. EPA held that the agency didn’t have the authority it claimed to force power-plant closures by setting unmeetable emission standards and thus dictate, as the court had put it, “how Americans get their energy.”
Chief Justice John Roberts noted for the 6-3 majority that after Congress had repeatedly considered and rejected providing the agency authority to regulate power-sector greenhouse gases, the EPA claimed “to discover an unheralded power” that represented a “transformative expansion in [its] regulatory authority” to force “generation shifting.”
The court invoked the major-questions doctrine—a principle grounded in the separation of powers—which states that when a regulatory agency seeks to impose burdens of “economic and political significance,” there is “reason to hesitate.” If an agency can’t point to “clear congressional authorization,” the authority doesn’t exist.
Many climate activists took the lesson that they should stop bragging about clever regulatory approaches. Two weeks after West Virginia v. EPA came out, the Environmental Law Institute hosted a funereal webinar in which panelists warned about candid outbursts turning up in Supreme Court reversals, mentioning such statements as President Obama’s “if Congress won’t act soon . . . I will,” and Mr. Biden’s then-chief of staff Ron Klain’s tweeting about “the ultimate work-around” of constitutional limits to impose Covid vaccine mandates. Several panelists urged activists to be careful in their press releases and to not let appointees’ cheerleading “get out in front of the lawyers.”
That’s good advice, but the administration appears undeterred. Records obtained by policy groups I represent in Freedom of Information Act litigation show Mr. Biden’s EPA team came in with this plan to hit fossil generation with a barrage of disparate regulations as a climate strategy. One impressively prescient email sent the day after Mr. Biden’s election by law professor and soon-to-be Biden climate advisor Ann Carlson laid out the approach, even using the phrase “suite of climate policies.”
Two weeks into Mr. Biden’s term, a PowerPoint slide show—given by a lawyer named Joe Goffman, who is hailed in media profiles as the administration’s “law whisperer” because “his specialty is teaching old laws to do new tricks”—detailed a plan of tightening regulation on power plants by using solid waste, water and even visibility standards. The audience for his plan to blitz fossil power generation with these non-climate programs? The White House Climate Office. FOIA records also include activist correspondence to Mr. Goffman specifically urging the EPA to tighten “haze” rules as a back door for the climate agenda, which EPA appears to be doing.
Long-held plans are hard to let go. Despite the court’s rejection of each authority the administration has claimed so far to regulate greenhouse gases from power plants, one email written during the immediate post-West Virginia scramble refers to “EPA’s CAA toolbox” for “Power Sector GHG Reductions.” (The abbreviations stand for Clean Air Act and greenhouse gas.)
West Virginia v. EPA addressed power the agency claimed under a specific rule, but the opinion’s scope extends far beyond that rule. The justices flatly stated that trying to force the plant-closure agenda Mr. Regan described, for which the EPA can cite no statutory mandate, presents a “major question” requiring a clear congressional statement of authority.
Academics now call on Mr. Biden to ignore the Supreme Court. His EPA is doing so, while also ignoring Congress. It seems inevitable the court will confront this latest gambit to evade constitutional limits. As always, the question will be how much lasting harm the EPA can inflict before the courts act to stop it.
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Reality deserves a look in when teaching children the science of global warming
I have pondered this more than usual lately given on-air discussions and media reporting about rising levels of anxiety and depression in our children. A recent Sydney Morning Herald report focused on record levels of mental health disorders, with many children refusing to go to school.
We unnecessarily frightened our kids for three years over Covid-19, keeping them from school for extended periods. Now we wonder why they are too anxious or despondent to return. Half their parents have not returned to the workplace either, so they are not getting an ideal lead.
Then there is climate change. For years the climate alarmists have been instilling the fear of Gaia into our children, from pre-school to the classroom, from the nightly news to the kids programming.
The ABC’s flagship kids television current affairs program, Behind the News, kicked off an episode this month by declaring: “scientists say that last month was officially the hottest month Earth has ever recorded. And the UN says we’re no longer facing global warming, but something worse.”
And on they went with vision of extreme weather events and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres telling us global warming was over and “the era of global boiling has arrived”.
The reporter then said: “Global boiling, it sounds pretty intense, but the UN says the threat the world’s facing is intense.” Neither the UN nor the media are interested in context or reassurance; their currency is hysteria.
Guterres is a former Portuguese Socialist Party prime minister – a green-left politician, no more and no less – and scaring people into realigning the global economic order is his life’s work.
But our children, do we really want to be doing this to our children? After reading about the record anxiety and mental health problems for our young people in the SMH, it occurred to me that they might be part of the problem. When you click through to their climate-change coverage, there is plenty of climate fear porn to be found.
“Global boiling, Sydney hasn’t done enough to prepare for lethal heat,” screams one headline. “Record July heat prompts dire warning; Act now or we all scorch and fry,” shouts another. “Crucial global climatic system could face tipping point in two years,” we read, surely not another tipping point? Then: “The hottest July in 120,000 years. What’s in store for Australia this summer?”
Not a hint of context, subtlety, or scepticism. Imagine the absurdity of claiming a day or month is the hottest in 120,000 years.
The more you research these matters, the more you doubt even records claimed over the past century, given so many early readings have been revised downwards.
The Bureau of Meteorology claimed Adelaide recorded the hottest ever maximum for a capital city on January 24, 2019, when the temperature hit 46.6C. Yet the record it broke from 1939 was actually recorded as the equivalent of 47.6C before, in recent years, it was “homogenised” downwards. There are endless other examples.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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