Ozone, Pm 2.5 And Global Warming Are Good For You: The New Deniers, Coming To DC
EDIT
Last week, the Washington Post and E&E News published a list of people expected to be appointed as new scientific advisers by the EPA. Some have operated within groups that have long denied climate change science. And now they are doing the same with air pollution.
For example, Stanley Young is a statistician at climate denial group the Heartland Institute. He wrote in a statistical blog in 2014 that “the science literature … is on the side that increased ozone and PM2.5 are not associated with increased deaths”. (He also states that temperature rise “is good for humans”.)
It’s not just the advisers either. As people donned masks in Delhi last week, Steve Milloy, member of Trump’s EPA transition team and Scare Pollution author was asking the Twittersphere:
Link to tweet
Milloy is right that nobody dies purely from air pollution (hence nobody has it on their death certificates), but there is broad scientific consensus that it is a causal factor that shortens lives.
The science is significantly more established than that on climate change, according to Dr George Thurston, co-author of the World Health Organisation’s Global Burden of Disease air pollution report. He tells Unearthed: “The relationship between ambient air pollution exposure and human mortality is even more definitively quantified, with a broad scientific consensus, than the relationship between human activity and climate change, likely because death is a more definitively defined endpoint than climate change.”
EDIT
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/nov/16/modern-air-is-too-clean-the-rise-of-air-pollution-denial
