I swear I scheduled this post for Monday, yet here it is Sunday. I’ll leave it, since it was mailed out. There will not be another post Monday. I do not know how my enemies did this.
A toxin, as the redoubtable reader undoubtedly knows, is a poison. And a poison, says Mr Webster, is that which causes “morbid, noxious, or deadly effects”.
People who ingest or breath toxic, which is to say poisonous, substances, especially if they do so on a continuous basis over a long period of time, do not live as long or as well as those who do not, on average.
Well, so much used to be routine medical knowledge. But since the idiot panic of 2020, and of the great wokening of all things, medical “knowledge” is now what you can get away with saying. Like “some women have penises” or “if you are vaccinated you cannot catch covid.”
And “almost everyone in Europe is breathing toxic air”.
So says the propagandists at The Guardian.. They also say “98% of Europeans breathing highly damaging polluted air linked to 400,000 deaths a year.”
Now we’ve discussed this many times, but “linked to” is one of the most marvelous creations of modern The Science. It arises from the faulty idea of “null hypothesis significance testing.” “Significance” itself means having a wee P-value. And wee p-values mean your hypothesis is “linked to” some causal proposition, like toxic air is killing people.
Since it is logically impossible—not just unlikely: impossible—for a wee P to prove cause, yet those who flash their wee Ps around earnestly desire to claim cause, but know they cannot, they lash out with phrases like “linked to” or “associated with”, which are utterly empty of any causal language. They mean only wee P. And wee P says nothing about cause.
In other words, every time you see “linked to” or “associated with” or the like, guard your wallet.
Europe is facing a “severe public health crisis”, with almost everyone across the continent living in areas with dangerous levels of air pollution, an investigation by the Guardian has found.
Analysis of data gathered using cutting-edge methodology – including detailed satellite images and measurements from more than 1,400 ground monitoring stations – reveals a dire picture of dirty air, with 98% of people living in areas with highly damaging fine particulate pollution that exceed World Health Organization guidelines. Almost two-thirds live in areas where air quality is more than double the WHO’s guidelines.
Here is their Map Of Deadliness:
The WHO, that earnest agency that led the covid panic, puts the “safe” level of PM2.5 at 5 micro grams per cubic meter of air.
PM2.5? It is dust which contains particles the size of 2.5 microns or smaller. For fun, I typed into the woke search engine “Can masks block PM 2.5” and it returned in bold these words: “Should you wear a surgical mask? Even though a surgical mask cannot filter out the small particles in the air…”
Amusing, is it not? Not to say hilarious. For, you see, the coronadoom virus suspended in particles (like moisture from your breath) averages around 0.125 microns (the viron itself is much smaller still). Which is twenty times smaller than PM2.5, which is supposed to be deadly, but which masks can’t block.
Masks are one huge scientific joke. So feel free to laugh.
Anyway, back to PM2.5. What do Experts say it does? With my emphasis, PM2.5 is “tiny airborne particles mostly produced from the burning of fossil fuels, some of which can pass through the lungs and into the blood stream, affecting almost every organ in the body.”
Isn’t that something. Every organ of the body. Amazing. Almost a miracle disease.
Here’s a quote from an Expert: “‘This is a severe public health crisis,’ said Roel Vermeulen, a professor of environmental epidemiology at Utrecht University who led the team of researchers across the continent that compiled the data. ‘What we see quite clearly is that nearly everyone in Europe is breathing unhealthy air.'”
All right, since PM2.5 affects almost every organ in the body, people sucking it in must be dying earlier, especially as it’s claimed PM2.5 only increases. Let’s see. Poland is pretty purple on the map. Let’s ask the woke search engine for Poland’s life expectancy, which surely must be decreasing if PM2.5 affects almost every organ in the body. And let’s compare Poland to, say, Portugal. Starts with ‘P’, too, you see, and is a nice light color on the map. We’ll toss in a few more, too, like North Macedonia, which Experts say has the worst PM2.5.
The numbers only go up to 2020, at which time there is a dip everywhere, because of the covid panic. So ignore that.
Except for Russia and Ukraine, for reasons you can best ask Victoria Nuland about, the progress is only up, Up, UP. But this was all before the woke really stuck, and before the panic, so perhaps these trends reached their max in 2019.
In any case, there is no evidence here that PM2.5, which affects almost every organ in the body, is taking a great toll in lives.
How about, say, asthma? That surely is exacerbated by dust. According to one paper “In the Portuguese population, the prevalence of ‘Current asthma’ was 6.8%…and of ‘Lifetime asthma’ was 10.5%.” Another says, In Poland “The overall prevalence of asthma was 8.6%…among children and 5.4%…among adults.”
There are other papers with differing numbers, but they all bounce around these figures, more or less. There is no way to tell Portugal and Poland apart from them, even though, according to The Guardian Portugal’s air is crystal clear compared to Poland’s.
Of course, there is little profit in these gross comparisons, for the simple reason that the Portuguese are not the Polish. Their habits differ, their industries differ, their climates differ, their demographics differ, even as their PM2.5 differs. We’d have to put in herculean efforts to do comparisons worth doing.
Which nobody does. They make “linked to” statements instead, hoping you’ll fall for it.
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Wee P is definitely Low T.
We need re-ballification everywhere.
Toxic air killed me once. Pissed me off