Yes, They Are Still Coming For Our Gas Stoves

Scientists chase after fads as much, and maybe even more, than anybody else. We have seen this numberless times, “climate change” and covid being the two most prominent examples. Every scientist, it seems, has something to say on both.

Gas stoves are a prime example of fad science. Part health scare—which always thrills the Cult of Safety First!—and part “climate change”—which excites granting agencies and activists. A winning combination.

According to wokepedia, “James Sharp patented a gas stove in Northampton, England in 1826 and opened a gas stove factory in 1836.” And, of course, untold numbers of people have been using them to good effect ever since.

There has been the occasional accident due to faulty installation. On the other hand, gas ovens serve as good places to stick reporters’ heads. They also serve as a nifty plot devices in murder movies.

Given the humongous numbers of uses of gas stoves over nearly two centuries, if there were systematic ill health effects wreaked using them to scramble your eggs, the world would surely have noticed by now. Since we haven’t seen them, we can conclude that any effects are buried in the noise, or non-existent. Or far outweighed by the many benefits gas stoves bring.

Obviously, stoves burn gas, and this leads to the byproducts of the burn. Which change due to the type of gas being burned. Nobody has ever recommended sniffing these fumes. Presumably, given the long history of friendly use, the ventilation in people’s homes must have been adequate to remove the fumes and various effluvia.

Woke city folk rarely have the experience of going outside on a summer’s day, the sunlight being just right, so that you can see the thousands of bugs and the huge cloud of God-knows-what that is constantly teeming and roiling in the air. Air which you breathe. And can have anything in it!

If they let themselves think about this cloud, they’d worry. It’s never been measured! “We need to research that air and measure it,” they would think, “to see what should be regulated. That air could be killing us. Safety First!”

And now they think indoor air hasn’t been thoroughly measured. There have been some investigations I’ve seen, but these were generally before global warming became “climate change.” Since then, there has been the odd paper showing how this or that malady is worse for people in homes with gas stoves. But these investigations suffer from the standard kinds of epidemiological flaws with which long-time readers are familiar.

Here’s the NY Post on the latest research: “Cooking on a gas stove can produce up to 100 times more dangerous particles than a car exhaust pipe, a terrifying new study has revealed.”

Are you terrified? Will you obediently shut off your gas stove and order from a corporate chain restaurant instead? Or do you need to know more?

The peer-reviewed paper is “Dynamics of nanocluster aerosol in the indoor atmosphere during gas cooking” by Satya S Patra and a collection of others, in PNAS: Nexus.

They set up suction to measure “nano-sized molecular clusters” (NCA) in this dinky “house”, which probably doesn’t match the domiciles of most readers (pic from NY Post):

They then married their air-sucker with an “aerosol general dynamic equation (GDE) to provide fundamental insights into the size-dependent (dp) behavior of NCA in indoor atmospheres”.

Ah, a model.

Which depended on whether the gas was used, and I promise this is what they did, to boil water, melt grilled cheese, or cook up some buttermilk (!) pancakes. Would ordinary milk-based pancakes have performed the same? Bacon was not mentioned.

Using the nifty equipment they discovered that burning gas indoors emitted combustion products.

Which is good. If they hadn’t, we would have worried. But of course we knew, with certainty, these products would be there before the measurements were taken.

Also this: “Indoor atmospheric NCA formation and transformation processes during propane gas cooking are highly transient, with NCA number size distributions and concentrations changing rapidly while the stove was in use”.

Meaning the stuff burned variously. Golly. And the concentrations abated after the cooking was over.

Why is any of this scary? Well, because of propaganda, like that found in the Post. And of sentences like this, from the paper: “For both children and adults, the largest NCA dose was received in the head airways”.

Dose.

That’s a medical word. If you hear you are getting a dose, it only sounds good if a quack prescribes it for you. It does’t sound appealing coming from an appliance.

A dose is “evidence suggesting that gas cooking may increase the risk of respiratory symptoms in European adults”. Why Europeans? Americans are robuster?

Yet for all this, there is nothing in this paper, just some equations and descriptions of the use of air suckers and the like. It doesn’t describe ordinary households. It only says what everybody knew it would say.

But it will still be used as ammunition in the “climate change” propaganda wars. Which means readers can look forward, though not with pleasure, to us reviewing those studies claiming gas stoves cause various maladies.

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