If you like to see how much of your life expectancy is lost due to air pollution in your particular region or city, I can recommend the Air Quality Life Index (AQLI) map [1] created by the University of Chicago's Energy Policy Institute.
You can click on a particular region and see exactly how the air quality impacts you long-term and also can see the developments from 1998 till today. It is interesting to see e.g. for China that the air quality got substantially worse until the 2010s and then better in recent years -the same development the article talks about. Other countries like e.g. India unfortunately seem to get worse.
I often use this map and information on life years lost when advocating for clean air action in my talks as it makes the more abstract micrograms or standard AQIs much more tangible.
Switzerland lies in the middle of a densely populated region with 400 million polluting people (aka Europe). It's far from atlantic fresh air supply and mountain ranges trap pollutants.
What does "10 million die from air pollution" means?
We know that air pollution is bad, but how can we say "this person died from air pollution"? One can die from cancer, we know it is the cause of death because we detected cancer cells and the symptoms are consistent with cancer. Air pollution may have been the cause, or it could have been many other things, including bad luck, we can't really attribute this death to air pollution, even if the patient lived in a polluted environment.
It is not the same as saying that someone died of covid, like stated in the article. Controversies aside, we know when someone died of covid because of the symptoms and virus testing.
I guess it is a result of weird calculations based on estimated life expectancy reduction correlated to air quality metrics multiplied by the world population or something like that. But speaking in terms of life expectancy directly would make more sense, and probably would give a clearer idea.
Using statistical measures, you don't need to be able to point at any one person and say "air pollution killed this person".
There are obviously other correlations you need to be able to account for, but generally you can account for them.
>It is not the same as saying that someone died of covid, like stated in the article.
Interestingly, the covid death rate is largely calculated the same way. Someone doesn't have to die from acute respiratory issues caused by a covid infection in order to count, we just see that populations with high rates of covid infection also have higher rates of death. This helps also account for e.g. covid causing heart attacks which would otherwise be hard to account for.
Along the same lines of attributing cancer deaths to radiation exposure. When it occurs immediately, one would more or less directly attribute it, but when it manifests later, you still acknowledge that it was a large contributing factor. Even if contributing factors are % of individual deaths, summed up over the population, it adds up many deaths. Similarly, one could look at # premature deaths in the presence of pollution.
If these people worked in asbestos facilities and developed mesothelioma, then there is a very good chance it is the cause. Out of the banned substances, asbestos is one of the few where we can actually count the dead and get a meaningful number.
But air pollution is vague, there are many types of pollutants with different effects, a wide range of diseases, and we are all exposed to it in some way. There may be some rare cases where you can make a direct connection, for example if you are very exposed to a specific chemical, and you develop a disease that is known to be common for people exposed and rare otherwise. But if you just counted such cases, that would be a gross underestimate of the damage air pollution does.
Sometimes I wonder if all this air pollution isn't the reason why my body feels hot and inflamed at the end of the day in the summer. I'm just resting in a bed and I feel like I'm in salt.
After a quick shower, I just feel fresh again. Showering is not just for normal skin hygiene, it's because the air is just so full of crap.
The worst isn't just the engines fumes and particles, it's also the dust, the asphalt that's made with oil, the concrete etc everything that's artificial.
Pandemic lockdown was a better world, there is no doubt about it. I really want the economy to crash and stop. I understand hermits who go live in the lands eating pasta. It's not just the noise, the rent, the crowding, it's the air.
I once saw an electron microscopy picture of a pollen covered in micro plastics but I can't find it anymore. Pollen attracting pollutants (via charge/surface effects?) are not a necessary mediator for pollutants to adhere to the skin though.
As the famous line goes, a statistician is someone with his head in the freezer and his feet in the oven who'd say on average his body temperature is normal.
What you say and the fact that there is a lot of capita in NYC seems to me to mean the emissions are pretty bad.
No, what it means is that if those people went anywhere else, total emissions would increase because other US cities are not as well-equipped for helping people live without the use of personal vehicles, which are the major emitters in the US.
Asthma, autism and ADHD have had huge impacts on my family, and it seems this is likely air pollution related.
Then we get to the aerosols hiding the impacts of climate change, and the mind boggling scale of recent forest fires.
Gloomy.
Excuse me while I go learn linear algebra. AGI is our only hope. The only thing that can create the massive changes we need now is an AGI capable of persuading, coordinating and aligning the interests of every human on the planet.
Point me to the ditch, HAL, and I'll start digging.
You can click on a particular region and see exactly how the air quality impacts you long-term and also can see the developments from 1998 till today. It is interesting to see e.g. for China that the air quality got substantially worse until the 2010s and then better in recent years -the same development the article talks about. Other countries like e.g. India unfortunately seem to get worse.
I often use this map and information on life years lost when advocating for clean air action in my talks as it makes the more abstract micrograms or standard AQIs much more tangible.
[1] https://aqli.epic.uchicago.edu/the-index/