Charles G. Battig, M.S., M.D., Piedmont Chapter president, VA-Scientists and Engineers for Energy and Environment (VA-SEEE). His website is www.climateis.com.
Now I can finally relax, take a deep breath, and breathe easier. The Environmental Protection Agency, an aggressive arm of the nanny government, has just issued new air quality standards that mandate that the new “safe” level of ozone in the air we breathe shall be lowered from the current 75 parts per billion to 70 ppb. I feel better already, perhaps.
I also feel better for all the theoretical lives that will be saved, according to EPA sponsored studies such as this one. However, my joy is tempered by the realization that those are not real lives saved – rather, they are “estimated deaths saved,” as in “We applied health impact assessment methodology to estimate numbers of deaths and other adverse health outcomes that would have been avoided during 2005, 2006, and 2007 if the current (or lower) NAAQS ozone standards had been met. Estimated reductions in ozone concentrations were interpolated according to geographic area and year, and concentration–response functions were obtained or derived from the epidemiological literature.”
Thus, the fewer ozone deaths will be taking place in a computer-generated fantasy world, where epidemiological data-torturing takes place by bits and bytes, not in the hospital admission records for real-life patients. The referenced paper concludes: “We estimated that annual numbers of avoided ozone-related premature deaths would have ranged from 1, 410 to 2, 480 at 75 ppb to 2, 450 to 4, 130 at 70 ppb, and 5, 210 to 7, 990 at 60 ppb. Acute respiratory symptoms would have been reduced by 3 million cases and school-loss days by 1 million cases annually if the current 75-ppb standard had been attained. Substantially greater health benefits would have resulted if the CASAC-recommended range of standards (70–60 ppb) had been met.”