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Traffic pollution leads to 4 million child asthma cases every year

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Four million children develop asthma every year as a result of air pollution from cars and trucks, equivalent to 11,000 new cases a day, a landmark study has found.

Most of the new cases occur in places where pollution levels are already below the World Health Organization limit, suggesting toxic air is even more harmful than thought.

Guardian Graphic / Source: Achakulwisut et al, Lancet Planetary Health

The damage to children’s health is not limited to China and India, where pollution levels are particularly high. In U.K. and U.S. cities, the researchers blame traffic pollution for a quarter of all new childhood asthma cases.

Canada has the third highest rate of new traffic-related asthma cases among the 194 nations analyzed, while Los Angeles and New York City are in the top 10 worst cities out of the 125 assessed. Children are especially vulnerable to toxic air and exposure is also known to leave them with stunted lungs.

The research, published in the journal Lancet Planetary Health, is the first global assessment of the impact of traffic fumes on childhood asthma based on high-resolution pollution data.

“Our findings suggest that millions of new cases of pediatric asthma could be prevented by reducing air pollution,” said Susan Anenberg, a professor at George Washington University. Asthma can cause deadly seizures.

The key pollutant, nitrogen dioxide, is produced largely by diesel vehicles, many of which emit far more than allowed on the road even after the Dieselgate scandal. “Improving access to cleaner forms of transport, like electrified public transport, cycling and walking, would reduce asthma, enhance physical fitness, and cut greenhouse gas emissions,” said Anenberg.

“This landmark study shows the massive global burden of asthma in children caused by traffic pollution,” said Chris Griffiths, professor at Queen Mary University of London and the co-director of the Asthma U.K. Center for Applied Research, who was not part of the research team. “Asthma is only one of the multiple adverse effects of pollution on children’s health. Governments must act now to protect children.”

Guardian Graphic / Source: Achakulwisut et al, Lancet Planetary Health

The new study combined detailed NO2 pollution data with asthma incidence rates and population numbers. Many large studies have already shown a strong link between traffic pollution and childhood asthma and that pollution causes damaging inflammation. This data on risks was used to calculate the number of new cases around the world.

“From the weight of evidence, there is likely a strong causal relationship between traffic pollution and childhood asthma incidence,” said Ploy Achakulwisut, also at George Washington University and the lead author of the new study. “So we can be confident that traffic pollution has a significant effect on childhood asthma incidence.”

The epidemiological evidence for NO2 being the key pollutant is the strongest. However, researchers cannot rule out that other pollutants also pumped out by vehicles, such as tiny particles, are also a factor as it is not possible to experiment directly on people.

“Childhood asthma has reached global epidemic proportions,” said Rajen Naidoo, professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, and not involved in the study. It indicates that 1 in 8 of all new cases is due to traffic pollution. “An important outcome from this study is the evidence that the existing WHO standards are not protective against childhood asthma.”

The country with the highest national rate of childhood asthma attributed to traffic pollution is South Korea, with almost a third of all new cases blamed on vehicles. Japan and Belgium are in the top 10, along with six Middle Eastern nations, including Saudi Arabia.

Due to their high populations and pollution levels, the top three countries for the total number of new children getting asthma each year are China (760,000), India (350,000), and the U.S. (240,000). The scientists said their research may underestimate the true levels in many poorer nations where asthma often goes undiagnosed.

“While it is important for parents to try to reduce individual exposure, maybe by avoiding highly congested roads as much as possible, not everyone can do this,” said Achakulwisut. “So it is important to call for policy initiatives to tackle pollution at city, state and national levels.”

“The good news is that a transition to zero-emission vehicles is already underway,” she said. Some countries and cities are pledging to phase out internal combustion engines and policies such as London’s new ultra-low emission zone are being rolled out. “But this transition needs to become global, and it needs to happen faster. Each year of delay jeopardizes the health of millions of children worldwide.”

Penny Woods, chief executive of the British Lung Foundation, said: “We used to think the only real danger roads posed to children was the threat of a car accident. However, now we can see there’s an equally deadly risk: breathing in air pollution. Rightly, there’s been a huge effort to reduce road accidents and we need to see an equal commitment to reducing toxic air.”

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Traffic pollution leads to 4 million child asthma cases every year

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Fox News Tries to Prove Steve Bannon Isn’t as Bad as ISIS

Mother Jones

Over the weekend, USA Today published an editorial that suggested senior White House adviser Steve Bannon and ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi shared “similar world views” that included “apocalyptic visions of a clash” between Islam and the United States.

Among those upset by the unflattering comparison was Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, who on Wednesday invited USA Today‘s deputy editorial opinion editor, David Mastio, to join his show and debate Bannon’s record. That’s when Carlson offered up the following chart:

The graphic was roundly mocked on social media, where many skewered Fox News’ absurd effort to present Bannon as an innocent in comparison to a despot and generally missing the point of the editorial.

Sunday’s editorial followed the reports—including this Mother Jones story—outlining Bannon’s record of promoting anti-Islamic propaganda during his tenure as Breitbart CEO and his long-standing predictions of the arrival of a “Judeo-Christian war” against Islam.

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Fox News Tries to Prove Steve Bannon Isn’t as Bad as ISIS

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Watch global warming spiral out of control

Spirograph

Watch global warming spiral out of control

By on May 31, 2016

Cross-posted from

Climate CentralShare

The temperature spiral that took the world by storm has an update. If you think the heat is on in our current climate, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

To recap, University of Reading climate scientist Ed Hawkins wrecked the internet a few weeks ago with a revolutionary new way to look at global temperatures. Using a circular graph of every year’s monthly temperatures and animating it, Hawkins’ image showed planetary heat spiraling closer to the 2 degrees C threshold in a way no bar or line graph could do.

An update to the famous temperature spiral using future climate projections.Jay Alder/USGS

His tweet with the original graphic has been shared 15,000 times, and it’s been dubbed the most compelling climate visualization ever made (sorry, landmarked Keeling Curve). The spiral’s popularity can be attributed in part to its hypnotic nature and the visceral way it shows the present predicament of climate change.

Hawkins’ graphic hints at the temperature spiral to come, but now a new addition brings what the future holds into stark relief.

“Like a lot of people, I found Ed Hawkins’ temperature animation very compelling because it details observed warming from 1850 to present in a novel way,” U.S. Geological Survey scientist Jay Alder said. “His graphic sets the context for looking at projections from climate models.”

So Alder used climate projections and stretched the spiral to its logical conclusion in 2100 when most climate model projections end. Using our current carbon emissions trends, it shows that things could get out of hand pretty quickly.

The world has been on the edge of the 1.5 degrees C threshold — the amount of warming above preindustrial levels that could sink many small island states permanently — this winter and early spring thanks to climate change and a strong El Niño. If the world continues on its current carbon emissions trend, it could essentially pass that threshold permanently in about a decade.

The 2 degrees C threshold — a planetary “safe” threshold enshrined in the Paris Agreement — will likely be in the rearview mirror by the early 2040s as temperatures spiral ever higher. By 2100, every month is projected to be 5 degrees C (9 degrees F) warmer than it was compared to preindustrial levels.

It’d be a world vastly different than today with sea levels up to three feet higher (and possibly more if Antarctica’s ice goes into meltdown), rapidly shrinking glaciers, and highly acidic oceans. Those changes would have very real consequences for coastal cities, water resources, and ecosystems across the planet.

Of course, Alder’s super spiral is only one possible future for the planet. Last year’s Paris Agreement could be a turning point where nations start to rein in their carbon pollution. While temperatures would likely still spiral higher because of warming that’s already locked in, cutting carbon emissions now will at least make the spiral more manageable.

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Watch global warming spiral out of control

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No, Poor People Don’t Inherit a Lot of Money

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

I had a doctor’s appointment this afternoon, so I missed the twilight session of the Benghazi hearing. When I got home, it was 8 pm on the East Coast….and the hearing was still going on. Yikes. I assume I didn’t miss anything, did I?

Anyway, while I was in the waiting room I was browsing The Corner and came across the graphic on the right. It struck me as peculiar. The bottom income quintile in America gets 43 percent of its wealth from inheritance? Even granting that these households don’t have much wealth to begin with, that really didn’t seem right.

There was a link to piece by Kevin Williamson that turned out to be two years old—which is something like two decades in blog years. Still, I was curious, and I had nothing else to do while I waited. So I clicked the link. Here’s what Williamson says:

For the top income quintile, gifts and inheritances amount to 13 percent of household wealth, according to research published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics….Meanwhile, inherited money makes up 43 percent of the wealth of the lowest income group and 31 percent for the second-lowest. In case our would-be class warriors are having trouble running the numbers here, that means that inherited money on net reduces wealth inequality in the United States.

This is pretty misleading. I tracked down the BLS report, and it turns out this 43 percent figure is only for those households that inherit anything in the first place. But as you might expect, a mere 17 percent of low-income households report any inheritance at all. If you average this wealth across all low-income households, inheritance accounts for about 7.4 percent of the wealth of the entire group. If you do the same thing for the top earners, inheritance accounts for about 4.9 percent of the wealth of the entire group.

So….7.4 percent vs. 4.9 percent. When you compare entire groups, which is the right way to do this, there’s not very much difference between the two. And in a practical sense, the difference is even more negligible. If you run out the numbers, the wealth of the bottom group increased from $56,000 to $63,000 per household. Big whoop. Conversely, the wealth of the top group increased from $7.2 million to $7.6 million. That’s a nice chunk of change. In a technical sense, the low-income group got a bigger percentage increase, and income inequality has been reduced. But in any normal human sense, $7,000 is such a tiny amount that it doesn’t matter. In a nutshell, rich people inherit a lot of money and poor people don’t.

I’m not really sure what the point of being misleading about this is, since Williamson’s main themes in the linked piece are (a) rich people don’t get most of their money from inheritance, and (b) rich people are mostly married and work a lot of hours. Those things are both true, and there’s no real reason to toss in the other stuff. All it does is provide grist for other people to make misleading graphics later on.

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No, Poor People Don’t Inherit a Lot of Money

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Study: Fracking Good; Coal Bad

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

When scientists and policymakers talk about limiting climate change, what they’re mainly talking about keeping more fossil fuels in the ground. The fact is, there’s no way to prevent global warming from reaching catastrophic levels if we burn up our remaining reserves of oil, gas, and coal.

Climate negotiators have agreed that warming should be limited to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial level. That means that humans can release about 1.1 trillion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, and we’ve gone through about half of that already. The remaining emissions are known as our “carbon budget”; if we “spend” emissions beyond our budget, we’re much more likely to push the planet to dangerous levels of warming. If we burned through all of our current reserves of fossil fuels, we would overspend the budget by about threefold.

In other words, there are a lot of fossil fuels that are “unburnable” if we’re going to stay within the prescribed warming limit. But how much, exactly? And where exactly are those unburnable fuels? That’s the question asked in a study released today in the journal Nature by a team of energy analysts at University College London. The answer matters because mapping the geographical spread of unburnable fuels is a key step in understanding the roles specific regions need to play in the fight against climate change.

The model developed by Christophe McGlade and his team takes into account known estimates of fossil fuel reserves in a number of different countries and regions, as well as the global warming potential of those reserves and the market forces that determine which reserves are the most cost-effective to exploit. The results, shown below, are what the model finds to be the most cost-effective distribution that stays within the 3.6-degree limit.

The researchers ran the model twice: Once assuming widespread use of carbon capture and storage (an emerging technology for catching carbon emissions as they escape from power plants that is gaining steam but has yet to be proven on the global stage), and once assuming no CCS at all. The two scenarios ultimately aren’t that much different—using CCS won’t allow us to burn vastly more coal, oil, and gas. The results shown below are from the “with-CCS” scenario.

Tim McDonnell

A couple interesting things pop out. As you might expect, the vast majority of the world’s coal would need to stay buried. The United States is able to use most of its oil and gas in this scenario, because those resources are relatively cost-efficient to extract and bring to market compared to, for example, gas in China and India. In other words, according to this study, the US fracking boom can go forward full steam as long as the gas it produces aggressively replaces our coal consumption. But Canada can’t touch most of its oil, because the oil there—the kind that would be carried in the Keystone XL Pipeline—is exceptionally carbon-heavy tar sands crude.

What isn’t shown in the graphic above is that the model prohibits developing any of the vast oil and gas reserves in the Arctic. Melting sea ice has made those reserves increasingly attractive to energy companies like Shell.

Of course, the model has to make assumptions about future oil and gas prices that are basically impossible to be certain about. Unexpected changes to the price of oil, for example, could upset the cost equation for drilling in the US and re-shuffle the entire regional breakdown. But even as an estimate, the study really illuminates the vital need for policies all over the world that dramatically cut our dependence on coal.

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Study: Fracking Good; Coal Bad

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Seas are rising in weird, new ways

on the level

Seas are rising in weird, new ways

By on 1 Dec 2014commentsShare

Here’s a fun fact about “sea-level rise”: The seas aren’t actually level to begin with. Because of predictable, long-term patterns in climate, global winds push more water into some oceans than others. This leaves the seven seas (not really a thing) divided into six “basins” (actually a thing). Water in these interconnected systems can slosh around to different areas while the overall volume stays the same — much like water in a bathtub.

Or so we thought!

Last month in the super-sexy-sounding journal Geophysical Research Letters, scientists published research suggesting that changes to the Earth’s climate are driving changes in the way sea level rises in some of these ocean basins. Historically, the oceans of the Southern Hemisphere operate as a closed system, with an inverse relationship between the Indian and South Pacific basin and the South Atlantic basin: When one goes up, the other must come down. Using satellite measurements of sea level to track the flux in level, the researchers were surprised to find that, starting in the late ’90s, both basins began to rise in unison.

This is a map of the ocean basins — those big blue and purple blotches at the bottom of the map have been behaving strangely, thanks to climate change. Click to embiggen. Philip R. Thompson and Mark A. Merrifield

The total increase in this basin is about 2 millimeters a year — for you Americans, that adds up to a little more than an inch since 2000. It’s not weird that the oceans are rising, obviously, but it is strange to see such a distinct shift in the way they rise. The scientists trace this weirdness back to changes in the east-west wind patterns — changes for which they have several hypotheses, all of them linked to climate change.

Meanwhile, the other oceans seem to be behaving normally. Though let’s be clear: By “behaving normally,” we mean “rising in predictably terrifying ways as opposed to new weirdly terrifying ways.”

Source:
Science Graphic of the Week: Rising Sea Levels Show Strange Patterns

, Wired.

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Seas are rising in weird, new ways

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