A while back an anti-nuke wrote a classic comment in one of my diaries that since indoor air pollution killed "only" 2.0 million people per year - citing a link that I use repeatedly in my arguments, nuclear energy - which has not killed anything like 2 million people in more than six decades of commercial operations, never mind in a single year or event, was useless in the discussion.
Anti-nukes are a spectacularly misinformed and oblivious group, but it is startling to learn that the same people who claim that people in Mali (for example) should buy $50,000 worth of solar PV equipment and their lives will be made whole haven't, apparently, heard of hot plates. No surprise there.
(I have a desultory diary in which I've collected interesting comments that delineate something of the anti-nuke mentality in preparation, but I haven't had the time to work on it, to be frank. If I'm ever in the mood to work on it and publish it - my growing cynicism makes that less and less likely - it will be called "NNadir is a Liar About Air Pollution.")
This brief and sloppy (20 minute) diary will be about the very same practice that kills a fair proportion of the 2.0 million people per year who die from indoor air pollution, the "renewable energy" practice of burning biomass, as applied to direct measurement of its effect on outdoor air pollution in New Zealand.
The paper from the primary scientific literature is entitled "Identification of Particulate Matter Sources on an Hourly Time-Scale in a Wood Burning Community" and it is written by scientists in New Zealand. The paper appears (as of this writing) in the ASAP (online) issue Environmental Science and Technology, a publication of the American Chemical Society. Here is a link to the paper.
I'll excerpt some of the text from the full paper.
Particulate matter (PM) is well-known to have adverse effects on human health.1−3 It also has a range of environmental effects, including local reductions in visibility and effects on theradiative balance.4,5 Because of these effects, PM concentrations are routinely monitored in numerous countries and managed according to local legislation. In New Zealand, the National Environmental Standard (NES) for PM sets a 24 h average limit for PM10 (particulate matter with aerodynamic diameters less than 10 μm) concentrations at 50 μg m−3. Many urban areas in New Zealand exceed the NES numerous times each year, particularly during the winter when wood combustion for home heating is common (http://www.mfe.govt.nz/...).4 Particulate matter concentrations in New Zealand urban environments have been shown to have distinct diurnal cycles,
independent of community size or population,6 with peak PM10 concentrations occurring between 10 pm−midnight and 8−11 am
The authors note that the sources of air pollution in New Zealand have not been identified, and then tell us about a town of about 20,000 people in a fairly rural area, the town of Masterton, where lots of people use so called "renewable energy," for heating, specifically wood. It appears that the town often exceeds the National Environmental Standard for particulates, and so they decide to investigate.
They then apply a mathematical technique known as Positive Matrix Factorization (PMF) to discern something about the sources of particulate pollution in Masterton, along with some fairly sensitive analytical techniques.
(I recall writing a diary here sometime ago - or perhaps on another website - where GC/MS techniques to analyze for a class of compounds called levoglucasans were used in Austria to actual wood species found in wood smoke pollutants. I'm not going to poke through my diaries to find it, but I can easily find some papers in my files that describe this technique. An example is Atmospheric Environment 42 (2008) 126–141. The authors in this paper do not refer to this techique.)
The authors discern, apparently that wood burning sources totally dominate air pollution in Masterton, as well as in several urban areas of New Zealand.
They write:
The average hourly contributions from each source at both sites were calculated to assess source contributions over every hour in a day. Figures 5 and 6 present the average hourly source contributions at WC and CC, respectively. From Figures 5 and 6 it is evident that biomass burning is a significant PM source every hour during the winter. It is also clear that biomass burning is the most significant contributor to both peaks observed in the diurnal cycle. It is not surprising that biomass burning dominated the evening peak, since on cold winter evenings home heating is a necessity, and in Masterton many households rely on wood burners as their main heating source. More surprisingly, biomass burning also dominated the morning PM peak.
The study gives no epidemiological evidence about the health effects of this air pollution, since in general people don't give a rat's ass about deaths from so called "renewable energy," since, well, renewable energy is, um, always great.
Such an opinion about renewable energy always being great may have been less widely held say, about 200 years ago, when, after tens of thousands of years, humanity abandoned the renewable paradise for, um, something else. In particular Europe at the time was about fresh out of forests, but who cares?
But nevertheless it would appear that renewable energy in New Zealand (as well as many other places elsewhere) would seem to have something to do with outdoor air pollution as well as indoor air pollution. The World Health Organization (as linked above) reports that these two types of air pollution seem to kill respectively, 1.3 million people per year, and 2.0 million people per year.
I'm sure we're all far more involved with trying to find one or two people who died because of the 9.0 earthquake and 15 meter tsunami that struck nuclear reactors in Japan - even if we couldn't care less about the tens of thousands of other people who were killed by buildings in the same event.
Enjoy the rest of your Sunday, as much as I'm enjoying mine. We're very happy here in New Jersey today about the bad weather, because like about 50% of the rest of the United States, we've been experiencing drought.
