No scenario for escalation inevitable incentives for conflict minimization
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- Studies linking the effects of air pollution to other issues are awful -- err against their impacts.
Air PollutionNo impact to air pollution.Schwartz & Hayward, ‘7[Joel, Visiting Fellow – AEI and former Dir. Reason Public Policy Institute’s Air Quality Project and former Ex. Officer of the California Inspection and Maintenance Review Commission which evaluated California’s vehicleemissions inspection program, MA in Planetary Science from Cal. Tech., and Steven, F.K. Weyerhaeuser Fellow – AEI, “Air Quality in America: A Dose of Reality on Air Pollution”, Decenber, http://www.aei.org/docLib/20080317_AirQuality.pdf] Air pollution affects far fewer people, far less often, and with far less severity than is commonly believed. The common wisdom is that a substantial fraction of Americans are suffering serious and permanent harm from air pollution even at recent historically low levels. Yet the actual research, most of it government-funded, tells a different story. California’s Children’s Health Study (CHS), for instance, reported that higher air pollution was associated with a lower risk of developing asthma. The CHS also found that ozone had no effect on children’s lung development, even in areas that exceeded the federal standard more than one hundred days per year. High levels of PM2.5 were associated with a decline in lung function. However, even for children who grew up in areas with PM2.5 at three times the level of the annual standard, the decline was only one to two percent. The CHS children were born in the early 1980s. No American child today experiences anywhere near the PM2.5 levels that were associated with even these tiny lung-function declines. Based on estimates by the California Air Resources Board, perhaps the most aggressive air pollution regulatory agency in the world, eliminating virtually all human-caused ozone in California would reduce total asthmarelated emergency room visits and respiratory hospital admissions by only about 1 and 2 percent, respectively—and this in a state where millions of people live in areas that have by far the highest ozone levels in the nation. We show that even this estimate is inflated, because it is based on a selective reading of the health effects literature that ignores contrary evidence. The most serious claim about air pollution is that it prematurely kills tens of thousands of Americans each year. The claim is based on small statistical correlations between daily pollution levels and daily deaths. But correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation, as recent embarrassing medical reversals have shown. For example, based on correlation studies, medical experts presumed that hormone-replacement therapy and Vitamin A supplements prevent heart disease, calcium supplements prevent osteoporosis, and a low-fat diet reduces cancer risks. But randomized trials, which eliminate the sources of uncontrollable bias that plague correlation studies, showed that these claims are greatly exaggerated or just plain false. In fact, Vitamin A turned out to increase cardiovascular risk. The air pollution–mortality claim deserves even greater skepticism. First, it is based on the same unreliable correlation methods that have led medical authorities astray in other areas. Second, even though pollution was correlated with higher premature mortality on average, it seemed to protect against death in about one-third of cities. How could pollution kill people in some cities and save them in others? More likely, both results are chance correlations rather than real effects. Third, researchers have been unable to kill animals in laboratory experiments, even when they expose them to air pollution at levels many times greater than ever occur in the United States. This suggests that air pollution at today’s record-low levels doesn’t pose a risk, and current standards are health-protective with plenty of room to spare. Studies linking the effects of air pollution to other issues are awful -- err against their impacts.Koop and Tole, ‘4[Gary, Prof. Econ. – U. Leicester and Fellow at the Rimini Centre for Economic Analysis and Lise, Lecturer in Env. Social. Sci. – Dept. Econ. U. Leicester, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, “Measuring the health effects of air pollution: to what extent can we really say that people are dying from bad air?” 47(1), January, ScienceDirect] Estimation of the effects of environmental impacts is a major focus of current theoretical and policy research in environmental economics. Such estimates are used to set regulatory standards for pollution exposure; design appropriate environmental protection and damage mitigation strategies; guide the assessment of environmental impacts; and measure public willingness to pay for environmental amenities. It is a truism that the effectiveness of such strategies depends crucially on the quality of the estimates used to inform them. However, this paper argues that in respect to at least one area of the empirical literature—the estimation of the health impacts of air pollution using daily time series data—existing estimates are questionable and thus have limited relevance for environmental decision-making. By neglecting the issue of model uncertainty—or which models, among the myriad of possible models researchers should choose from to estimate health effects—most studies overstate confidence in their chosen model and underestimate the evidence from other models, thereby greatly enhancing the risk of obtaining uncertain and inaccurate results. This paper discusses the importance of model uncertainty for accurate estimation of the health effects of air pollution and demonstrates its implications in an exercise that models pollution-mortality impacts using a new and comprehensive data set for Toronto, Canada. The main empirical finding of the paper is that standard deviations for air pollution-mortality impacts become very large when model uncertainty is incorporated into the analysis. Indeed they become so large as to question the plausibility of previously measured links between air pollution and mortality. Although applied to the estimation of the effects of air pollution, the general message of this paper—that proper treatment of model uncertainty critically determines the accuracy of the resulting estimates—applies to many studies that seek to estimate environmental effects. Directory: files files -> Answer True False 2 points Question 2 files -> Integer programming and game theory files -> 4 Integer Programming files -> Bpa vehicle Window Repair Scenario #1 task: Procure vehicle window relacement. Objective files -> Pop Warner History files -> North Carolina Inclusion Initiative Mapping Where Children with ieps are Being Served Purpose files -> Fall 2013 Spring 2014 Program Data: Standard 1 Exhibit 4d files -> Hanban – asia society confucius classrooms network 2010 request for proposal files -> Northern England’s set-jetting locations Download 1.24 Mb. Share with your friends:
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