Slide 1 Doublethink: Two incompatible positions. S. Stanley Young, PhD FASA, FAAAS stan.young@omicsoft.com 1 Doublethink is holding two different beliefs that are contradictory, perhaps in different situations. The beliefs may be firmly held as with some true believer, or they could be dishonest for public and private consumption. When looking at an argument in support of the two positions, does one favor emotional and the other rational, perhaps self-serving, thinking? Or is there some combination of rational and emotional?
Slide 2 Decision making • Appeal to authority. • Appeal to emotion. • Appeal to data/analysis. 2 We don’t have time to carefully evaluate everything in life so we often take shortcuts. If a good authority takes a position, it is fast and convenient to just follow along without much thought. Emotion can be used to force a decision without much though. Through much of human history authority and emotion were the primary modes of decision making. Logic/data/analysis are late comers to decision making. My question, mostly, is How dangerous is air pollution? Are we to believer what the EPA told a congressional committee? It can kill you right now! Air pollution is causal of acute deaths. By improving air quality we have saved 160,000 premature deaths each year.
Slide 3 NEJM 1993, EHP 1995 EPA chose Dockery (McCarthy, Nichols, Beale). 3 Where did the emphasis on particulate matter start? Two papers appeared in the mid 1990s. Dockery et al. (1993) claimed PM2.5 was the toxic component of the air. Styer et al. (1995) said they say no association of PM10 with mortality. The EPA funded both studies. NB: PM2.5 and PM10 contains PM2.5 and the two are highly correlated. The Styer data set is much larger than the Dockery data set. The EPA chose to go with Dockery. The decision was (likely) made by McCarthy, Nichols and Beale. McCarthy now heads the EPA. Nichols heads the California Air Resources Board. John Beale was lead policy person for water and air at EPA for many years. They were “rain makers” for the EPA. John Beale is now in jail for massive fraud. The EPA does not have the Dockery data set and Harvard refuses to make the data set public.
Slide 4 Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 2003 The Clean Air Act of 1970 and Adult Mortality KENNETH CHAY CARLOS DOBKIN MICHAEL GREENSTONE UC Berkeley UC Berkeley University of Chicago cdobkin@ucsc.edu “We find that regulatory status is associated with large reductions in TSPs pollution but has little association with reductions in either adult or elderly mortality.” 4 Dobkin found and made this data set available to Young and Obenchain. Their re-analysis confirmed no association.
Slide 5 Journal of the American Statistical Association 2011 “Based on the local coefficient alone, we are not able to demonstrate any change in life expectancy for a reduction in PM2.5.” 5 This study was funded by USEPA. Greven et al. also say, that large effects noted from location to location are most likely due to confounding. Confounding occurs when two or more factors occur together in a way that makes statistical separation difficult or impossible. Crazy example. Ice cream consumption increases in the summer. Does ice cream consumption cause heat stroke? Obviously not. But if we measure ice cream consumption and not temperature, we might think so due to the association. The Greven et al. data set is not public. A letter from Dominici to EPA “walked back” the claim in the paper. Without the data, it is impossible to know which interpretation makes the most sense. The JASA paper was peer reviewed. Greven et al. have not retracted their paper. ??
Slide 6 BMJ Heart 2014 “This study found no clear evidence for pollution effects on STEMIs and stroke, ….” 6 Virtually all air quality/mortality papers point to heart attacks as the etiology for excess mortality due to poor air quality. This paper, using a massive data set, all of England and Wales, removes heart attacks and stroke as a possible etiology for air quality induced mortality. On the face of it, it seems absurd that very low levels of small particles can CAUSE heart attacks or stroke. Smoking one cigarette gives a dose many orders of magnitude higher than current air levels. Linking know substances in particle matter to specific fatal mechanisms of heart attack or stroke has been very difficult. In epidemiology studies we are looking at statistical deaths. There are no autopsies.
Slide 7 BMJ Heart, Figure 2 7 Orientation. Y-axis is % increase or decrease of mortality. X-axis list air quality components, carbon monoxide, NO2, etc. A dot gives the mean change and the vertical lines give the 95% confidence limits. If the confidence limits do not overlap 0 then there is nominal statistical significance. Only 3/66, 4.5%, confidence limits fail to cross the no effect line, a result consistent with chance, 5%. There are no effects for all cause mortality, MI or stroke the primary response variables. We appear to be looking at purely random effects.
Slide 8 BMJ Open 2015 “…indicated that none of the air pollutants investigated — CO, NO, NO2,O3 and particulate matter (PM2.5) — showed consistent positive associations with increased risk 8 of AMI hospitalisation .” Canadian study found no effect of air components. This paper supports Milojevic et al. (2014).
Slide 9 Supporting Literature 1.1995 Styer No effect in two US counties. 2.2000 HEI repport. No effect in CA. 3.2003 Chay. No effect US. 4.2005 Enstrom . No chronic effect CA. 5.2011 Greven. No local effect US. 6.2013 Cox. Only temperature effect. 7. 2013 Young. No effect in West US. 8.2014 Milojevic. No heart attacks or stroke. 9.2014&2015 Young. No acute effect in CA 9 As early as 2000 it was reported that there were no excess deaths in California (a report funded by EPA). In 2003 Chay et al. reported that reductions in air pollution did not produce a reduction in deaths across the US. I’m happy to provide pdfs of these papers. These papers have been largely ignored by EPA and are usually not cited by EPA funded researchers. Not citing Enstrom 2005 is particularly egregious. The study is large and its result calls into question causality. For example Dockery et al. (1993) has over 6,000 citations and Styer et al. (1995) has just over 100. The Styer data set is larger. The statistical methods are sound. The paper appeared in Environmental Health Perspectives. Dockery used PM2.5 and Styer used PM10. PM2.5 is a component of PM10 and the two are highly correlated. Chay is cited ~100 times. It uses Total Solids Particulate, TSP. TSP contains PM10 and PM2.5. The three are highly correlated. For example, Integrated Science Assessment for Particulate Matter 2009 was searched for Styer and Chay and neither name was found.
Slide 10 Decision making • Appeal to authority. • Appeal to emotio ion . • Appeal to data/analysis. 10 If appeal to authority fails, then appeal to emotion is often effective. The emotions are complex but those of anger, fear, anxiety, etc. can cloud good judgement on the part of the decision maker. Induced emotions can cloud the judgement of individuals.
Slide 11 11 The Navy pilots of these F4B-4's are just having a little fun with the local farmer who is none too pleased. Scared cows don't produce milk. EPA is just having a little fun trying to scare the public – maybe to their own advantage. They are true believers and anything goes, even unethical human experiments, or they are dishonest knowing that current levels of air quality are not causally related to death? Are they flimflamming everyone?
Slide 12 Emotion The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins , all of them imaginary . H. L. Mencken Global Cooling/ ……./Sustainability/Air Quality/etc. 12 Humans depend on emotional respond to dangerous situations. But emotion can be exploited. H. L. Mencken: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” The medieval church used scare/emotion to control people. Global cooling, etc. and air quality kills are all likely imaginary.
Slide 13 Decision making • Appeal to authority. • Appeal to emotion . • Gather data and do analysis . 13 The most difficult and time consuming method of decision making is to gather data and do analysis
Slide 14 Gather Data (Facts) California, 8 air basins. Years 2000 – 2012, most recent. Daily deaths, air quality, weather. Over 37,000 exposure days. Over 2 million e-death certificates. 14 We secured an e data set from California of over 2M death certificates for the years 2000-2012. We looked at the 8 most populous air basins. We obtained air quality, PM2.5 and ozone, and weather variables, min and max temperature as well as relative humidity. We have over 37,000 days of data. This is one of, if not the largest, air quality/acute mortality data sets extant. It is clearly the largest publicly available data sets. This analysis was reported http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03062, Feb 10, 2015. We made the data set available. The EPA knows or should know about the paper and the data set.
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