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Go ahead and visit your nearest hospital. Ask a cardiologist about heart disease cases they've seen in their career. Ask how many could have even possibly been

Go ahead and visit your nearest hospital. Ask a cardiologist about heart disease cases they've seen in their career. Ask how many could have even possibly been a direct result of air pollution. Then ask how many were obviously linked to poor diet, lack of exercise, and/or smoking. Then you do the math.

PierceJoy 9y ago
> Ask how many could have even possibly been a direct result of air pollution. That's now how this works. To go back to the smoking example, lung cancer is not a direct result of smoking. It's a combination of factors, smoking being one of them. Many people smoke their whole lives and are cancer free. The question is, across the population, how many more people die of heart disease when pollution is present. That does not imply that pollution is the only cause, but simply an additional factor that pushes the number of deaths higher. > Then ask how many were obviously linked to poor diet, lack of exercise, and/or smoking. Then you do the math. Where in the article did it imply that pollution was a greater risk than poor diet and lack of exercise?
- curiousgeorgio 9y ago
  > how many more people die of heart disease when pollution is present Exactly. And I'm saying that question is much more difficult to answer than some people probably think. Heart disease is so extremely prevalent, and there are so many variables at play that I find it hard to believe anyone can confidently answer that question definitively, at least so far as to claim that pollution is "responsible for" the deaths of X number of people. It's especially hard to isolate because the dependent variable (pollution) and the independent variable (number of heart disease-related deaths) have both been increasing, and pollution levels are positively correlated with a lot of other risk factors for heart disease.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
    > It's especially hard to isolate ... I guess that, that it is especially hard, is what motivates some people to put in the effort to attempt to quantify these variables. It's probably impossible to determine with absolute certainty, though it might be possible to determine with some level of confidence.

PierceJoy 9y ago

> Ask how many could have even possibly been a direct result of air pollution. That's now how this works. To go back to the smoking example, lung cancer is not a direct result of smoking. It's a combination of factors, smoking being one of them. Many people smoke their whole lives and are cancer free. The question is, across the population, how many more people die of heart disease when pollution is present. That does not imply that pollution is the only cause, but simply an additional factor that pushes the number of deaths higher. > Then ask how many were obviously linked to poor diet, lack of exercise, and/or smoking. Then you do the math. Where in the article did it imply that pollution was a greater risk than poor diet and lack of exercise?

curiousgeorgio 9y ago
> how many more people die of heart disease when pollution is present Exactly. And I'm saying that question is much more difficult to answer than some people probably think. Heart disease is so extremely prevalent, and there are so many variables at play that I find it hard to believe anyone can confidently answer that question definitively, at least so far as to claim that pollution is "responsible for" the deaths of X number of people. It's especially hard to isolate because the dependent variable (pollution) and the independent variable (number of heart disease-related deaths) have both been increasing, and pollution levels are positively correlated with a lot of other risk factors for heart disease.
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
  > It's especially hard to isolate ... I guess that, that it is especially hard, is what motivates some people to put in the effort to attempt to quantify these variables. It's probably impossible to determine with absolute certainty, though it might be possible to determine with some level of confidence.