A new simulation claims small-micron particulate matter, so small you need an electron microscope to see it, is killing 250,000 people each year. PM₁₀, 10 microns in size, is a well-known killer. That is wildfires and smog but after smog was drastically reduced in the 1990s, the target went down 400%, to 2.5. Suddenly air quality maps could be orange and red again, even though the air is cleaner in wealthier countries than it has been since the 1980s.

It is just correlation, and therefore only EXPLORATORY, not science. The authors note poorer areas in Europe have more of this 'virtual' pollution - PM_2.5 - and more deaths. So they link them and then claim they can prevent them. All in a computer simulation, while ignoring clear confounders like that poor people have many, many other lifestyle risks that contribute to earlier mortality.

On the left, a California map showing PM_2.5, a designation fabricated in the 1990s with no deaths recorded to-date. On the right, an actual pollution map using PM¹⁰.

The ecologists behind the paper say greenhouse gas emissions need to be drastically cut but they can't tell us where the cutting will happen. America, for example, has lower per capita emissions than in World War II. Our emissions are even lower than World War I.



Most of those reductions are due to the private sector wanting to be more efficient - no one wants profits going up in smoke - while only 0.1% is due to subsidies to alternative energy like solar and wind. They'd be even lower if the same political demographic that fetishized solar panels hadn't banned nuclear energy in 1994.

Telling poor people they can't have heat or air conditioning to reduce emissions even more won't save lives, it will cost them. France can lose 12,000 old people in a heat wave due to the high cost of their electricity while academics claim it saves virtual lives because they didn't use air conditioners.

That's not science, it's environmental nihilism, the exact thing science prevents.