The price of EU:s global warming fixation: Hundreds of thousands Europeans "will suffer a premature death"

Here is another major - and deadly - European failure:

for more than a decade EU member states have tended to encourage the rise of diesel vehicles, with favourable tax regimes and pricing structures.
This has been one factor in bringing down greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels used for road transport, as diesel engines are more fuel-efficient than their petrol counterparts. But it has had an unintended consequence in the form of greater air pollution, because diesel engines spew out more particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide than petrol-driven cars, giving rise to breathing difficulties in vulnerable people, such as children and older citizens.

Failed European environmental policies has led to hundreds of thousands of premature deaths:

Hundreds of thousands of Europeans will suffer a premature death in the next two decades as the result of governments’ failure to act on air pollution, Europe’s environmental watchdog has warned.
In 2011, the latest year for which figures have been reliably collated, more than 400,000 are estimated to have died prematurely as a result of breathing toxic fumes, despite recent improvements in some countries.

A new report just out gives the death figures for one European city, London:

Nearly 10,000 people died in a year as a result of air pollution in London, a study has found.

Experts from King's College London combined the effects of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and a particulate matter known as PM2.5 to look at the total impact on the city's health in 2010.
The scientists said combining the pollutants "reveal a higher health impact than previously estimated".

Fighting real pollution - finally some (partially) good science in Science

Finally some - partially - good science from sources close to the global warming establishment. A new study published in Science focuses on what could be done to decrease real air pollution:

Buses spew clouds of black exhaust fumes in Mexico City while, in India, wood burnt in rudimentary stoves fills houses with sooty smoke. Methane leaks from gas pipelines in Russia and rice paddies in China, eventually breaking down in sunlight and contributing to the production of smog and ozone. In each of these cases, simple steps to curb air pollution would promote public health.

By 2030, these reduction measures could prevent anywhere from 700,000 to 4.7 million premature deaths from air pollution annually, the study found. And because ozone is toxic to plants, such measures could boost global crop production by 1–4%.

It is only when the scientists behind the study start speaking about the benefits of the above measures in preventing bogus human caused global warming that things begin to go wrong:

We’re in a gridlock over carbon dioxide, and we’re losing time,” says Veerabhadran Ramanathan, an atmospheric scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, and a co-author on the Scienceanalysis. “This is one way to buy back some of that time, and the co-benefits are huge.”

What Ramanathan calls "the co-benefits", are quite obviously the only real - but valuable - benefits of fighting "black carbon".  However, if there is support among warmists for these kind of measures, it should not be impossible to find common ground with global warming sceptics. At least for this blogger, it does not matter if the warmists - wrongly - think that fighting real pollution will be useful in promoting their beliefs. The main thing is that something is done in order clean the air in some of the worst polluted regions of the world.

But this may be too good to be true. Die-hard warmists, like Kevin Trenberth have already began to put down the new findings:

Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, credits the study with building scientific consensus on the issue, but warns that it should not detract from the main agenda on carbon dioxide. “The fundamental problem with long-term climate change is CO₂, and anything that takes us away from addressing that doesn’t really solve the problem,” he says. “It just puts it off.”

Read the entire article here