Times ..the Birmingham council website which tells you if your car is legal in a clear air zone is often wrong.

I'd love to know why my vehicle is coming up as non-compliant with @BhamCityCouncil 's CAZ checker.
According to @WaseemZaffar, Euro 6 vehicles are supposed to be compliant

The Yorkshire Post runs : Children will suffer pollution effects from exercising in sports grounds.

Of course the Times DieselsRpaedos page runs the story
"Report by Air Team a campaign group"
The article quotes our mate Dr Jonathan Grigg.

Does training at such sports ground stop a child's athletic career ?
It says that one of the worst sport grounds was used by David Beckham
So no

R4 prog just had a long item
it did not scream "ban diesels, ban diesels"
The second researcher said they were surprised not to find diesel particulate correlations but rather other chemicals
like Carbon Monoxide.... and NOx

She said there was also a delayed effect as if the chemicals facilitate bacteria

The first researcher conformer a 48 hour delay in effects
but didn't mention the other chemicals being a cause.
He did make a point of saying that people are misinformed if they think most particulates come from fuel ...
He said much comes from brake dust and stirring up road dust.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000fgf7

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000fgf7

Tuesday Asthma UK passed on a Canadian study to the Times
Exposing pre 3 year olds to cleaning products correlates to 35% increase in developing asthma
2,000 child study
other factors were compensated for

maybe they alter childs microbiome

UK stats
5.5m with asthma
1.1m children
£1bn pa NHS cost
1,422 deaths
that is 4 per day

Are PM2.5 harm claims bogus ??

An analysis in by By Kip Hansen — 22 January 2020
at WUWT explains

Sure at high levels eg African women cooking indoors over a wood fire
severely reduced lifespan can be demonstrated.

However there are claims extrapolated from measuring the PM2.5 OUTDOORS in neighborhood streets and then extrapolating that to average days lost per person.
All studies are based on a US study called the Six Cities study
However the writer argues that the study's conclusions do not make proper confidence limits.
So all the extrapolations based on it are flawed.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/01/22/secret-science-under-attack-part-1/

In the comments is reference to William Briggs
also calling extrapolations flawed
https://wmbriggs.com/post/8720/

Trumps EPA is so concerned about laws being based on such weak studies

but the NYT ran a hyperbolic article
and refused to print the EPA's deep response
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/01/22/secret-science-under-attack-part-1/

Dirty air is deadlier than war, Aids and smoking combined
Ben Webster, Environment Editor
Tuesday March 03 2020, 9.00am, The Times
Air pollution shortens the life of the average person worldwide by almost three years and causes more deaths than the total from wars, malaria, Aids and smoking, a study has found.

Scientists said the world faced an air pollution “pandemic”, with the death toll far greater than previously thought.

They calculated that air pollution caused 8.8 million premature deaths in 2015, almost 2 million more than the number previously calculated by the World Health Organisation. Smoking caused 7.2 million deaths, Aids 1 million, malaria and other insect-borne diseases 600,000 and wars and violence 530,000.

The new study took into account a wider range of diseases and conditions, including diabetes, dementia and high blood pressure, which studies have shown are linked to air pollution. It also

Air pollution shortens the average person’s life by 1.55 years in the UK, compared with 2.9 years globally

PR BS cos it has line
"Much of it can be avoided by replacing fossil fuels with clean renewable energy"

doh other studies show that emissions of particules from electric cars are equal to those of combustion vehicules

Monday 60 charities like wwf, rspb , Womens Institute
say ban diesel by 2030

...nothing comes up on google search

A surprise now they are blaming tyres

Pollution from tyre wear can be 1,000 times worse than the emissions produced from a car's exhaust, new data has revealed. ... It found that a standard family hatchback using brand-new correctly-inflated tyres emitted 5.8 grams of particulates per kilometre

wheras the limit on exhaust pollution is 4.5 milligrammes per Km

The stats are fishy
cos they say that if you drive 10,000K you drop 58Kg of tyres

Thursday : waste heat from the tube dystem to be recycled to apartment blocks via defunct City Road station
energy bills to be cut by 10%

... is that new surely they haven't just vented the heat before ?

BTW the residents don't need the heat pump heat in summer.

Full page advert
Project SolarUK and Duracell
.. magic energy bank

PR BS

Hey, hey what about old petrol station workers

There is something suspicious about the anti-diesel campaigns
the campaigns rely on hyperbole rather than actual PAST evidence
Like they never say here are the TAXI dead drivers and this is how shorter their lives were.

I just another thought
what about the old petrol station forecourt workers ?
There should be stats that show how much shorter their lives were

After all engines were magnitudes more polluting years ago
Why is the data not presented , if it really is that bad ?

Today Coventry university are claiming drive-thru workers are at risk
It was on BBC Inside Out East on Feb 24th
- pollution at drive through'ss can harm staff
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000ft20/inside-out-east-24022020

OK it makes some sense, they are sitting next to car engines a full 7 hours in a shift
However the stats they presented were "25% above the legal limit"outside the window
.. well hang on that doesn't mean the worker is breathing bad air
It all depends on the ventilation of her booth
If filtered air is being forced in from a clean source , then the air she breathes should be OK

Mondays Times
There was a bit of a contradiction on page 2

First article ..... : Climate fears halt smart motorway plans *
Second article : Congestion is costing the economy almost £7 billion a year **

Like aren't smart motorways aimed at cutting congestion and getting the traffic moving ?
IMHO the problem is not the SMART motorways, but the DUMB drivers who drive into the back of stationary cars
.. but I think tech solutions will make them OK

===============
* A multi-billion road building plan – including proposals to roll out controversial smart motorways – has been put on hold over climate change concerns, The Times has learnt.

The £25 billion strategy to expand motorways and major A-roads over the next five years, has been shelved until later in the spring or even early summer.

The move is made after the Court of Appeal quashed government policy over the expansion of Heathrow on the grounds that it failed to take account of the UK’s climate change commitments.

======================

** A NEW STUDY has found that drivers on Britain’s roads spent an average of 115 hours in traffic last year, costing the country £6.9bn — an average of £894 per driver — in wasted time.
The research, carried out by data and analytics company Inrix, pointed out that most of the UK’s cities predate the car by centuries and said London is unequipped to handle the 2.6m cars registered there.

the top comments continue to show the difference between
: Times reporters who are mostly like Guardian reader
: Times Readers who are mostly like us, clued up skeptics

Top comment with 80 likes
@ ConcerbnedVoter says
"For the love of God, just get rid of the zero carbon target!
It is enough to make one weep. The whole system in thrall to the green blob."

Braintree solar only station will charge 24 cars at the same time got a £5m grant
FFS that is £20K per charger

it will be chargedfrom farms at Hull and York
wow that's far

will supercharge in 20/30min
Wow tgat is quite an ampage
wonder what ampage a solar farm delivers

"meat eating must halve to meet 2050 target"

"New Starbucks recyclable cups'

The Times #DieselsRpaedos team are less active theze days.

Tuesday they have Maida Vale street has lampost based chargers
The article has no contesting view
Its slow charging
"It is seen as highly efficient cos posts have an existing electricity supply so it companies don't need to dig up the road.

Hmm a row of streetlamps is going to have cabling to power the streetlamps
say at one amp each

Im guessing each car charger needs 10 amps
So I don't think there is enough spare caoatcity in lamp cables.

The next article is a repetition of their old report about the EV only street under the Barbican

Tue : Smoke from Australia’s recent bushfires killed more than 400 people... a study suggests.
"Steve Milloy @JunkScience · Mar 24 attacked the Times article

Total BS. No bodies.
Just statistical fantasy based on the assumption that PM2.5 kills
-- which it most certainly does not.

There are only a few comments on the article as if few people noticed it.

GC wrote
As The Guardian's "Environment Editor" Damian Carrington can choose the best researched and evidenced science to put his own name to.
A preliminary study has found the first evidence of a link between higher levels of air pollution and deaths from Covid-19 in England.
... "The analysis showed London, the Midlands and the north-west had the highest levels of nitrogen oxides and higher numbers of coronavirus deaths.

The research has not yet been peer-reviewed and shows only a correlation.
The scientists behind the study said more research was needed to confirm a causal link and rule out other possible factors such as income levels and any difference in age profiles in the regions"

a sign of PR BS is when science is published in media, before peer review

Oh air pollution causes Covid19
Does it ??

A red flag is when new science goes straight media
instead of the proper process of science journal

So NYT ran a story

And Milloy has followed it up
The scientists big claim was watered down and a correction issued
but the NYT just moved on with correcting their story

"The preliminary study by researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health made a splash when the results were announced April 7 in The New York Times, prompting alarm on the left as Democrats sought to connect COVID-19 deaths to the Trump administration’s regulatory pushback.

A few weeks later, however, its researchers quietly backtracked from their finding that people who live for decades in areas with slightly more particulate matter in the air are 15% more likely to die from the coronavirus, lowering the figure to 8%. The press release was revised Monday.

Other profs had already expressed doubt
“The model has not been validated and its assumptions are unrealistic,”
“In layman’s terms, it assumes an unrealistic effect of fine particulate matter on deaths, and then with that assumption built into the model, it uses data to estimate how big that unrealistic effect is. They’re making an assumption that has no basis in reality.”
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/may/4/harvard-backtracks-air-pollution-coronavirus-death/

The JimAl-Khalili show had Prof Frank Kelly on
He is the anti-diesel guy that did the Sweden study that put med students in an air chamber like Oxford St
and noticed an immediate deterioration on long function, that recovered in 24 hours.

The discussion was kind of shallow
"Oh there is this one street in London, Oxford Street that has no cars , just diesel buses and taxes
and it USED TO have magnitudes more pollution than Beijing
.. well of one particular thing NOx which Beijing doesn't have that much of, cos most of its vehicles are petrol."

Then "Oh the air is fantastically clean now in lockdown, I wish that would continue"

That is massive generalisations to me
...London is not the UK
One street in London is not London
and NOx is not all pollutants.
He did have to talk about the way car corps cheated and reported on it before the US EPA picked it up.
But he totally denied that later the car corps did come up with good anti NoX tech like Ad-Blue.

The air in most places in the UK is not that different to before lockdown
and other dominant factors like pollen and wood burners cause more health problems.
Asthma admissions to hospital have always correlated with high grass pollen days.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000j7zx

Kelly praised recent London mayors for air pollution measure
Both Sadiq & Boris.

He pushed the idea of magic have your cake and eat it solutions like electric buses.
But didn't highlight the main cure
#1 Stop centralising things in London
#2 Get people to live near to their job, so they can WALK.

The BBC decided to centralise operations by building a huge new HQ down the road from New Oxford St.
There is no BBC office at all in my region.