Air Pollution and Alzheimer’s: grim news

We’ve written a lot about air pollution over the years (LSS passim) Mainly to say that air pollution, particularly in the form of PM_2.5 particles can do all sorts of harm to your lungs and circulatory systems. A fact well-attested by some of the sharpest medical minds on the planet as this WHO report shows[1] But now there is increasing evidence that these pesky particles may play a big part in the massive wave of dementia and neurodegenerative disease that is sweeping across the world. The latest evidence is summarised by Professor Eef Hogervorst for The Conversation.[2] And it’s pretty grim.

Air pollution and the deadly particles it chucks out are associated with all kinds of activities beloved of certain US politicians and their followers. Fossil fuels; road transport; old style heavy industries; good ol’ boys roun’ the barbecue fire, and that sort of thing. But how do you measure it, and separate out other plausible causes? A rather nifty US study started by mapping Medicare claims for dementia by postcode and PM _2.5 particle density. Other factors such as smoking, bad diets and poverty were also considered. The latter was admirably controlled by factoring in Medicaid eligibility, a sure indicator of low wealthin the US. We often use the phrase Killer Quote here: this time it’s more than a rhetorical flourish

…….pollution levels in the areas studied were, on average, about twice as high as the limit set by the World Health Organization (WHO). ………..The researchers found that the increased Alzheimer’s risk in polluted areas remained even after taking high blood pressure, stroke and depression into account

Eef goes on to explain how and why PMs are pulverising your grey matter: but click on! For she does it much better than we ever could.

And our thoughts, gentle readers? Firstly, the work confirms other reports we’ve noticed [3] Secondly the impressive size of the sample. Above all the careful attempts to control other factors such as diet and poverty; we know you prefer thoughtful scholarship over blind jumping to conclusions. Nothing is yet conclusive: but the hypothesis that air pollution causes other forms of dementia fits the available data so very much more closely than anything else does seems to us to be as close to one as you can get.

[1] WHO global air quality guidelines: particulate matter (‎PM2.5 and PM10)‎, ozone, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide and carbon monoxide

[2] https://theconversation.com/air-pollution-may-directly-contribute-to-alzheimers-disease-new-study-275873?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest%20from%20The%2%5B2%5D

[3] The effect of ambient air pollution (PM2.5) on dementia risk | Nature Aging

#air pollution #fossil fuels #smoke #alzheimers #dementia #WHO #health #medicine

Renewables: Romanian success is a big warning for Uncle Sam

One of the enduring narratives promoted by the fossil‑fuel industry is that economic growth is only possible if we continue relying on their products. It’s a story that has shaped public debate for decades — and stands in the way of a safer, cleaner future. Do we have to take them at their word? Not according to the remarkable developments in Romania, uncovered for us today by Ajit Naranjan of the Guardian.[1]

For what Ajit has found is a country successfully decoupling economic growth from fossil fuels and tying it instead to renewables. It’s all the more interesting because the Romanian oil fields were the very birthplace of Big Oil back in 1857: and the old communist regime seemed to spend its time promoting every dirty fossil fuel technology it could find. But today there is a truly stupendous investment in things like solar panels, offshore wind and nuclear power. Emissions have dropped by 75% since 1990 while GDP has doubled. Some of the achievement is down to policies- such as EU membership, cleaning up agriculture-as well as technologies. And there is a darker side, as gas and oil are far from entirely banished. But we’ll leave all this to Ajit, who does such an informative job. And although Romania so heroically leads the way:

Dozens of countries have completely decoupled their economies from emissions, even accounting for the pollution in imported goods, and many more have managed to grow richer while emissions climb at a slower rate

All of which may be bad news for the USA, which currently seems to be trying to move back towards fossil fuels. Because in a global economy shifting toward clean energy, returning to fossil fuels may prove a strategic dead end. If renewables become the backbone of 21st‑century growth — as many economists expect — then choosing the old path risks leaving a country stranded while competitors build the industries of the future.

‘The trend is irreversible’: has Romania shattered the link between economic growth and high emissions? | Romania | The Guardian

#romania #USA #fossil fuels #economic growth #global warming #climate change #rewables

Hot years and wild fires: Is this the start of a true doom loop?

Two stories today give us serious pause for thought. Both concern our old bête noire of climate change. It’s not the bad news per se: we’re kind of inured by now. It’s the way they open the door to thoughts with actual evolutionary consequences: but more of that later.

The first story, from Ajit Niranjam of the Guardian, is a grim reprise of current trends. [1] 2025 is the third hottest year on record. For us their killer fact is context: El Niño, which had boosted heating trends in 2023 and 2024, was waning by 2025, so even that fig leaf has been stripped away. And talking of stripping away, what about the forests, which might have soaked up a little more of all that lethal CO₂ affording us a few more years of life? Well as this truly impressive piece of visual journalism by Ashley Kirk and Pablo Gutiérrez shows, they are being devasted by the very wildfires which global warming has brought about. This is what information theorists call a self re-inforcing feedback loop which would be intellectually interesting to study if anyone is left alive to do so.

And the evolutionary reason we are so worried? Our species carries ancient cognitive machinery that buckles under modern complexity. Human cognition defaults to fast, intuitive, pattern‑matching heuristics — brilliant for spotting predators in the savannah, disastrous for interpreting climate models This “cognitive autopilot” leaps to conclusions, prefers simple stories, and treats feelings as evidence. A species that cannot update beliefs in the face of overwhelming evidence, that treats data as optional, that cannot overcome its own cognitive biases is evolutionarily brittle. It will eventually be outcompeted by one that can. Can anyone think of a name for it?

[1] Human activity helped make 2025 third-hottest year on record, experts say | Climate crisis | The Guardian

[2] Mapped: how the world is losing its forests to wildfires | Wildfires | The Guardian

#climate change #global warming #evolution #atmosphere #weather #extinction

My Home is damaged: time to sue Big Oil?

It’s a question a lot of people are asking as the world is increasingly lashed by the storms, floods and wild fires unleashed by global warming. And when you realise that the world’s fossil‑fuel giants collectively command over six trillion dollars a year — more economic power than most nations on Earth-it’s a tempting pot of money to aim at. What would you do with even one of those trillions? So we asked our Legal People: Can an individual sue a fossil fuel company to pay for flood/fire/storm damage, or the rising insurance premiums, that go with all those things?

The chances of getting anywhere on your own are slim. Firstly, you must show that any damage has been made worse by global warming (there will always be a background level of storms and things). Secondly, that a specific company’s emissions and /or “misinformation” caused that extra damage. And above all that the company chosen has a “duty of care” anyway. Quite a big ask when you think how much legal brainpower that $6 trillion is going to buy against you.

However, joining in with group actions increases your chances of getting something back. [1] . In the USA there are now 86 lawsuits against fossil fuel companies, including the very biggest. This class alleges that these companies “knew about the dangers of global warming and did nothing”. Even worse, it is alleged, they “actively misled” about those dangers. These suits will be fiercely contested; and the Jury will decide, as they say.[2] But there is a juicy second front opening. Home owners in Washington State are suing oil companies for climate‑driven increases in insurance costs. which they allege “are driven by global warming.”[3] As such costs may well be set to rise astronomically for all of us, their battle is indeed a noble one.

In the meantime there at least two things you can do. Work with climate litigation NGOs Groups like ClientEarth, Global Legal Action Network,[4] and the Climate Litigation Network are actively exploring new legal strategies. Document your damages If future cases open the door to compensation, having detailed records of storm impacts and repair costs will matter. Courts are increasingly willing to treat climate damage as a foreseeable, preventable harm caused in part by corporate deception. That shift is what makes future individual claims more plausible. There’s little doubt at fossil fuel companies represent a big barrel of money. Could some of it one day belong to you?

[1] https://theconversation.com/more-than-two-dozen-cities-and-states-are-suing-big-oil-over-climate-change-they-just-got-a-boost-from-the-us-supreme-court-2050

[2] Big Oil in Court – The latest trends in climate litigation against fossil fuel companies – Zero Carbon Analytics

[3]Homeowners Sue Oil Companies as Climate Damage Drives up Insurance Rates – Environmental Magazine

[4] GLAN – Global Legal Action Network

#global warming #climate change #fossil fuels #legal action #money #insurance

We offer a massive and unconditional apology for Nitrogen

We think we owe you a truly massive overwhelming apology, gentle reader. And this is why.

“Will the world end with a bang or a whimper?” is a question we’ve covered before here. We’ve even mentioned a few possibilities such as magnetic flips ,exploding volcanoes and more insidious effects like pollution and pandemics. (LSS passim)Yet it was while researching another topic entirely that we came across a wholly unexpected and entirely man-made problem that we thought you should know about: Nitrogen, [1] [2]and its derivative compounds which has been unleashed on an unprepared world in uncontrolled quantities for over a century. The reason it’s rising so fast is simple: we are manufacturing and releasing unprecedented quantities of reactive nitrogen—fertilisers, manure emissions, industrial by‑products—far beyond anything the planet’s natural nitrogen cycle ever evolved to handle.

Why so much? Because the Haber–Bosch process unlocked a torrent of synthetic nitrogen, and agriculture embraced it as a miracle. Global production of reactive nitrogen has soared to many times its pre‑industrial level. Locally, this can boost yields, but it comes with a hidden price: soils become chemically dependent, losing the microbial communities that once fixed nitrogen naturally. Excess nitrogen washes into rivers, fuelling algal blooms and dead zones; it volatilises into nitrous oxide, damaging the ozone layer; it accumulates in ecosystems, favouring a few aggressive species while starving others. And things are never so bad that they don’t get worse. Nitrous oxide is the quiet heavyweight of greenhouse gases. molecule for molecule, it traps far more heat than carbon dioxide and lingers in the atmosphere for over a century. It’s also the single largest ozone‑depleting emission humanity still produces. And yet most people barely register it. So what looks like abundance at the farm gate is, at planetary scale, a metabolic overload.

And this is the deeper tragedy: millions of farmers, each trying to solve a local problem—how to feed crops, how to secure a harvest—collectively drive a global destabilisation of the nitrogen cycle. We’ve built a civilisation addicted to excess nitrogen, and the system now expects those inputs just to function. The long‑term risk is that we push soils, waterways, and atmospheric chemistry past thresholds that cannot easily be reversed. What began as a triumph of human ingenuity has become a planetary dependence, and the bill for that dependence is only just beginning to arrive. A silent catastrophe of soil degradation, desertification, wetland collapse (LSS 28 5 24),biodiversity loss from nutrient overload, and fisheries collapse.

And now for our apology, gentle readers. For several years now we have been repeatedly warning you of the dangers posed by antibiotic resistant bacteria and climate change. We had not a single idea about this nitrogen crisis building up all around us. None whatsoever, We profoundly and unreservedly apologise to all of you-readers, contributors researchers and hard working staff, even the ones in HR. And we say this-never will such an oversight happen again in this mighty organisation. But do not be alarmed. From now on we will search the world ceaselessly to bring you news of fresh perils, unexpected lethal dangers which may be lurking ready to wipe us all out Or if not that, at least reduce the handful of survivors to subsistence-level barbarism in a lawless, violent post-apocalyptic world. We think we may even have uncovered a few already. Follow us if you want to know more about what they are.

[1] Anthropogenic-driven perturbations on nitrogen cycles and interactions with climate change (2024)Gong, Kou‑Giesbrecht & Zaehle (2024)
Published in Current Opinion in Green and Sustainable Chemistry. click:Anthropogenic-driven perturbations on nitrogen cycles and interactions with climate changes – ScienceDirect

[2] Alteration in nitrogen cycle and its contribution to climate change: a review (2025)Anand et al. (2025) click:2Alteration in nitrogen cycle and its contribution to climate change: a review | Proceedings of the Indian National Science Academy

#nitogen #agriculture #nitrous oxide #pollution #climate change #disaster

Tyred of recycling stories? Ifedolapo Runsewe isn’t

It’s nice to report a good news story for a change. And the work of Nigerian entrepreneur Ifedolapo Runsewe is certainly good news. Not for what she is currently achieving, remarkable though that is. But because her company Free Recycle, based in Ibadan, points the way to solving a whole bundle of problems; a genuine ray of hope at a dark time.. So let’s unbundle things one by one, as there is so much to like here.

The Links We always ask you to look at the sources, gentle readers and today our researchers have come up with two. [1] is this rather good vid. from Business Insider via You Tube which actually walks you round her plant, introducing us not only to Ms Runsewe but also to some of her busy employees [2] is an article by Zaniel Dada for How We made it in Africa-a clever title if ever there was one

The Method Basically they take as many used vehicle tyres as they can get their hands on, strip out all the metal bits, chop up the rubber and turn it into all kinds of things including paving slabs and footwear to walk upon them in. How’s that for a neat bit of ergonomics?

The African connection. Yes some countries like the US have been quite good at tyre recycling for years. But there are billions and billions of old tyres in the world, and far too many get dumped in poorer countries where they can cause no end of unpleasant health problems. Here is a viable business model to turn a problem into a genuine new resource. We have covered other small companies with pioneering ideas here before (LSS passim) but never one from Africa. Thanks to all concerned! And, we wonder-if you can recycle used tyres, why not lots of other things too?

The Bigger Picture For most people, immigration is the biggest issue of our time. We have always believed that it is best addressed as an economic phenomenon as human capital moves from areas of low demand to areas of high demand. From poor places to rich ones, just like charged ions in an electronic field. Raise the quality of life in poorer countries, and migration will slow. Stop, even. Who is doing more to raise life in Africa than Ifedolapo Runsewe, with a thriving business providing regular jobs and structure?

We think we will hear more from Ifedolapo Runsewe in years to come. We think we will here more good news from Nigeria too. As one year closes and another soon opens, we wish them both continued success.

Disclaimer As with all our new company and start up stories LSS has no financial nor any other known connection to the businesses concerned. Except-we do own some car tyres!

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djCfm89pqG8

[2]https://www.howwemadeitinafrica.com/nigeria-entrepreneur-turns-trash-into-cash-with-rubber-recycling-business/170321/

#Ifedolapo Runsewe #nigeria #africa #development #recycle #commerce #business #enterprise #pollution

Hottest years make chilling reading. Here’s how you can still do something about Climate Change

The facts-objective, verified and indisputable- are chilling. The last three years of this decade have been the hottest on record. Vast areas are now being ravaged by wildfires or drowning in immeasurable floods. The latest gloomy news comes from Nature Briefing: a group of people who are as calm, objective and well-informed as any we have come across. :early Temperatures Reach Dangerous Highs, they report:

This year looks likely to tie with 2023 as the second-hottest ever on record. Last year was the hottest. “The three-year average for 2023-2025 is on track to exceed 1.5 ℃ for the first time,” says Samantha Burgess of the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, referring to the Paris Agreement pledge to limit global warming to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels. “These milestones are not abstract — they reflect the accelerating pace of climate change and the only way to mitigate future rising temperatures is to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” Euronews | 2 min read

As we were once more digesting these gloomy words in the LSS Boardroom, Selina the tea lady came in with this morning’s refreshments. “Good heavens!” she observed. Well, that was the gist of what she observed. “Are you lot really going to put out another gloomy blog on Climate Change? Give them some hope, for once, why don’t you” Again we paraphrase: suffice to say we understand where her grandchildren derived the terms they used when we tried to stop them from vandalising the cars in the office car park. But she is right: why don’t we tell you that there is something you can do? Take agency and all that. It shall be by supporting or donating to the organisations which we have listed below. We have chosen all of them for their integrity, hard work and track records. But above all for their moderate, pragmatic approach to this problem. We are deeply suspicious of more extreme outfits who in our view only help Big Oil by alienating ordinary people. Here, then is that list. All need money. It is nearly Christmas. We leave you to join the dots between those last statements.

World Wide Fund for Nature | WWF

Greenpeace UK

Home | Carbon180

Friends of the Earth | Home

Rainforest Alliance | Creating a Better World for People and Nature

For professional reasons we will be unable to produce another blog until next week

#global warming #climate change #big oil #pollution #ecology #environment

Why Net Zero threatens a wonderful land-that was

Kingston on Thames, Surrey, England. Spring 1962. A brand new Ford Zodiac pushes out from a brand-new house on a brand-new estate to begin a Sunday outing down to the south coast. Mum, Dad and their two kids on the back seat pass rows of new houses, all like theirs, all lived in by people like them. With cars like theirs at the fronts. This is Macmillan’s England, and people have never had it so good. Even, for the first time, the working classes. As the last new estates around Chessington drop behind and the real country begins at Box Hill, someone puts on the car radio. Listen! It’s the Shadows Wonderful Land,: and here, today, its dreamy tones are true. For as they head south on the A24 (soon to be massively widened) the temples of all this wonderful modernity are still visible in the brave new petrol stations and car showrooms sprouting across the sleepy countryside. The car has made people profoundly mobile and independent. People talk about them endlessly. Buy them, sell them Discuss performance. Your car is a badge of who you are, where you have arrived at, especially if you are a man. As our travellers pull into Worthing for a welcome ice cream they have indeed crossed a wonderful land.

This is the brave new world still remembered as the base line by the two children in the back of the Zodiac. Fast forward 2025 and they are well into their seventh decade. But they still remember the promise of those years with aching nostalgia. Their own lives, minus the usual vicissitudes of marital, family and work problems, have been tolerable enough: prosperous even, as their waistlines testify. But outside the narrow world of work and golf club, there have been disturbing changes. First crack in the wall came with the 1973 oil crisis, which demonstrated their country’s humiliating dependence on foreign oil. Tax cuts and North Sea Oil brought a brief sugar rush of prosperity: but now the world is a dark distrustful place hopelessly split between rich and poor where nothing ever works and everything is broken, from roads to trains to hospitals. Foreigners just keep coming and coming and coming. Above all the USA, their great patron and guarantor of all their security, is rapidly losing its ability to prosper and protect.

Now add something worse. All those grandchildren they sent off to University have come home to tell them that everything they believed in was wrong. That burning oil warms the planet to disastrous levels. [1] That vehicle emissions are a massive cause of mental and physical health disorders.[2] So are the plastics made from oils in abundance , which now pollute every imaginable stretch of sea air and land.[3] That, therefore, the whole cult of buying cars, comparing them, fiddling with them and collecting them turns out to have been as deluded as say smoking tobacco ,drinking alcohol or keeping slaves. That in effect, their whole lives have been a bit of a mistake That they now, with so little time left to enjoy , must give it all up.

It’s a big ask. Especially when incredibly rich industries run incredibly well funded political and media campaigns to tell these same baby boomers that they not only can go on burning fossil fuels, they really ought to- must. Because only that way lies the road to a better yesterday when the world was young. And straight. And white. Here is the challenge facing all of us who call ourselves progressive or educated . We have no idea if we shall succeed We know we will need swimming lessons if we do not,

[1] Burning of fossil fuels – Understanding Global Change

[2] Air pollution and health risks due to vehicle traffic – PMC

[3] 5 Harmful Effects of Plastic on Human Health

(See also LSS 9 4 24;26 9 24; 20 9 25)

https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?&q=the+shadows+wonderful+land&&mid=E99EB6B5B2B6CEBD22FBE99EB6B5B2B6CEBD22FB&&FORM=VRDGAR

Paracetamol from Plastic Bottles-this could be the start of something big

Remember how your mum always made you swallow water to wash down your headache pills? What if those pills had been made from the remains of a long discarded plastic bottle that some other child had been forced to undergo? According to the resourceful Nicola Davis of the Guardian, it’s about to happen.[1] And the implications are enormous.

A team lead by Professor Stephen Wallace of the University of Edinburgh has actually gone and turned old plastic bottles into medicine. Combining the very best in organic chemistry and genetic engineering, they have modified a strain of E. coli to make good old paracetamol, that standby of every household drugs stash the world over. [2] The details of how they do it may be read in the links supplied. But our interest today is somewhat different.

At last someone has found a use for all those mountains of ghastly plastic waste which so disfigure this once beautiful planet. It can be made into something which millions, no billions, of people can deploy every day: and to some beneficent purpose. And if paracetamol, why not other things? Meanwhile. fans of economics will note the creation of a demand., Soon people may be fighting each other in the streets to get the best plastic bottles to sell to wholesalers. Nations will go to war to gain access to those vast disgusting rafts of waste which currently drift around the oceans. There’s one sure way to modify the behaviour of the ignorant mass of humankind- Turn virtue into economics and let them make some money from it. The Professor and his team may have done just that.

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/jun/23/scientists-use-e-coli-bacteria-to-turn-plastic-waste-into-paracetamol-painkiller

[2]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41557-025-01845-5

#genetic engineering #organic chemistry #plastic #pollution #medicine

Climate Change denial: latest round in a long war of deception

First deny there’s a problem. Then do all you can to delay a solution. Buy up politicians, scientists, bloggers, and bots. The tactics of the fossil fuel industry and outriding nations as they seek above all to protect their comfy lifestyles and exorbitant profits. It’s not just made abundantly clear in this report by Damien Carrington in the Guardian: it nails down every last nail to be had into the coffin lid. [1]

But we’ve seen it all before gentle readers. We recall walking down an alley in London in 1971 with a close relative who assured us there was no definite, provable link between smoking and cancer, OK!? (he died of the latter) Why was he able to state this? Because for decades the tobacco industry had managed a huge campaign of deception, obfuscation and general misinformation designed to give him and his peers every excuse they needed to continue their tragic addiction. Using exactly the same techniques now employed by climate change deniers, funnily enough.. The only difference was that they didn’t have the Interweb to turbocharge their propaganda and illusioning. This rather depressing link to the WHO explains the ghastly details to anyone who may want to know more about the fundamentals of human nature [2]

And what are these fundamentals, by the way? We don’t know them all But we can hazard a guess at some, provisional though we may well be

1 Some people will do anything to make some quick cash, Anything at all.

2 Many people will do anything to avoid facing the consequences of the vile little habits which they have acquired in the course of a lifetime of self indulgence and self deception.

3 Just because you are educated and slightly more far seeing than others around you does not give you tactical superiority in the current wars between the intelligent and our enemies They are incredibly cunning and well funded

4 This ain’t over yet. Keep a close eye on rising sea levels, if you want to live

We will be ready with further insights. inspirations and bons motifs in future blogs. Keep reading. And thanks for all the recent sigh ups and likes. Keep ’em coming.

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jun/19/climate-misinformation-turning-crisis-into-catastrophe-ipie-report

[2]https://www.who.int/news/item/16-11-2023-new-who-campaign-highlights-tobacco-industry-tactics-to-influence-public-health-policies

#climate change #global warming #ecology #fossil fuels #tobacco #cancer