There is a great interview over the diesel particle crisis in Germany on HR (our Hessen regional public TV network) today, with Professor Werner Seeger, which I'd advocate a reading of their interview with the guy.
One of the key features of this interview, is that Professor Seeger does point out that two science groups are reading off different pages, and each having a different view of the diesel particle business. The two groups? Environmental epidemiology, and pulmonary medical professionals.
The pulmonary crowd arrived around six weeks ago to this diesel debate with a paper that was published (by retired professor Dieter Koehler) and signed off by 107 pulmonary medical professionals. Professor Seeger will admit, the paper does challenge some details of this entire debate about particle pollution. But he will go and suggest that this is the business of environmental epidemiology folks, not pulmonary medical folks.
A dividing line of scientists? Well....yeah.
At some point in this HR interview, there is the key point of Professor Seeger....that the environmental epidemiology scientists have to use mathematical methods in a scenario-based situation, to reach a result. In simple terms....finding the data sets and then funneling the info to reach a projected end-result. The pulmonary medical folks are using a past history data set, and telling a past history (not a projected history). In the mind of the pulmonary crowd, there's no factual or concrete data to support a city-by-city ban policy.
Past historians versus future historians? In simple terms, yes.
Toward the end of the interview, there is this moment where Professor Seger does hint that this whole discussion was on a quick pace and proven science simply wasn't developed or designed to enter this type of fast-moving 'emergency' (my word for the past two years of discussion).
It's an interesting interview, and I think Professor Seger did his best to be respectful of the pulmonary medical crowd. Maybe if scientists had been invited into the discussions early on....a lot of these opposing details would have been laid out. Instead, this became a city-by-city 'battle', with mostly lawyers, judges, politicians, environmentalists, pro-diesel enthusiasts, lobby-groups, and city planners trying to assemble fifty-odd separate ban actions....with no logic why X-city resolved their ban in this manner, and Y-city resolving it's ban action in a totally different manner. You'd almost think that this was a land of 1,000 city-states, and not one single nation.
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