Questions about "The High Frontier"

In rec.arts.sf.science Jonathan wrote:
Why aren't people fleeing now?

Who says they're not trying?

Some may be, but the population in Beijing is growing enormously. There
was until recently a huge construction boom caused by a great demand for
housing, with new high-rise apartment buildings going up all over the
place. This has only stopped because the government prohibited new
non-Olympic construction in order to concentrate effort on what they think
is important and so that visitors don't get a bad impression of the city
due to a skyline crammed with half-finished construction.

So obviously most of the people either don't know, don't care, or think
it's a worthwhile tradeoff.

Air Pollution Grows in Tandem with China's Economy

"For Qiao Xiaoling, such bald statistics disguise the terrible
pain of loss. Her husband died four years ago from leukemia.
Then lung cancer claimed her 34-year-old son. As she minds
her 3-year-old grandson, she admits she doesn't know
what caused their illnesses.

"I don't know if it's because of the water or the air. I'm scared
in my heart and worry about this little boy. I think about
moving, but I don't have the money," Qiao says.

Very sad but if the plural of anecdote is not data, then the singular
definitely isn't.

A formal draft of the report, ?Cost of Pollution in China,? was
released at a conference in Beijing in March after the deletions.
The excised information included statistical models estimating
that as many as 750,000 people a year die prematurely in
China, because of air and water pollution.

"As many as" is a worthless phrase. If you must pick one number, pick the
median estimate. If you can, provide the error bars.

Even if true (brief searches indicate that the true number may be more
like 500,00) this is about ten times more pollution-caused deaths than in
the US, in a country with about four times as many people, for roughly
2.5x the death rate due to this cause. While that's certainly not good,
it's not nearly as horrendous as you make it sound.

--
Michael Ash
Rogue Amoeba Software