Cancer under age 50 increased 80% from 1990 to 2019 | Hacker News Reader

Cancer under age 50 increased 80% from 1990 to 2019

bmjoncology.bmj.com

268 pointsmizzao147 comments

I read an article on here that we’ve polluted the environment so badly now that rain water is unsafe to drink basically anywhere it falls. Rainwater…[1]

I get it PFAs might not cause cancer but we’re pushing things to some pretty crazy extreme when it comes to pollution. Microplastics in the clouds ?

I really hope these things aren’t related because it’s going to fucking suck if they are. Can’t just put microplastics away.

I’m personally in the camp that thinks we should just be doing everything we can to minimise all types of pollution because we just cannot really predict what the effects will be. Even if we think something is benign.

I might be an extremist but I’m even worried about tyre dust. And even those blue plastic tarps people love to let rot in the sun and dissolve everywhere.

What we’re doing isn’t good, I just think we struggle to admit to ourselves because it’s quite horrific.

[1] https://phys.org/news/2022-08-rainwater-unsafe-due-chemicals...

> I’m personally in the camp that thinks we should just be doing everything we can to minimise all types of pollution because we just cannot really predict what the effects will be. Even if we think something is benign.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle

Thanks for sharing.

What worries me is this is always going to be about a quick buck vs long term risk. We do not have the collective wisdom to stop.

Even if we have the collective wisdom, that doesn't mean it will outweigh the incentives, especially if that decision-making power is unchecked.

Yup. The shitty thing about the prisoner's dilemma is that we nearly always lose it.

I think the wisdom is there more than you think (look around, every other person is concerned about environment especially younger ones). The problem is collective power to do anything about it. The few on top have disproportionate power and don’t care at all (because it wont affect them).

It's not "unscientific." We have something like a century and a half worth of evidence that the hazards to environment and human health from man-made substances is very often missed, understated, or outright suppressed by the industry that is profiting off it.

How many more decades do we need?

Given we are seeing plunging birth rates and species unprecedented rate (a dozen to hundreds of species a day), I'd say shifting to a "you have to prove it's not harmful" is a good policy.

Yes, the chemical industry has not stuck to the precautionary principle.

Besides, lots of excellent drugs are used in a trigger-happy way. Take for instance antibiotics, which are one of the greatest achievements of modern science. Lots of children are prescribed antibiotics for mild infections, i.e. when they don't need them, ignoring side-effects. Thankfully, doctors are starting to be a bit more cautious.

This is one of the reasons autoimmunity has skyrocketed during the last 50 years, and quite a few friendly commensal bacteria are nearly extinct. Persistent gut inflammation, below what is considered autoimmunity, is responsible for lots of colon cancer cases in adults. It is all tied.

Blind trust in doctors is such a societal problem.

It doesn't help that the systems we have in place to keep them in check are failing us. In the US doctors can tell their patients that their illnesses are caused by demon sperm and that alien DNA is used to make medical treatments and they will still keep their medical license.

To me, doctors are not as big of a problem as hospitals. In my area, nearly all doctors are now hospital employees. Doctors don't have the independence they used to have with their own practice: as employees, they have to do what the hospital tells them to do. Doctors can't afford to run an independent practice because of the cost of paperwork, computer systems, and liability, so now they work for hospitals, ie, a corporate machine designed (even obligated) to maximize profits over care.

I know it’s true, you even see it here all the time, but it is really disappointing to see people see this approach as unscientific. Progress at all costs should not be the goal! We should be working towards the betterment of humanity and if new innovations have a significant chance of working against that via side effects, we should absolutely be cautious.

I think it's more relaxing and enjoyable for us as a species to slow down a bit. There is no need to keep rushing into problems. We had / still have a pretty good environment, even if all technological progress stopped tomorrow, thousands of generations would still have beautiful lives. Everything from here is a bonus IMO.

One might describe it as conservatism, had conservatism chosen to anchor itself to preventing change rather than social/human regression and the advancement of capitalism and laissez-faire regulatory/economic policy.

I agree with most of this but I think we do recognize and every year we get smarter about how we handle it… I think it’s just very hard to see how we improve over a few years time scale… I remember in 1986 or 1987 my dad took us to his office I think it was cricket software in Pennsylvania and in the front of the very shiny new office was an extremely polluted stream. It was a bright red/orange color. I recall my dad telling us to avoid playing in the water and explaining that it was not supposed to be that color… years later and while much of the area that was farm land in PA is now homes and neighborhoods- I don’t believe such a stream exists…. That said plastic is still very hard thing to reduce in our environment already we see many more bio degradable examples of packaging being used and a lot of research into which plastics are harmful and ways to help reduce or mitigate the impacts… back in the 80s if it was known it was not talked about… progress is slow but if you care very deeply about it you should IMO go into research or engineering to do something positive about it. Understand why we use it and find good alternatives

I think this is because we have offshored manufacturing and even farming.

Could you imagine what rivers in China and India look like ?

I do agree we have improved in some areas for sure. But we don’t get clouds contaminated with plastic for no reason.

Half of adult men also smoke in China... who consumes ~50% of world total cigarettes, on the 1/3 of land that's not sand or plateau. 2.5 trillion cigarettes per a year smoked on 3m sqkm, or 2% of terrestial land. I don't know if that means anything, but if it does, it's not good.

Those streams and rivers exist. Look up industrial pollution in China, India or Vietnam. The manufacturing base which got pollution to that point is just geographically shifted.

When running industries, there is unfortunately no free lunch -- someone's paying the consequences. If not you, someone upstream who made the raw materials or any priors.

A lot of sites like that still exist but are unknown or look pretty.

Basically, don’t buy a home in a area where there were historically military facilities, especially Air Force, or defense contractors without careful review.

Its still a disease of old age not of environmental factors

If you lived next to a coal fire power plant it might tell a different story ?

I feel like “microplastics are in our clouds” sounds like science hysteria, so I think tomorrow the scientist and geographer in me needs to figure out if I can see them through my own eyes at home or my university’s hydrology lab or something.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/09/micropla...

> I feel like “microplastics are in our clouds” sounds like science hysteria

We don't know yet just how much harm microplastics are causing us, but the fact that they are everywhere (including in your blood and organs) isn't helping. I don't think there's anything hysterical about all of earth's water being unsafe to drink unless it's filtered. (https://www.su.se/english/news/it-s-raining-pfas-even-in-ant...). The world has never been poisoned at this scale before. Your body is already polluted, and our children's bodies will be polluted from the moment they are born.

I think everyone agrees that it's much better to clean up pollution, but the problem is not really so much that we are bombarded with more pollution (in many places, especially in the West, most measures of environmental pollution are much lower than in the past), the problem is you are just constantly bombarded with more information. Some of it is valid, but nearly all of it is designed to scare you.

Just consider this study, which is simply bad reporting. Check out some of the other comments in this thread, but all of these numbers can simply be explained by the growth in the global population during the study period. Actual per-capita cancer deaths among young people are way down during this timeframe.

More young people in the southern hemisphere are dead from skin cancer than would be otherwise if we didn’t pollute the atmosphere with CFCs,l and put a hole in the ozone layer, for example.

We might’ve seen a decline in cancer rates even with more people if we didn’t pollute so much.

Imagine living in a less polluted world with the medicine we have now ? Wouldn’t that be fantastic?

While plastic and car tires might have some measurably bad effects on humans, we still live on average way longer than our ancestors. You could draw a weird but valid correlation between poison rain water and living longer.

You're right though that we ought to be careful and try to reduce bad stuff. I suspect that will be key to increasing our life expectancy even further.

I'd argue our ancestors would outlive us had they had the medical care we do. I suspect our lifespan was prolonged mostly, or maybe solely due to advances in medicine.

I was going to say, if we keep fucking up, I can see that life expectancy hitting a cliff. Birth rates are already down.

> we still live on average way longer than our ancestors

Ted Kaczynski would like to ask about the average amount of happy years lived.

I think the world fossil fuel capitalists will have something to say about that unfortunately :/

did anyone read the conclusion?

> with notable variances in mortality and DALYs between areas, countries, sex and cancer types. Encouraging a healthy lifestyle could reduce early-onset cancer disease burden.

and...

> Dietary risk factors (diet high in red meat, low in fruits, high in sodium and low in milk, etc), alcohol consumption and tobacco use are the main risk factors underlying early-onset cancers.

seems to indicate that the authors of this article were not pointing the finger at environmental causes.

Garbage, read the responses, here's one:

> Zhao et al report 79% increase in actual number of cases from 1990 to 2019, but this figure can be misleading, as it does not take account of population growth. The authors therefore also report estimated annual percent change (EAPC) of the incidence rates of various cancers. However, it is unfortunate that the press has largely focused on the overall number rather than the per capita risk of cancer, giving the impression that we are facing an epidemic of cancer in young individuals. https://bmjoncology.bmj.com/content/2/1/e000049.responses

The headline figure of 79% does not account at all for population increase. This is bad science (communication).

> In 2019, the incidence number of early-onset cancer was 3.26 million, a 79.1% increase from 1990 (figure 1A,B).

Incidence number simply counts cancers. Of course there are more cancers given world population increase. This should never be in a study headline.

Also, better detection of early cancers. Also in the past, cancer deaths may have been misattributed as something else.

Scanning tech has gotten much much better in the past 20 years along with software that helps doctors recognize tumors and other abnormalities with even older tech.

Thank you very much - was skeptical of the headline, looking through the comments to find an explanation, so thank you for delivering. Another important quote from your source:

> However, focusing on absolute case numbers does not take into account that the global population in the age group 15-49 increased by 45% and in the age group 40-49 (where most incident cases have occurred) by 86% during the study period (see Table S2). Both, age specific and age standardized rates show no increase in incidence in incidence and mortality for the period 1995 to 2020 (Figure 5). Age standardized mortality declined substantially during the study period.

This was my immediate first question. The title and front matter would mention if. this is growth adjusted.

I also think there are many forces at play. We've started:

- consuming more packaged goods

- selling unhealthy things as healthy

- doing less physical labor

- having more mental health problems at a young age

I feel a study like this does nothing to tell us what the cause is, just noting the sensationalized effect.

But it says that "All rates are reported per 100k population."

But many things reported are not rates, it's subtle

Figure 3 shows incident rate changes in percent by country, it seems there are stark increases in South American and African countries and mainly declining incident rates in western countries. Intuitively, I would associate increases in those regions with increased access to medical care there - so, overall a good thing?

Intuitively I thought it was about the developing countries are getting more industrialized and polluted. But perhaps both.

More doctors to know that people aren’t just dropping dead from mysterious reasons. And more industrialization to have more cancer. I would bet more on the former than the latter.

Even with that, cancers metabolize sugars. The more sugars you put into your body, the faster and larger cancer cells can get. Add to this that sugars are inflammatory, and this heightens cancer risks. Add to both of those factors and increase in pollution and it’s just a perfect storm.

You are probably referring to the Warburg effect. While there is a clear link between obesity and cancer, cutting sugar intake doesn't appear to be an effective cancer treatment. (It's still generally a good idea for other reasons, though.)

https://www.mskcc.org/news/no-sugar-no-cancer-look-evidence

You think the undeveloped world has cleaner water and food than the industrialized world?

Water, no. Food, probably. A lot of the undeveloped world eats only locally produced food, minimally processed. Highly processed foods don't necessarily make it out there.

As they start developing, they are able to import things with high levels of preservatives etc.

I'd prefer preservatives over contaminants like heavy metals.

As someone who's traveled the undeveloped world pretty heavily, you would be surprised at how bad the "raw" food quality is; especially if poverty is very high. Undeveloped doesn't mean "without access to industrialized goods", it just means industrial infrastructure of their own is lacking.

You seem to be mixing undeveloped (Port au Prince, Khartoum, Dhaka, etc) up with "tribal". They still have access to pesticides, heavy metals, low-quality/toxic feeds, gasoline, etc; in addition to having generally very lax/non-existent regulations.

They use massive amounts of pesticides and have huge pollution issues due to burning trash and trash disposal problems, including out in fields.

If you spend any time in India, for example? Holy moly.

Traditional foods or methods of cooking are not necessarily healthy. If eaten in excess cassava is high glycemic index like other Western starches, and stuff like cooking in animal fats is very unhealthy.

A lot of obesity in developing economies comes from people who have experienced food scarcity overcompensating and overfeeding themselves and their children.

>A lot of obesity in developing economies comes from people who have experienced food scarcity overcompensating and overfeeding themselves and their children.

This is true and easily observable everywhere, even in advertising. I'm in the Philippines at the moment, and there's a trope in Filipino television advertising that includes the "cute, chubby/fat kid." Having a chubby kid signifies to other Filipinos that you are middle class and have enough money and resources to overfeed your child.

There's nothing necessarily unhealthy about cooking in animal fats.

In moderation, sure.

That being said, to give an example, an excess of lard is linked to increased obesity in Mexico.

I think industrial wastes and parasites cause different kinds of diseases.

Could it because of decreased mortality from other factors like infectious disease or malnutrition, which would allow for cancer to rise to the top for cause of death?

Yeah. If more people are living long enough to have cancer, you'll see more cancer.

FWIW, age expectancy has been above 50 y/o for a while, even in developing countries.

There is also the effect of improved health systems being able to diagnose more. You’re not going to get a cancer diagnosis if you don’t have access to a hospital.

not 80% more.

My thinking is that they switched to a more westernized diet full of sugars, instead of their local food. But then again it could be a thousand factors together.

I think a SAD puts upward pressure on this number, and modern healthcare puts downward pressure on it.

Agreed! SAD = Standard American Diet for who doesn't know

A truer acronym has never been coined.

Dow the rabbit hole I go, is it pronounced as S.A.D or “sad”. If it’s each letter (like CIA or FBI) it’s an initialism not an acronym; the latter should be pronounced as a word.

Which befuddles my industry joke of TLA (three letter acronyms) since it is pronounced as T.L.A. Not “tella”

I spend 0 time worrying about stuff like this.

Modern healthcare is somewhat effective at detecting and treating cancer but does very little for prevention. The only really effective preventative intervention seems to be removing polyps during a colonoscopy before they have a chance to turn cancerous.

Vaccines to prevent cervical cancer?

Also hepatitis B vaccinations and screening for early enough detection to treat surgically.

Yes, good point. That one seems to be having a significant effect in the last few years.

https://www.gardasil9.com/

When I was living in Kenya around 2013, open pit burning was the main way of dealing with trash... And included a lot of plastics, batteries, you name it.

When I was in Armenia last year, this was the modus operandi for removing large amounts of trash also. Just throw it on the side of the road and burn it in heaps.

that's how most of rural America still gets rid of trash.

It used to be 50 years ago. But the state where I'm from banned burning trash decades ago. I'm not saying people don't ever do it, but if you get caught you can be fined.

And is this something read somewhere, or a friend of a friend told you in NYC?

This is 100% false that most of rural America still burns trash.

I grew up on a farm, we burnt trash and stopped before I barely remember seeing any fires. Not because we are environmentalist, but because we were told to stop just like everyone else in the state.

People in rural areas here in Canada do that now in 2024.

Same in a lot of developing countries. I'm in the Philippines right now and I've seen this not only here, but in other SE Asian countries. Of course, when I do, I seek to get as far away from it as possible as quickly as possible. It doesn't seem like the local governments do anything about it even when it's reported.

Yeah, that map looks a lot like developed world vs. developing world. So two major factors here almost certainly are:

1) Fewer people in developing countries are dying from other things than they were 30 years ago, for example malnutrition and maternal or infant mortality.

2) Better diagnostics and screening. Screening is a big deal, in a sufficiently immature medical system you'll have people who die of cancer that never even get diagnosed. Start doing better screening and you will find and treat these cases earlier.

The fact that one of the biggest increases was in prostate cancer supports this idea (at least to my layman's eye). Prostate cancer tends to remain benign for a long time so you won't catch it without screening.

If you look at the right-hand column you will notice, compared to the West, there's barely any cancer in Africa! (Incidence rate is very low) Of course that isn't because no one gets cancer in Africa, it's because much of the population has limited access to screening/diagnoses.

I don't think we need to leap to the conclusion that microplastics are causing cancer to skyrocket.

In the developed world it is almost all good news. Incidence rates are flat to down over the last 30 years. Death rates are flat to dramatically down due to improved treatment.

Here is a direct link https://bmjoncology.bmj.com/content/bmjonc/2/1/e000049/F3.la...

The quality of postmortems has probably improved globally but most in those places. One could imagine a cancer death in youth being treated like any death since the family/country is unable to afford autopsies for all suspicious deaths.

According to this graph in the article, while age-adjusted incidence rate of cancers increased marginally from 1990 to 2019, age-adjusted death rate for both genders decreased dramatically https://bmjoncology.bmj.com/content/bmjonc/2/1/e000049/F5.la...

Likely due to better treatments available over the past 30 years.

How much of this is from actual increase in the disease, and how much is from earlier and more sensitive detection?

It compares mortality so

Um, mortality ... basically didn't change?

This diagram: https://bmjoncology.bmj.com/content/bmjonc/2/1/e000049/F1.la...

Shows about 800K deaths in 1990 vs 1M deaths in 2019. That's 25% at best--or less when adjusted for population growth.

And the proportions stayed roughly the same.

That would strongly suggest that the increase is mostly detection.

Also points towards frustratingly limited progress in cancer treatment efficacy.

Sadly.

However, I think that is about to change. Rapidly.

I see biomed as broken into 3 eras much like any technical field--alchemy, science, and then engineering.

The invention of PCR in 1984 is when biomed changed from being alchemy to being an actual science. The application of mRNA heralds the start of the era where biomed is switching to having progress from engineering rather than just science and some serendipitous luck.

And once something switches to being engineering, it can be accelerated by education and money.

True. However, what might that mean to say the environment? For example, if cancer in humans becomes effectively 100% curable, do we become less attentive to diet, environmental toxins, etc.?

I believe you're correct. But I also believe such a shift will likely come witb unintended consequences. What might those be?

Note: nuclear fusion is similar. That is, loads of cheap clean energy is certainly a victory but there are also massive geopolitical and financial systems unintended consequences. It's not all rainbows and unicorns

The authors seem to think that cancer is less deadly now, but they also note that increased screening likely increases the prevalence of cancer:

Introduction: "Currently, it was reported that the promotion of cancer screening strategies and the exposure to risk factors in early life or young adulthood may increase incidence of early-onset cancer... Furthermore, changes in diet, lifestyle and environment since the turn of the 20th century, resulting in increased rates of obesity, physical inactivity, westernised diets and environmental pollution, may have affected the incidence of early-onset cancer. Additionally, alcohol, smoking and detrimental pregnancy exposures may have also affected the incidence of early-onset cancer"

Conclusion: "Our study showed that the global morbidity of early-onset cancer increased from 1990 to 2019, while mortality and DALYs slightly decreased."

Well earlier detection and improved treatment is going to lower mortality rates. But that still doesn't prove cancer has increased.

Note: I personally believe it probably has but such an opinion is not science.

As usual, no mention of pulse-modulated RF as a ubiquitous and ever increasing biological stressor. Its been shown and replicated how RF can potentiate effects of chemical carcinogens (Tillmann 2010, Lerchl 2015). Just an FYI.

Refs: https://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.3109/09553001003734... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00062...

Things get into your body primary through Ingestion. If its caused by something we eat, it could very well be things added into your food, like preservatives. I just bought some mixed nuts. I read the ingredient list, there's canola oil on them. Like why?

It could be other things that effect hormones.

For example the pill, that is taken by so many people, or just people over consuming sugar, and getting fatter.

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37086982 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37125047

I am betting on a decrease in the amount of sun exposure during childhood being the cause.. it's known that the more basal cell and squamous cell carcinomas an adult has, the healthier they are in general.. and the incidence of those non serious cancers is generally linked to sun exposure in childhood

"You are what you eat" and when you eat in the US I would start asking questions Monsanto and Bayer for a start.

They seem to compare absolute numbers of cancer without mentioning the fact that the world population grew 50% since 1990.

I think not: "the age-standardised rate (ASR)/100k population,"

> In 2019, the incidence number of early-onset cancer was 3.26 million, a 79.1% increase from 1990

They used the rate by 100K in most other figures but the one the title refers to doesn't.

Fair call, I didn't see that one. That's a definite fail by the editors.

American's are on more and more pharmaceuticals, and yet their health and life expectancy is declining.

People are way too lax about what they put into their body, and trusting. Taking pills for things that are often lifestyle related.

Trying to mask the symptoms with pharmaceuticals and not trying to fix the cause...like obesity, and excessive alcohol.

This is one of the reasons I did not take the covid jab. I was worried it would give me cancer. I was okay with getting fired.

I wouldn't get a tattoo either for same reason.

You probably make wise choice. Currently in EU mortality of 15-44y is rising after 2021.

https://euromomo.eu

Kids nowadays are drowning in plastic stuffies, which I assume are made of toxic waste. No joke, iirc they off gas enough to pick up on household air quality sensors.

Interesting, where can I read more?

Try (best title ever) “Slow Death by Rubber Duck” by Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie. Excellent book, although they frame their enquiry a little too much like “Supersize Me” and I'm not sure it was the best way.

The subtitle "The Secret Danger of Everyday Things" really ties the room together.

What kind of toxin is in toys nowadays?

None.

A “toxin” is a naturally occuring poison, such as snake venom. The word you're looking for is the umbrella term “toxicant”.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxicant

But, pendantry aside, pretty sure a lot of those plastic toys, especially the sort of rubbery squishy ones, are probably loaded with pthalates and other exotic and interesting things.

this is pretty pedantic alright. For better or worse and as much as lots of people wanted to push back against it, you're just going to have to accept that "toxin" has become a general term now no longer tied to just naturally occurring poisons. Words evolve, they change with use.

It's like the people dying on that pedantry hill over "literally" being now used in slang to just mean "a lot / really significantly" rather than "how something appears in literature". I'm sure there were people equally complaining about the death of the English subjunctive verb [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_subjunctive

Equally, should we not value the richness and vibrancy of the language? Should we not strive for accuracy and precision? Or do we want to pare down the language to some banal Orwellian Newspeak, drained of vigour, designed to make the possibility of interesting and original thinking impossible?

Anyway, “Toxicant” is a perfectly cromulent word.

I have multiple air sensors and I don’t notice a high pollutant count (voc, co2, pm1/2.5/10) due to toys.

Gas stoves however.. they spike voc and co2 around the house when used.

Here are there someone from the origin of western-cultivated formulas will post an equation to which many “westerners” (for a lack of better word) will respond with surprise or rejection, mostly citing how the equation used the wrong constants or how the medicine improved.

The “western” medicine still neglects TCM and its learnings, primarily focusing on doctrine and enforced lessons of medicine (if we may call it so), but more appropriately post-medicine which is or can be more or less effective after the disease has developed to a visible to sensory state.

It will take some time (or more given the current condition in which the westerns are more concerned in shipping and producing the weapons than raising the vibration of their planetary bodies) to understand that post-condition-medicione is negligible against preventive medicine and if they will want to preserve health in their human bodies, something radical will need to be changed (which will be a challenge for their established trajectory of thought but the appropriate holistic approach to health and medicine of the future).

If anything in TCM worked and wasn't risky, what would stop big pharma putting it in a pill or lotion?

Alternative medicine that works becomes medicine.

You cannot compete in society where alternative medicine is punished and you don't even have a freedom of choice to pick treatment because you are forced to give your money (taxes in EU) to companies that you wouldn't pay otherwise.

I'm not against western medicine, I'm just missing more focus on causes of illnes and explanations, not just solving consequences.

I read through the article. Let me share a small story. I recently completed course for Global Warming in College. I would say my instructor was a quite good. He gave the vibe more of a person in industry who taught than a teacher who published papers. Naturally in course of Global Warming we had figures about how much the globe is warming. We have already raised average temperature by few degree. Current goal of global climate organization is to limit any further increase to 1.5 C and at max, at most dire 2 C. Changes to climate are already somewhat irreversible. So this figure of 1.5 is very sensitive and important. Now this is all good but who decides these numbers ? Who is going to take initiative to meet goals ? Who's fault it was to reach these numbers ?

Moral: These are very loaded figures. Enough to make small naive children make protests and the world to notice. The numbers are very diluted based on agenda. Cancer patients might have increased, seems very plausible. But did the study account population increase or simply number of people reporting ? I don't think so. We all want to make world a better place but take these numbers with a grain of salt.

Of course the study is looking at cases per N people. What a silly question, let alone to assume they didn't. HN is getting worse every day.

Wait - your first paragraph has nothing to do with your moral. What's "diluted"?

It seems like you want to say "be skeptical about numbers.". Fine. But what does that have to do with the course?

The course taught them just how much they should be sceptical of numbers

My entire post very was poorly structured. Properly conveying experiences is hard in text, my bad. Just be cautious when you see big scary numbers.

If your claim is as it appears - "this study may not have adjusted for population growth" - you could just click the link and check, rather than spread doubt and uncertainty.

As it stands, the population has not grown 80% in the timespan given so even if they didn't control for population - which would be the most elementary mistake ever and no one would get published having made it - it still doesn't account for the effect size.

Reflexive scepticism, without any effort to verify, isn't any more useful than reflexive belief.

Interestingly, if you do click the article, you'll find that they did not control for population. The 80% figure is in absolute nominal terms. It's more than the most elementary mistake, it's downright deceptive.

You just took a course on Global Warming and you don’t know where the IPCCC target figures come from? Hopefully that’s because you slept through most of the course, because if it wasn’t even covered that is a pretty fundamental set of information to ignore. Here you go: http://www.climate.gov/news-features/features/whats-number-m...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com