[amaurymartiny]

There's a study[1] by Richard Muller from Berkeley Earth that proposes an equivalence between air pollution and daily cigarettes smoked. He uses the number of deaths caused by these 2 factors as a common denominator to calculate the equivalence.

I believe cognitive cost would also be a good denominator. Something like "we find that an increase of 10 µg/m³ raises the probability of a chess player making an error by 1.5 percentage points. The same 1.5 percentage points would be caused by smoking 2 cigarettes per day."

Plug: I'm the author of an open-source mobile app[2] which does this pollution-cigarettes conversion. I think cigarettes gives a strong image of air quality for those who are unfamiliar with AQI.

[1]: http://berkeleyearth.org/air-pollution-and-cigarette-equival... [2]: https://shootismoke.github.io/