Secondhand Smoke, Lung Cancer, and the Global Warming Debate

The American Thinker ^ | December 19, 2010 | S. Fred Singer

[Scanian]

In 1993, the EPA published a report claiming that secondhand smoke (SHS -- also sometimes known as environmental tobacco smoke or ETS) causes three thousand deaths from lung cancer every year. Anyone doubting this result has been subject to attack and depicted as a toady of the tobacco lobby. The attacks have been led by a smear blog called DeSmogBlog, financed by the Canadian PR firm of James Hoggan, and have been taken up with great enthusiasm by self-styled "science historian" Professor Naomi Oreskes.

The tobacco smoking issue has also become a favorite tool for discrediting climate skeptics. A prime example is the book Merchants of Doubt by Oreskes and Eric Conway, which attacks several well-known senior physicists, including the late Dr. Fred Seitz, a former president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Physical Society, and (most recently) Rockefeller University.

No matter what the environmental issue -- ozone depletion, acid rain, pesticides, etc. -- any and all scientific opposition based on objective facts is blamed on an imagined involvement with tobacco companies. None of this is true, of course. Oreskes and Conway claim to be academic historians, yet they have consistently ignored factual information, have not bothered to consult primary sources, have never interviewed any of the scientists they try to smear, and generally have operated in a completely unprofessional way.

Oreskes' and Conway's science is as poor as their historical expertise. To cite just one example, their book blames lung cancer from cigarette smoking on the radioactive oxygen-15 isotope. They cannot explain, of course, how O-15 gets into cigarettes, or how it is created. They seem to be unaware that its half-life is only 122 seconds. In other words, they have no clue about the science, and apparently, they assume that the burning of tobacco creates...

[bboop]

Oh, don’t forget airplanes. What if you were in the last seat of the non-smoking section and had a long flight? Or got that one table in the restaurant that was non-smoking? Those things I do not miss.

[jonrick46]

The authoritarian system which the Left wants to impose on our free America is what keeps the people in the Third World Nations down in the bondage of poverty.

When government takes the role of the drug dealer, the dependency they create wipes men’s spirit of innovation and the ability to generate wealth.