I have known for quite some time that the second hand smoke (SHS) claim that it causes cancer study was based on flawed data analysis for some time.
Michael Crichton also was avid in the exposing the false data used in the study. Now the moron Surgeon General says that just one whiff of SHS can cause a heart attack based on nothing. Pretty pathetic.
Here’s an excellent article on the links between sham science and the myth of SHS and how it is used as a cudgel against those that argue against the global warming myth from S. Fred Singer:
Secondhand Smoke, Lung Cancer, and the Global Warming Debate
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.
