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| December 19th 2010 American Thinker
It doesn’t matter whether you smoke or not, or don’t like the smell of smoke or not, you don’t have the right to
lie about the smoke. Nor do you have the right to lie about nuclear energy, global warming, DDT, radiation,
ozone holes, acid rain, and many others. We want the truth without the agendas. |
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Secondhand Smoke, Lung Cancer, and the Global Warming Debate
By S. Fred Singer
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 isotopes — a remarkable discovery worthy of alchemists. As an aside, when not engaged in smearing scientists by linking them to the tobacco lobby, Oreskes’ and Conway’s book claims that opposition to environmental regulation of greenhouse gases and other “pollutants” is based on anti-communism!
The ultimate aim of these attacks, at least in my case, has been to discredit my work and publications on global warming. I am a nonsmoker, find SHS to be an irritant and unpleasant, have certainly not been paid by Philip Morris and the tobacco lobby, and have never joined any of their front organizations. And I serve on the advisory board of an anti-smoking organization. My father, who was a heavy smoker, died of emphysema while relatively young. I personally believe that SHS, in addition to being objectionable, cannot possibly be healthy.
So what is the truth about SHS and lung cancer? I am neither an oncologist nor a chemical toxicologist, but I do know some statistics, which allows me to examine the EPA study without bias. I can demonstrate that the EPA fudged their analysis to reach a predetermined conclusion — using thoroughly dishonest procedures. EPA “scientists” made three major errors: 1) They ignored “publication bias.” 2) They arbitrarily shifted the statistical “confidence intervals.” 3) They drew unjustified conclusions from a risk ratio that was barely greater than 1.0.
- Since none of the epidemiological studies provided the clear answer they wanted, the EPA carried out a “meta-analysis,” lumping together a selected group of studies. Unfortunately, this approach ignores publication bias — i.e., the tendency for investigators not to publish their studies if they do not find a positive result.
- The EPA, in order to calculate a positive risk ratio, relaxed the confidence intervals from the generally accepted 95% standard to 90% — and admitted this openly.
- Even so, their “Risk Ratio” was just a little above 1.0 — whereas careful epidemiologists, because of the presence of confounding factors, generally ignore any result unless the RR exceeds 2.0.
To sum up this somewhat technical discussion, while I cannot give specific answers about lung cancer or other medical issues connected with SHS, I can state with some assurance that the EPA analysis — to paraphrase my former teacher, Nobel physicist Wolfgang Pauli — is “not only wrong, but worthless.”
My assessments are independently confirmed by the Congressional Research Service (in report CRS-95-1115) and by a lengthy judicial analysis in 1998 by Judge William Osteen — all available on the internet. Science journalist Michael Fumento presented, in 1993, a well-researched and eminently readable account in Investors Business Daily.
In the largest (in terms of statistical power), most detailed (in terms of results presented), and most transparent (in terms of information about its conduct) epidemiologic paper on SHS and mortality ever published in a major medical journal (in the May 17, 2003 issue of the British Medical Journal), UCLA Prof. James Enstrom found no significant relationship between secondhand smoke and lung cancer. It is worth noting also that the World Health Organization, in a just-completed study reported in the British medical journal Lancet, gives a lung-cancer death rate (for US, Canada, and Cuba) of barely six hundred per year, only a fraction of the EPA number of U.S. deaths. An independent study, published in BioMed Central (2010) and supported by the Canadian National Cancer Institute and Canada’s Cancer Society, found no noticeable lung-cancer effect from SHS in nonsmokers; however, there was a significant effect from welding, use of paint thinners and solvents, and exposure to diesel exhaust, soot, and smoke from sources other than tobacco.
But just when we thought that nothing could top the EPA claims, along comes this bombshell from Obama’s surgeon general Regina Benjamin: “Even brief exposure to secondhand smoke can cause cardiovascular disease and could trigger acute cardiac events like heart attack.” Not just long-term exposure to SHS — just a whiff can kill you, asserts the surgeon general’s media release of Dec. 9, 2010. Of course, there is no evidence cited to back up this wild claim — just the usual and undisputed evidence about the health consequences to actual (primary) smokers.
So what does it all mean? The issue is not whether SHS is healthy; it obviously is not. One issue is the use of the “tobacco weapon” to attack the credibility of climate scientists — in place of using scientific arguments. It bespeaks of the desperation of those who don’t have any valid scientific arguments and wish to avoid public debate. (Imagine, if you will, Oreskes attacking the validity of the notorious “hockey stick” temperature curve by linking its author, Michael Mann, to tobacco company Philip Morris, instead of describing his faulty use of statistics.)
The other issue is the conduct of science and the integrity of the science process: the intrusion of government political agenda — worthy or not — on the way science is done and reported to the public. The corruption of science in a worthy cause is still corruption, and it has led to its further corruption in an unworthy cause — the ideologically driven claim of anthropogenic global warming.
Atmospheric physicist S. Fred Singer is professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and founding director of the US Weather Satellite Service. His book Unstoppable Global Warming – Every 1500 Years (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007) presents the evidence for natural climate cycles of warming and cooling and became a New York Times bestseller. He is the organizer and chairman of NIPCC (Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change), whose reports reach conclusions that contradict those of the U.N.-supported IPCC.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/12/second_hand_smoke_lung_cancer.html at December 19, 2010 – 05:54:03 PM CST
Make America Stronger, Smarter and Save Trillions
BY MICHAEL R. FOX PHD – The current economic situation in the United States is frightening. Horrendous and growing national debt, horrendous and growing government spending,
Social Security in a financial mess, Medicare in a greater financial mess, a Mainstream Media (MSM) which is stunningly uninformative, and so far to the political left it would make the editors of Pravda blush.
When was the last honest article you can recall reading in the MSM about social security, energy, environment, global warming (it’s not about science) nuclear energy, prolific state and national spending, all with little or no regard to the taxpayers who are asked to pay for all of this.
Whether it is the Tea Party Movement or some other hardnosed group demanding excellence from our federal, state, and local governments, providing worthwhile, defensible, cost effective and common sense regulations instead of the exorbitant waste we all can see, remains to be seen. We are not getting the governments we are paying for and it is difficult to find any of them who have the best interests of the taxpayers as guidance.
There are those among us in America who are opposed to freedom, free markets, capitalism, and our Constitutional form of government, and they exploit current law in their oppositions to this form of government. This weaponry they deploy involves regulations, taxation, and litigation. It is absolutely false to assume that these groups, or their allies employed in the regulatory agencies and academia, have the best interests of Americans at heart. In throttling our energy sources they wish us harm. Targeted industries are usually attacked using one or more of these legal weapons.
Regulations Re-examined The magnitude of the costs of regulations for example, is staggering. Clyde Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) annually reports the costs of some of the regulations (federal regulations only—the states add billions more to the regulatory burdens) (http://tinyurl.com/26jh9vv). The title of the report is appropriately “Ten Thousand Commandments”. For the year 2007, the latest analysis available on the CEI website, the estimated costs for regulatory compliance to federal regulations is $1.157 trillion dollars. This is the equivalent of a huge hidden tax imposed on the American economy and is not known to those who haven’t seen the costs of compliance. It doesn’t seem to be common knowledge among our tax and spend Congressmen either. These compliance costs should anger voters and is an area where Congress could find many billions in savings for American business and to the consumers who always pay for this. The voters are eagerly looking for smart ways to cut the spending. Regulations, both state and federal, are great places to begin.
These hidden regulatory costs are more than triple the total corporate income taxes of $342 billion for 2007 which now are the largest in the world. On top of all of this are the regulatory administration and enforcement costs of $42 billion annually. This is quite a police force, don’t you think? And it’s a police force which does not generate a dime’s worth of wealth for our nation. Let’s fix this regulatory cancer on our economy. There is a need for common sense, defensible regulations, and a need for enforcement. But at the current levels of regulations the destructiveness is obvious.
Social Security The current levels of social security expenditures now are larger than the revenues received by the SSA. Not only larger than the revenues, the expenditures are increasing even more as the 1960s flower children begin to retire. Even worse the SS system is structured so that taxpayers are required to support the SS system, forcing the younger generations to pay the trillion-dollar bills for SS benefits to the elderly. This is an insanely costly funding plan for the SS program, and we see little effort to improve this funding strategy, either at the SSA or with the Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles’ Deficit Commission. Are there better alternatives to such a Ponzi scheme for the suicidal SS funding plan to consider? Of course there is and it’s not from Bernie Madoff.
Consider the retirement plan for Galveston County Texas. (http://tinyurl.com/2e5nke5). In the early 1980s city and government entities could opt out of the federal social security programs. Today people are retiring from the Galveston plan with encouraging results. Depending upon the average salary, length of time participating in the program, and age at retirement, the retirement benefits at all levels are much greater than those expected from the SSA. See examples in Table below.
| Galveston Plan vs. Social Security |
| Salary |
Galveston Plan |
Social Security |
| $17,000 |
$1036 |
$683 |
| $26,000 |
$1500 |
$853 |
| $51,000 |
$3103 |
$1368 |
| $75,000 |
$4540 |
$1645 |
| Upon Retirement after 30 years Assuming 5% Rate of Return |
As one can see at 3 different levels of income, the three different retirement benefits from the Galveston plan are all larger than the benefits from Social Security, in the case of the $75,000/yr salaries the benefits are $4540/$1645 = 2.75 time larger. While these benefits are very impressive the most stunning part is that none of the Galveston retirement funds come the taxpayers. Younger generations are not stuck with paying the benefits of the retiring generation. It pays for itself. The developer of the plan, Eric Gornto, is still working productively in Galveston. Gornto should be named Secretary of Commerce or better the head of the Social Security Administration, which is now trillions of dollars overcommitted and unable to pay its debts, even with the trillions extracted from American workers. One suspects that our healthcare programs could also be similarly placed on such a self-funding program, without the horrendous authorized theft from the younger generations.
Imported Oil The US now imports from foreign sources about 12 million barrels of oil per day. This amounts to more than $440 billion per year. This is one of the largest transfers of wealth which the US pays because of its failure to develop our own domestic sources of oil. Remarkably the Obama administration has gone out of its way too oppose the development of domestic sources of oil, coal, and nuclear energy.
From Prudhoe Bay in Alaska, to the Gulf of Mexico, to the East Coast of the United States, we are forbidden to drill and develop our own domestic sources of oil. Instead of having $440 billion dollars leaving this country annually, we should spend it in America. Remarkably while America bans the drilling of oil, the Export Import Bank recently loaned billions to Brazil to further develop Brazil’s new oil field. Who is looking out for us? We should be developing our own energy sources including oil, coal, natural gas, and nuclear energy. We should invest these billions in America making our nation stronger and less dependent upon international thugs.
Nuclear Medicine There have been Impressive advances in nuclear medicine in Europe, America, and around the world. If the results of clinical trials in the treatment of cancer, for example, were known and used more widely in the United States, we could reduce the costs of both diagnostic and therapeutic uses of these new nuclear techniques drastically. In clinical trials studying cancer the radioisotopes used in this technology are delivered selectively to the cell surfaces of cancer cells, and not to the surfaces of non-cancerous cells. The cancer cells are killed selectively.
Depending upon whether diagnosis or therapy is the purpose, differing isotopes can be selected for delivery to the cell surfaces for these differing purposes. As a rule the diagnostics are very precise showing the stages, locations, sizes, of the tumors.
Both in diagnosis and therapy the cost savings to our medical care would be in the billions annually. The reasons for the lower costs are: a. the cancer remission rates found in clinical trials are very high, often above 85%, the side effects are minimal (boredom being listed as a side effect), and the costs can be reduced drastically, since the treatments may be administered in the doctor’s office and treated as an outpatient. The costs of such treatments could be as little as 10-20% of the costs of traditional treatments (http://tinyurl.com/29nmdu8).
The technology is in its infancy for a variety of scientific and political reasons. There is little doubt that huge medical cost savings could be achieved in our nation with the advancement of these technologies into fighting cancer, AIDS, and arthritis, to name a few.
Vaclav Klaus president of the Czech Republic, has known totalitarianism personally for decades, having live under communism in his home country. He sees frightening similarities between that horrendous experience and the new movement called global warming. Read on.
Make America Stronger, Smarter and Save Trillions
BY MICHAEL R. FOX PHD – The current economic situation in the United States is frightening. Horrendous and growing national debt, horrendous and growing government spending,
Social Security in a financial mess, Medicare in a greater financial mess, a Mainstream Media (MSM) which is stunningly uninformative, and so far to the political left it would make the editors of Pravda blush.
When was the last honest article you can recall reading in the MSM about social security, energy, environment, global warming (it’s not about science) nuclear energy, prolific state and national spending, all with little or no regard to the taxpayers who are asked to pay for all of this.
Whether it is the Tea Party Movement or some other hardnosed group demanding excellence from our federal, state, and local governments, providing worthwhile, defensible, cost effective and common sense regulations instead of the exorbitant waste we all can see, remains to be seen. We are not getting the governments we are paying for and it is difficult to find any of them who have the best interests of the taxpayers as guidance.
There are those among us in America who are opposed to freedom, free markets, capitalism, and our Constitutional form of government, and they exploit current law in their oppositions to this form of government. This weaponry they deploy involves regulations, taxation, and litigation. It is absolutely false to assume that these groups, or their allies employed in the regulatory agencies and academia, have the best interests of Americans at heart. In throttling our energy sources they wish us harm. Targeted industries are usually attacked using one or more of these legal weapons.
Regulations Re-examined The magnitude of the costs of regulations for example, is staggering. Clyde Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) annually reports the costs of some of the regulations (federal regulations only—the states add billions more to the regulatory burdens) (http://tinyurl.com/26jh9vv). The title of the report is appropriately “Ten Thousand Commandments”. For the year 2007, the latest analysis available on the CEI website, the estimated costs for regulatory compliance to federal regulations is $1.157 trillion dollars. This is the equivalent of a huge hidden tax imposed on the American economy and is not known to those who haven’t seen the costs of compliance. It doesn’t seem to be common knowledge among our tax and spend Congressmen either. These compliance costs should anger voters and is an area where Congress could find many billions in savings for American business and to the consumers who always pay for this. The voters are eagerly looking for smart ways to cut the spending. Regulations, both state and federal, are great places to begin.
These hidden regulatory costs are more than triple the total corporate income taxes of $342 billion for 2007 which now are the largest in the world. On top of all of this are the regulatory administration and enforcement costs of $42 billion annually. This is quite a police force, don’t you think? And it’s a police force which does not generate a dime’s worth of wealth for our nation. Let’s fix this regulatory cancer on our economy. There is a need for common sense, defensible regulations, and a need for enforcement. But at the current levels of regulations the destructiveness is obvious.
Social Security The current levels of social security expenditures now are larger than the revenues received by the SSA. Not only larger than the revenues, the expenditures are increasing even more as the 1960s flower children begin to retire. Even worse the SS system is structured so that taxpayers are required to support the SS system, forcing the younger generations to pay the trillion-dollar bills for SS benefits to the elderly. This is an insanely costly funding plan for the SS program, and we see little effort to improve this funding strategy, either at the SSA or with the Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles’ Deficit Commission. Are there better alternatives to such a Ponzi scheme for the suicidal SS funding plan to consider? Of course there is and it’s not from Bernie Madoff.
Consider the retirement plan for Galveston County Texas. (http://tinyurl.com/2e5nke5). In the early 1980s city and government entities could opt out of the federal social security programs. Today people are retiring from the Galveston plan with encouraging results. Depending upon the average salary, length of time participating in the program, and age at retirement, the retirement benefits at all levels are much greater than those expected from the SSA. See examples in Table below.
| Galveston Plan vs. Social Security |
| Salary |
Galveston Plan |
Social Security |
| $17,000 |
$1036 |
$683 |
| $26,000 |
$1500 |
$853 |
| $51,000 |
$3103 |
$1368 |
| $75,000 |
$4540 |
$1645 |
| Upon Retirement after 30 years Assuming 5% Rate of Return |
As one can see at 3 different levels of income, the three different retirement benefits from the Galveston plan are all larger than the benefits from Social Security, in the case of the $75,000/yr salaries the benefits are $4540/$1645 = 2.75 time larger. While these benefits are very impressive the most stunning part is that none of the Galveston retirement funds come the taxpayers. Younger generations are not stuck with paying the benefits of the retiring generation. It pays for itself. The developer of the plan, Eric Gornto, is still working productively in Galveston. Gornto should be named Secretary of Commerce or better the head of the Social Security Administration, which is now trillions of dollars overcommitted and unable to pay its debts, even with the trillions extracted from American workers. One suspects that our healthcare programs could also be similarly placed on such a self-funding program, without the horrendous authorized theft from the younger generations.
Imported Oil The US now imports from foreign sources about 12 million barrels of oil per day. This amounts to more than $440 billion per year. This is one of the largest transfers of wealth which the US pays because of its failure to develop our own domestic sources of oil. Remarkably the Obama administration has gone out of its way too oppose the development of domestic sources of oil, coal, and nuclear energy.
From Prudhoe Bay in Alaska, to the Gulf of Mexico, to the East Coast of the United States, we are forbidden to drill and develop our own domestic sources of oil. Instead of having $440 billion dollars leaving this country annually, we should spend it in America. Remarkably while America bans the drilling of oil, the Export Import Bank recently loaned billions to Brazil to further develop Brazil’s new oil field. Who is looking out for us? We should be developing our own energy sources including oil, coal, natural gas, and nuclear energy. We should invest these billions in America making our nation stronger and less dependent upon international thugs.
Nuclear Medicine There have been Impressive advances in nuclear medicine in Europe, America, and around the world. If the results of clinical trials in the treatment of cancer, for example, were known and used more widely in the United States, we could reduce the costs of both diagnostic and therapeutic uses of these new nuclear techniques drastically. In clinical trials studying cancer the radioisotopes used in this technology are delivered selectively to the cell surfaces of cancer cells, and not to the surfaces of non-cancerous cells. The cancer cells are killed selectively.
Depending upon whether diagnosis or therapy is the purpose, differing isotopes can be selected for delivery to the cell surfaces for these differing purposes. As a rule the diagnostics are very precise showing the stages, locations, sizes, of the tumors.
Both in diagnosis and therapy the cost savings to our medical care would be in the billions annually. The reasons for the lower costs are: a. the cancer remission rates found in clinical trials are very high, often above 85%, the side effects are minimal (boredom being listed as a side effect), and the costs can be reduced drastically, since the treatments may be administered in the doctor’s office and treated as an outpatient. The costs of such treatments could be as little as 10-20% of the costs of traditional treatments (http://tinyurl.com/29nmdu8).
The technology is in its infancy for a variety of scientific and political reasons. There is little doubt that huge medical cost savings could be achieved in our nation with the advancement of these technologies into fighting cancer, AIDS, and arthritis, to name a few.
Steve Milloy explains some of the physics of global warming. There is little need for anyone to be concerned about CO2, let alone man-made CO2. Read on. See also the amazing graph showing the minimal temperature increase the doubling of CO2. Take a look here.
Vaclav Klaus president of the Czech Republic, has known totalitarianism personally for decades, having live under communism in his home country. He sees frightening similarities between that horrendous experience and the new movement called global warming. Read on.
This is a whitepaper on the health effects from Hanford or better, the lack thereof. You can view the pdf here.
A summary of the problems of the US nuclear industry
Download Untold-Story by M Fox
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