Jimmy Akin

Continuing excerpts from Crichton’s important speech:

In 1993, the EPA announced that second-hand smoke was "responsible
for approximately 3,000 lung cancer deaths each year in nonsmoking
adults," and that it " impairs the respiratory health of hundreds of
thousands of people." In a 1994 pamphlet the EPA said that the eleven
studies it based its decision on were not by themselves conclusive, and
that they collectively assigned second-hand smoke a risk factor of
1.19. (For reference, a risk factor below 3.0 is too small for action
by the EPA. or for publication in the New England Journal of Medicine,
for example.) Furthermore, since there was no statistical association
at the 95% coinfidence limits, the EPA lowered the limit to 90%. They
then classified second hand smoke as a Group A Carcinogen.

This was openly fraudulent science, but it formed the basis for bans
on smoking in restaurants, offices, and airports. California banned
public smoking in 1995. Soon, no claim was too extreme. By 1998, the
Christian Science Monitor was saying that "Second-hand smoke is the
nation’s third-leading preventable cause of death." The American Cancer
Society announced that 53,000 people died each year of second-hand
smoke. The evidence for this claim is nonexistent.

In 1998, a Federal judge held that the EPA had acted improperly, had
"committed to a conclusion before research had begun", and had
"disregarded information and made findings on selective information."
The reaction of Carol Browner, head of the EPA was: "We stand by our
science….there’s wide agreement. The American people certainly
recognize that exposure to second hand smoke brings…a whole host of
health problems." Again, note how the claim of consensus trumps
science. In this case, it isn’t even a consensus of scientists that
Browner evokes! It’s the consensus of the American people.

Meanwhile, ever-larger studies failed to confirm any association. A
large, seven-country WHO study in 1998 found no association. Nor have
well-controlled subsequent studies, to my knowledge. Yet we now read,
for example, that second hand smoke is a cause of breast cancer. At
this point you can say pretty much anything you want about second-hand
smoke.

MORE TOMORROW.

READ THE WHOLE SPEECH.

Continuing excerpts from Crichton’s important speech:

[In 1983], five scientists including Richard Turco and Carl Sagan published a paper in Science called "Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions." This was the so-called TTAPS report, which attempted to quantify more rigorously the atmospheric effects, with the added credibility to be gained from an actual computer model of climate.

The similarity to the Drake equation is striking. As with the Drake equation, none of the variables can be determined. None at all. The TTAPS study addressed this problem in part by mapping out different wartime scenarios and assigning numbers to some of the variables, but even so, the remaining variables were-and are-simply unknowable. Nobody knows how much smoke will be generated when cities burn, creating particles of what kind, and for how long. No one knows the effect of local weather conditions on the amount of particles that will be injected into the troposphere. No one knows how long the particles will remain in the troposphere. And so on.

According to Sagan and his coworkers, even a limited 5,000 megaton nuclear exchange would cause a global temperature drop of more than 35 degrees Centigrade, and this change would last for three months. The greatest volcanic eruptions that we know of changed world temperatures somewhere between .5 and 2 degrees Centigrade. Ice ages changed global temperatures by 10 degrees. Here we have an estimated change three times greater than any ice age. One might expect it to be the subject of some dispute.

But Sagan and his coworkers were prepared, for nuclear winter was from the outset the subject of a well-orchestrated media campaign. The first announcement of nuclear winter appeared in an article by Sagan in the Sunday supplement, Parade. The very next day, a highly-publicized, high-profile conference on the long-term consequences of nuclear war was held in Washington, chaired by Carl Sagan and Paul Ehrlich, the most famous and media-savvy scientists of their generation. Sagan appeared on the Johnny Carson show 40 times. Ehrlich was on 25 times. Following the conference, there were press conferences, meetings with congressmen, and so on. The formal papers in Science came months later.

This is not the way science is done, it is the way products are sold.

What I have been suggesting to you is that nuclear winter was a
meaningless formula, tricked out with bad science, for policy ends. It
was political from the beginning, promoted in a well-orchestrated media
campaign that had to be planned weeks or months in advance.

Further evidence of the political nature of the whole project can be
found in the response to criticism. Although Richard Feynman was
characteristically blunt, saying, "I really don’t think these guys know
what they’re talking about," other prominent scientists were noticeably
reticent. Freeman Dyson was quoted as saying "It’s an absolutely
atrocious piece of science but…who wants to be accused of being in
favor of nuclear war?" And Victor Weisskopf said, "The science is
terrible but—perhaps the psychology is good." The nuclear winter team
followed up the publication of such comments with letters to the
editors denying that these statements were ever made, though the
scientists since then have subsequently confirmed their views.

A final media embarrassment came in 1991, when Carl Sagan predicted
on Nightline that Kuwaiti oil fires would produce a nuclear winter
effect, causing a "year without a summer," and endangering crops around
the world. Sagan stressed this outcome was so likely that "it should
affect the war plans." None of it happened.

MORE TOMORROW.

READ THE WHOLE SPEECH.