Slimed by Naomi Oreskes – In Defense of Dr. Fred Singer

Ron Arnold October 20, 2014

The Oreskes documentary calling Dr. Fred Singer a “Liar for Hire” is a repeat of a nearly identical attack on him twenty years ago. An honorable newsman at that time debunked the attack and my research subsequently uncovered a genuine conspiracy of Big Green money and malice. While we consider legal action against the present vicious attack on Dr. Singer, I submit this short section from my book EcoTerror: The Violent Agenda to Save Nature for your information along with the advice of DeepThroat: Follow The Money.  The excerpt is found in Chapter 5, “Radicals” in the middle of page 183 forward for about 3 pages…..To Read More……

This appeared on October 24 (Australian time) on Jon Ray's Greenie Watch.  Fred Singer has decided not to sue over the grievous libel directed at him by Naomi Oreskes & Co. but he has suggested that his supporters reprint two articles from a few years back wherein both he and another writer have critiqued her work. What she says now is more shrill than in the past but her accusations are basically now old ones so the effort of composing a new reply would be superfluous.The two articles follow the backgrounder below:

Naomi Oreskes, Conspiracy Queen, By Norman Rogers June 7, 2011

 Naomi Oreskes is the environmentalist Noam Chomsky. She thinks that anyone who questions environmentalist doctrine is evil. Her crusade is to expose the presumed ulterior motives of the critics. According to Oreskes, if you question the dubious studies concerning secondhand tobacco smoke, you must be in the pay of tobacco companies. If you question global warming, you must be working for a fossil fuel company. If you question the DDT ban, you must part of a right wing conspiracy to weaken faith in government regulators.  Oreskes is the author of one of the silliest articles ever to appear in the journal Science. She claimed that she analyzed 928 peer-reviewed papers on global warming and 100% agreed with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concerning global warming. If you go to the website of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) you can find hundreds of peer reviewed papers that disagree with the IPCC in one way or another…. Oreskes is a professor and an important administrator at the University of California. Like Chomsky, she cloaks her endless conspiracy theories in the machinery of scholarship. Her 343 page book has 64 pages of notes. A pig with lipstick is still a pig. Neither Oreskes nor her co-author have strong scientific educations and it shows......To Read More…..

 

Science and Smear Merchants, By S. Fred Singer, June 21, 2011

Professor Naomi Oreskes, of the University of California in San Diego, claims to be a science historian. One can readily demonstrate that she is neither a credible scientist nor a credible historian; the best evidence is right there in her recent book, "Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming," coauthored with Eric Conway. Her science is faulty; her historical procedures are thoroughly unprofessional. She is, however, an accomplished polemicist, who has found time for world lecture tours, promoting her book and her ideological views, while being paid by the citizens of California. Her book tries to smear four senior physicists -- of whom I am the only surviving one. I view it as my obligation to defend the reputations of my late colleagues and good friends against her libelous charges..... We have established so far that Oreskes is neither a scientist of any sort nor a careful professional historian. She is, however, a "pop-psychologist." It seems she has figured out what motivates the four senior physicists she libels in her book; it is "anti-communism." Really! This is not only stated explicitly but she also identifies them throughout as "Cold Warriors." ......To Read More......

 

Editor's Note:  One more thing.  I wish to address this issue that's constantly thrown up to Singer - and others who have spoken up about EPA's minipulation of science regarding second hand tobacco smoke.  The issue wasn't whether or not so these scientists who spoke up support smoking or tobacco companies.  The issue for them was the junk science the EPA used to reach it's conclusions.  There was serious concern was that if this was allowed to stand it would become a serious slippery slope to justify more regulations involving more things the environmental activists at EPA were against.  The tobacco companies sued, but the stakes in the suit were far more reaching than profits for tobacco companies or the rights of smokers.  As Glenn Lammi, chief counsel of the legal studies division at the Washington Legal Foundation, said that amounts to "moving the goal posts during the game." "It's a very definite slippery slope, and we think this is very dangerous for the whole community," he said, noting that a huge number of chemicals have been accused of being cancer-causing on evidence similar to that used in the second-hand smoke analysis. That concern has turned out to be justified.

One more, one more thing.  Fred Singer commented on these attacks against him over this by saying:

 

"I am certainly no expert on lung cancer or on epidemiology. My only 'offense' was to quote an official report by our Congressional Research Service and the extensive documentation by a federal judge that exposed the dubious way in which EPA cooked the data to come up with its claim of 3000 cancer deaths from SHS. I have never smoked and am on the advisory board of ACSH, a well-known anti-smoking organization. Personally, I hate SHS; but that does not affect my science". 

 

Here are two articles by Michael Fumento worth exploring that deal with this issue

• Is EPA Blowing Its Own Smoke? How Much Science Is Behind Its Tobacco Finding?
• EPA'sPseudoscience Goes Up in Smoke

Secondhand Smoke, Third-Rate Science

By Michael D. Shaw, Dec 16, 2013

This appeared here, and I would like to thank Mike for sending this to me. 

 (HealthNewsDigest.com) - In a perfect world, it wouldn't be necessary for me to begin this article by affirming that I am not a supporter of smoking, nor am I a paid shill of the tobacco industry. But in our real world--in which a goodly amount of scientific research grant money is awarded on the basis of sensationalized fearmongering results--those who question the validity of such results are often attacked.

"Kill the messenger" is hardly a new phenomenon, having been recorded as early as 442 BC in the play Antigone by Sophocles.

That said, let's proceed to the matter at hand: The overblown (sorry, couldn't resist) dangers of secondhand smoke. We'll start off with the latest findings, as presented at the June, 2013 meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

"Among never smokers, any passive smoking exposure and most passive smoking categories did not significantly increase lung cancer risk, compared to no passive exposure; however, passive exposure as an adult at home for 30 or more years was associated with increased risk, of borderline significance."

These conclusions were reached based on an analysis of data derived from the Women's Health Initiative Observational Study--a prospective cohort study conducted at 40 US centers, from 1993-1998. Initially, there were 93,676 participants, aged 50-79. The final analytic cohort consisted of 76,304 women.

Our friends at the American Council on Science and Health published this reaction to the study by epidemiologist Dr. Geoffrey Kabat of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine:

"This does not really come as a surprise to those who are familiar with the epidemiologic evidence regarding exposure to passive smoking and risk of lung cancer. In fact, the association is weak and inconsistent. The largest U.S. prospective studies, the American Cancer Society's (ACS) Cancer Prevention Studies (CPS I and II) show either no association or an inconsistent association, respectively. The [study] makes the important point that we should not overstate the weak and uncertain association with passive smoking, and should be looking for other, larger risk factors for lung cancer occurring in never smokers. [T]he only thing that's surprising is that this news comes as a surprise to many people."

But wait! Haven't we been hearing for years that secondhand smoke causes all kinds of diseases, including lung cancer? According to the American Lung Association, "Secondhand smoke causes approximately 3,400 deaths from lung cancer and 22,700 to 69,600 deaths from heart disease each year." For their source, they cite a June, 2005 report from the California Environmental Protection Agency on environmental tobacco smoke.

Your clue to data fudging is "approximately." There are no hard statistics on the number of deaths caused by secondhand smoke. Inasmuch as the very cause of death on death certificates has been estimated to be wrong 30-50% of the time, and no one has ever written "secondhand smoke" as a cause, how could there be? Instead, the California numbers are simply estimates, based on someone's model, and nothing more.

The Lung Association also references an article from The Lancet, published in July, 2005 entitled "The whole truth and nothing but the truth? The research that Philip Morris did not want you to see." The gist is that the industry knew that tobacco smoke was toxic, but suppressed this from the public. Furthermore, secondhand smoke--called "sidestream smoke" in the report--was studied by the industry in great detail. The experimental work was performed by the Institut für Industrielle und Biologische Forschung GmbH (INBIFO), based in Cologne, Germany, and later purchased by Philip Morris.

It is worth noting that all the data cited in the Lancet article was based on rat studies. I'll go out on a limb here and speculate that the ambient exposure of these rats to sidestream smoke was far higher than any imaginable worst case scenario for a real life human environment. Support for this contention is established by this amazing quote from the article:

"The documentary evidence suggests that INBIFO maintained two quite distinct profiles. One, revealed in its internal reports, appears to have involved a very large programme of inhalation studies, some of which, as long ago as 1982, showed that sidestream smoke was more toxic than mainstream smoke [inhaled by the smoker himself], a key finding that could have informed the debate about passive smoking."

Assume this is true. The effects of inhalation of mainstream smoke are mitigated to some extent by the smoker's ability to breathe ambient air between puffs on the cigarette. For sidestream smoke to be "more toxic" on a dose-response basis would require the ambient air concentration of environmental tobacco smoke to be close to that of mainstream smoke! In other words, there would be almost no difference between smoking a cigarette, or breathing the ambient air.

Science at its best, no doubt. However, this is all in keeping with what we might call "Surrealistic Science." Another current example is the outrageous disconnect whereby the role of cholesterol in cardiovascular disease has been officially downplayed, yet statin drugs--approved for the sole purpose of lowering cholesterol--must still be taken with even greater alacrity.

Perhaps, RJ Rushdoony was onto something when he said that "The purposes of modern science are increasingly those of magic, the exercise of total control. The essential goal of modern science is knowledge in order to have prediction, planning and control."

Two stories in one: No link found between secondhand smoke and lung cancer; and no one seems to care

 

Posted on December 11, 2013 by admin @ American Council on Science and Health &

Although numerous studies seeking to find strong (or any) evidence of a link between SHS (secondhand smoke, or passive smoking) and lung cancer have failed to find such, the popular wisdom (shared by most scientists) is that SHS is indeed a cause of lung cancer. One reason for this widespread mythology is the failure of news media both general and scientific to take note of these studies.

Another example of this "conscious avoidance" has occurred recently. In June, at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO, possibly the most prestigious meeting of cancer researchers), a Stanford medical student (Ange Wang) presented her (and colleagues ) evaluation of lung cancer and smoking histories contained in the vast Women s Health Initiative (WHI) database. 

Their conclusion: among the 76,000+ profiles with all the requisite information, among women who had never smoked, exposure to passive smoking overall, and to most categories of passive smoking, did not statistically significantly increase cancer risk. The news report of this presentation only now has appeared on the website of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute (JNCI) and as of today, no media have paid attention to either the original report or the current news item.

ACSH advisor, epidemiologist Dr. Geoffrey Kabat of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, NY, who has been a pioneer in this area for over a decade, had this comment:

"This does not really come as a surprise to those who are familiar with the epidemiologic evidence regarding exposure to passive smoking and risk of lung cancer. In fact, the association is weak and inconsistent. The largest U.S. prospective studies, the American Cancer Society s (ACS) Cancer Prevention Studies (CPS I and II) show either no association or an inconsistent association, respectively. 

Widely cited meta-analyses show a 25% increased risk of lung cancer among never smokers exposed to passive smoking (mainly through marriage to a smoking spouse). However, other meta-analyses indicate that the excess risk may be lower, more on the order of 10%. In any case, this figure needs to be compared to the 2,000-6,000% increase in risk of lung cancer among smokers. The news item makes the important point that we should not overstate the weak and uncertain association with passive smoking, and should be looking for other, larger risk factors for lung cancer occurring in never smokers.

The only thing that s surprising is that this new result, based on an as-yet-unpublished analysis of the Women s Health Initiative observational study, was featured in a news item in the prestigious Journal of the National Cancer Institute under the title No Clear Link Between Passive Smoking and Lung Cancer. In other words, the only thing that s surprising is that this news comes as a surprise to many people."

ACSH s Dr. Gilbert Ross added this perspective: While not disagreeing with the findings, given the prior studies in concord with it, we should note that this is a meeting presentation, not yet published in a peer-reviewed journal. Further, the number of never-smoking women diagnosed with lung cancer is quite small, 152 to be precise, making general comments based solely upon these data fraught. 

As another expert commented to JNCI: Passive smoking has many downstream health effects asthma, upper respiratory infections, other pulmonary diseases ¦.. but only borderline increased risk of lung cancer, said Dr. Jyoti Patel of Northwestern U. School of Medicine. The strongest reason to avoid [SHS} is to change societal behavior: to not live in a society where smoking is the norm. We echo her call for continued, strong anti-smoking measures.