Since you asked.

Both my parents died of smoking-related disease, one at 54, the other at 65.  I've never smoked, except for the half-dozen Crooks cigars I was required to burn up during my frat-initiation hazing.

Smoking is bad for you.  What a revelation.  But if an adult wants to use a legal product, I'm not going to pass judgment.

I am libertarian when it comes to personal responsibility & freedom of choice.  Alcohol is bad for you, too.  So is speeding.  But we can't ban driving without some issues.  People make bad choices.  Unless you are willing to usurp free will & take charge of all choices, they will continue to do so.

The question was were the risks of tobacco grossly overblown by the scientific community?

Also psycho didn't seem to think there was much to do about second hand smoke.

So you're OK with allowing an informed adult to decide to do things even if bad for them. So do I. Where I draw the line is when someone *chooses* to do something that is detrimental to the health of others.

So is the danger of second hand smoke grossly overblown and if so should people be forced to be subjected to it against their will? You know like waitresses in a resturant or even someone's own children in their own apartment?

As an aside we seemed to have a Deja Vu moment in this thread.

I forget where I was going with this. Actually no I don't, I do have a point although it is somewhat pedantic.

Basically Psycho made a somewhat different analogy between pro-tobacco and anti-AGW than the one I’ve been making. He stated that the AGW crowd has “grossly overblown” the consequences of AGW just as the anti-tobacco crowd had "grossly overblown" the evidence against 2nd hand smoke.

As you say "grossly overblown" is a subjective term but that doesn't mean it’s totally unquantifiable. Certainly if I had swagged some numbers for second hand smoke from memory and happened to say the risk was 40% greater rather than the 20-30% greater that you mention I don't think anyone would say that I had "grossly overblown" the risk. However if I claimed that the number was 70% then the term "grossly overblown" might in fact be applicable.

The bottom line is that I see no evidence that scientists had "grossly overblown" the risk of second hand smoke in the anti-tobacco case and therefore it doesn't necessarily follow that scientists have "grossly overblown" the consequences in the pro-AGW case.

This is somewhat a case of semantics but I just want to illustrate how folks will go out of their way to make an argument. By making a conclusion dependent on a premise you can disprove the conclusion simply by disproving the premise.

The thing is that one could certainly make the argument that AGW proponents have “grossly overblown” the consequences of AGW without making the argument contingent on some supposed anti-tobacco argument. And actually if done in such a way it’s far more difficult for me to disprove.

So why make the analogy in the first place? That’s really the point I’m trying to make here. Why would someone bend over backwards to include an unnecessary premise to a conclusion that they wish to make when their argument has a much better chance of standing up on it’s own without the premise?

I’m not sure, perhaps psycho can shed some light but my guess is that I have (successfully I might add) been making the analogy between the *tactics* of pro-tobacco and anti-AGW and psycho wanted to incorporate some part of my argument (no matter how tenuously related) as a basis for his conclusion thereby conferring more weight upon his conclusion.

Of course the end result is that his premise is flawed as I’ve shown which therefore negates his conclusion but I do find it amusing that he felt compelled to incorporate elements of my (successful) argument into his (unsuccessful) argument.

Of course “imitation is the sincerest of flattery” so I guess I should be flattered.

It's hard to know whether the 20-30% increase in relative risk from second-hand smoke is exagerated or not without delving into the specifics of the articles underpinning those numbers.  It's all in the minutiae of definitions & methods.

What is the threshhold degree and duration of exposure for any detectable increased risk? At what degree and duration of exposure is relative risk further increased?  And by how much?  Is the relationship linear?  Is there a 'dose-response' curve?  And statistical significance only increases the odds that a relationship exists.  Statistical significance doesn't confirm relationships, mostly because not all variables can be completely controlled.

I personally disagree with the NIH/NCS using the term 'causes' in the manner they do when, to be intellectually honest, they should be using the phrase 'increases the risk of'.  But the NIH/NCS aren't completely free of bias - they do have a 'mission' and they are a creature of government bureaucracy.

Speaking of tactics, one of my replies that got swallowed up in the Great Forum Crash of 2010 dealt with that.

Al Gore and at least some of the key pro-AGW scientists refuse to debate or engage skeptics.  The reasoning I've seen, put forth by their defenders in the press and in blogs, is that to do so would confer upon skeptics a legitimacy they don't deserve.  Any agreement to debate is a loss before any debate occurs, so why debate?  Just sharing a stage or podium with a skeptic concedes too much, if only symbolically.  We'll just retreat to the tower and wait them out.

Talk about tactics, well those are the tactics of the pro-AGW contingent - refuse to accept that there is anything to discuss.  'You have nothing to say, so I'm not going to give you any satisfaction.'  It's what they call 'denial' turned inside out - the Royal Treatment, if you will.  It's pretty much more of the same sort of thing Mann & Jones were doing all along, if privately, as evidenced by the emails they've conceded they authored.

Not true.  You don't understand the concept of statistical significance.

There is some basis for this view.  Even if one concedes that man is the principle cause of the recently observed warming, however, 'human activities' is a rather broad phrase, one that is difficult at best to use as the basis for concrete remedies.  We have a long way to go before we can be confident that any proposed remedy is 1) feasible and 2) will achieve some as yet undetermined 'ideal' set point.  Much as I've always believed on a gut level that there was no challenge man was incapable of meeting (I grew up in the decade of Mercury, Gemini & Apollo), I don't believe we have sufficient knowledge or technology to take on climate.

What a time for the forums to explode.  Serves me right for bothering to link sources that will probably be ignored...

Short version follows:

Arctic ice.  I know, it's long.  All you idiots yammering over the disappearance need to read it though.  Massive hole in the "established" science on the topic.

Mumbles!

Stop picking on poly sci majors and go after Richard Lindzen or something.  Trashing them for talking about poly sci topics(AGW has like 20 billion just in US government funding behind it regardless of your refusal to admit it) is low.

Stop using GISTEMP.  Seriously, even Jones doesn't like it, and his numbers are just as cooked.  Try these instead.  They aren't being manually altered, and show the actual trends.

For those of you confused by this Mumbles directed information, both my reply and his post were et.  Hopefully, it makes sense to him.  Well, ok, I'm not really hopeful, more like resigned but too stupid to stop posting, but humor is the only thing left to live for so I have to do something.

Lastly, as there seems to be some serious confusion here, usually because you're idiots that don't know what you're talking about, some minor clarification.  Apparently, no one bothered to read the transcripts, so no one knows what "statistically significant global warming" means.  No Mumbles, it's not because they picked the time frame of 1995-2009.  Read it.  For those of you too fucking lazy to be wasting our oxygen supply, it's because warming trends of equal significance to even the high estimates of the current one just happen to predate industrialization.

I also read the transcript for the hearing as well.  I know I'm supposed to be a redneck conservative that only reads blogs(I'm not real sure rednecks actually have computers to start with, but I'll work with it anyway), but this particularly stupid back and forth just bugged me.  Especially since a certain someone, frequently named, persisted in posting more visuals to GISTEMP...

New material, smoking nonsense.

I'll explain why you look like an idiot, along with most of the adult population.  Non-smokers have a 1.4%(males)-1.3%(females) chance of developing lung cancer before they kick the bucket.  How do you feel about that 20-30% increase now?

Anyone who actually knows what they're talking about(which should include congress and other legislative bodies when debating a subject and writing laws in regards to it) isn't going to get excited over second hand smoke.  It's not even a tenth the concern that first hand smoke is, that only makes it up around 17% among males.  Females, who more commonly smoke in a less irresponsible manner, are under 12%.

It's more in line with things like drowning in your bathtub than it is a threat to public safety.  Instead, they've made it illegal in many states for people to allow smoking on their own property based on a cancer scare of mythical proportions, the food in those restaurants and clubs has far more of an impact on both cancer rates and heart disease.  At most they should have mandated common sense ventilation practices(something any business with a brain already has), which negates the already minor risk almost entirely.

I know, sob stories galore, so and so died, so and so has asthma.  Shit happens.  To everyone.  If there's anyone out there that doesn't have a relatively close relative that went or is currently going that way, lucky them.

But, doesn't that put it alarmingly close to 1.7-1.8%?

That is truly shocking!

Actually, you're the one who looks more like an idiot. Your views on smoking are extremely narrowminded and you aren't seeing the bigger broader picture. You're limiting the dangers of smoking to just lung cancer. Smoking is known to cause heart disease, lung diseases, lung infections (pneumonia and bronchitis), birth defects/prematurity, SIDS, etc. You can't simply look at one danger of smoking and claim that it is miniscule. You have to look at the sum of all those dangers and say whether or not it is dangerous. Sure a 1% increase for lung cancer is one thing, but what about another 1% increase from all the other dangers? You'll soon realize that it can really add up and really affect the population as a whole. There is a reason why it is a big killer in the USA.

Let's also not forget that even if you don't have any lung cancer risk, second hand smoke can still trigger other diseases when exposed even briefly to it. The CDC has reported how even just a brief exposure to second hand smoke with someone who has heart risks can trigger a heart attack.

http://www.cdc.gov/features/heartmonth/

http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/basic_information/health_effects/heart_disease/iom_report/index.htm

Second hand smoke is dangerous. Obviously not nearly as dangerous as first-hand, but it can still be very dangerous. What's to protect the baby in the car with a parent smoking in the front seat? A baby's lungs are still developing and are much more prone to lung diseases from second hand smoke.

You then go and compare food in clubs to secondhand smoke? Wow...first off, the food is only hurting the person eating it, not the person next to the person eating it.

Also, most states that have bans from smoking in restaurants and bars already previously had regulations on ventilation and smoking areas. Sit-in restaurants were already required to have seperate ventilation systems for smoking and non-smoking areas. It was then banned altogether in many states because you lose that seperation in bar areas.

Finally, I don't know of any states that prohibit an individual from smoking on their own home property. That would be pretty big for anti-tobacco to accomplish that. That is the tobacco industry's last sanctuary so-to-speak.

Kestrel, your point 3 is one of those examples of "truth in repetition". No matter how many times this lie is repeated, it remains a lie.

This is old news:

http://infowars.net/articles/august2007/300807Warming.htm

Another thing that Climategate has exposed is the corruption of the peer-review process. Science should be about discovering the truth, not federal grants and political correctness.

 http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/11/24/the_fix_is_in_99280.html

I know, I know, these article will convince no one and the author's credibility will be destroyed. Enjoy.