The public has become increasingly aware that the science behind man-made global warming is a fraud. But maybe Americans like bogus science in pursuit of certain public policy objectives. Let’s look at it.
Many Americans find tobacco smoke to be a nuisance. Some find the odor offensive, and others have allergies or asthma that can be aggravated by smoking in their presence. There’s little question that tobacco smoke causes these kinds of nuisances, but how successful would anti-smokers have been in a court of law, or public opinion, in achieving the kind of success they’ve achieved based on tobacco smoke being a nuisance?
A serious public health threat had to be manufactured, and in 1993 the Environmental Protection Agency stepped in to the rescue with their bogus environmental tobacco smoke study that says secondhand tobacco smoke is a class A carcinogenic.
Why is it bogus? The EPA claimed that 3,000 Americans die annually from secondhand smoke, but there was a problem. They couldn’t come up with that conclusion using the standard statistical 95 percent confidence interval. They lowered their study’s confidence interval to 90 percent. That has the effect of doubling the margin of error and doubling the probability that mere chance explains those 3,000 deaths.
