So it continues to bother me that people make an "intuitive" leap from smoking causing cancer to secondhand smoke causing cancer.

They do it all the time, and Volvo Democrats like The Pancake Man, an überliberal and would-be filmmaker I met in Freiburg, aren't the only culprits. Almost universally, my skepticism has been met with shock.

Of course, it is fun to be right and an iconoclast.

The latest newsletter from the oft-polemic Skeptic's Dictionary deals with secondhand smoke. I'd also recommend watching the mostly excellent "Second Hand Smoke" episode of Penn and Teller's show, available on DVD or (ahem) shared on my campus network space.

Here's an excerpt of the Skeptic's article, since I know you despise following links:

Secondhand smoke

In the last newsletter, I mentioned that Penn and Teller were challenged at James Randi's Amazing Meeting 2 last January regarding their Bullshit! episode that claimed the studies on secondhand smoke were bogus. I said I'd look into it. I did and P & T are right. Almost everybody who claims that the scientific evidence supports the claim that passive smoking causes 3,000 lung cancer deaths a year cite a single source: our own Environmental Protection Agency's 1993 report.

The EPA's data show no significant link between passive smoke and lung cancer. Even after lowering the standard from p=0.05 to p=0.1 (i.e., from a one in twenty to a one in ten chance of a spurious correlation), they were still able to get a relative risk of only 1.19. According to John Brignell, "risk ratios of greater than 3 are normally considered significant. One might even stretch a point and go down to 2, but never lower" (Sorry Wrong Number, p. 129). Yet, the EPA has not backed off. Neither has the World Health Organization, which published a study in 1998 that concluded: "Our results indicate no association between childhood exposure to ETS [environmental tobacco smoke] and lung cancer risk." The WHO study also noted that there was only "weak evidence" for a risk of lung cancer from spousal or workplace ETS. Yet WHO put out a press release that contradicts their own conclusions.

There have been other studies on secondhand smoke but the evidence goes against the EPA, which likes the work of Elizabeth Fontham, whose data has been questioned for treating ex-smokers as non-smokers. If there is a causal connection between passive smoke and lung cancer, it is a very small contributing factor.

Penn & Teller had somebody do the math. There is a 25% higher risk of dying of lung cancer from passive smoke. For those exposed to ETS, the death rate from lung cancer is 1 in 80,000. For those not exposed, it is 1 in 100,000. Looked at another way: For every million people exposed to ETS, there will be 12.5 deaths from lung cancer; for every million people not exposed to ETS, there will be 10 deaths due to lung cancer. This is statistically of no significance. [See episode 5 of their excellent DVD: Bullshit!]

So there you go.

Oh, and speaking of bogus claims, I just found another article debunking claims made in "Bowling for Columbine" by director and populist fabulist Michael Moore, the left's answer to Ann Coulter. They're both on the Wishy-Washy Moderate's "Traitors to the Cause" list.