Institutional science fraud EPA and passive smoke style informs the type of fraud the IPCC does

I had forgotten the details of the passive smoking fraud perped by the EPA but Chris Monckton in Watts up with That reminded me of just how dishonest our politically correct political organs can be:

There is a 1:10 million risk that a non-smoker will contract lung cancer, and a 1:8 million risk that a passive smoker will contract lung cancer. The difference between the two risk rates is statistically insignificant.

The EPA’s decision to regulate passive smoke as though it were a class A carcinogen was vacated by a U.S. Federal District Judge in North Carolina in 1998. The judge said: “The court is faced with the ugly possibility that EPA adopted a methodology for each chapter, without explanation, based on the outcome sought in that chapter.” The court also noted an EPA internal document admitting that the evidence was insufficient to classify passively-inhaled smoke as a class A carcinogen, and that the EPA had not followed its own classification guidelines. The court found evidence that the EPA had cherry-picked its data, and used the term “cherry-picked” in its judgment. The court held that EPA’s exclusion of nearly half the available studies violated its own guidelines, which required it to review all the available evidence. EPA was also held to have fallen foul of the law by explicitly refusing to research all aspects of indoor air quality.

Interestingly, the court also found that EPA, in switching from the usual 95% to a 90% statistical confidence interval, “to increase the likelihood that its meta-analysis would appear statistically significant”. That is exactly what the IPCC did in 2007. Even then, the EPA found a relative risk of only 1.19, which is only “weakly associative”; and, if it had included the studies it had excluded, it would not have been able to demonstrate a relative risk greater than unity at all. EPA had adopted an a priori position and had then adjusted the statistical methodology and sampling in an attempt to confirm that position.

The court concluded that, “Using its own methodology and its selected studies, EPA did not demonstrate a statistically significant association between ETS and lung cancer. … EPA changed its methodology to find a statistically significant association.”