I used to smoke heavily until about 15 years ago, and then somehow, thankfully, managed to give up, almost cold turkey. Incredibly difficult (memo to tobacco company executives: I know this will come as a shock but that nicotine that is in cigarettes? Addictive. Highly addictive). I had been through years of reading health warnings, suffering from coughs and frequent colds, short of breath and so on. Cancer? No, not me, couldn't happen, smoked a pipe, not cigarettes. The rest of it, well, yes, only to be expected, never going to run a marathon, but my right to smoke was non-negotiable. So I smoked on. Always an excuse for not giving up, always a future date when I might, no would, certainly, any time I wanted to, just didn't want to, not yet.
And cancer? No, not happening. I would give up long before that could develop. And no certainty that it would, anyway. Lots of people I knew smoked pipes. Didn't have cancer. No definite cause and effect there then. And if it happened? Well, then the doctors would deal with it, surgery and other treatments, marvelous cures. 'Cancer a word not a sentence'. All that.
And then there was someone I knew that had died of undoubted pipe smoke related cancer. And then another. And then Yul Brynner, doing that terrible after death advertisement, and Steve McQueen. Cigarettes though. And then that chap from Monty Python. Pipe smoker. And then I had early cancer cells in my mouth. Kept smoking. Then another friend died. And I stopped.
But most people don't. There are many people with throat cancer, in denial, pretending the symptoms are something else and eventually putting a cigarette in the hole in the windpipe left when everything else is removed in order to keep smoking. You can't be more in denial than that. Total denial.
Mmm, sounds like the denial of the SUV drivers, or the governments addicted to coal fired power stations, or the airlines pushing cheap flights, that there is any connection between what they are doing and global warming.
Don't know if Bjorn Lomberg is a smoker. See he is appearing on Fox to again pretend there is no such thing as global warming. No link to human activity. If he was a smoker though, I can see him lined up in the hospital ward continuing to smoke cigarettes through a hole in the throat, using a computer to speak and say - 'no damage to health from cigarettes'. And continuing to blow smoke at his family and other people, the computer squawking 'no danger from passive smoking'.
But the analogy breaks down of course. Bjorn and all the others living in denial of global warming, many of them posters (paid or unpaid) on HuffPo, are not damaging themselves but the 6 billion other people in the world. That's a lot of passive smoke.
Be nice to see Bjorn reform, see the light, and do a Yul Brynner for carbon dioxide production - 'Now that I'm gone, I tell you: Don't make CO2, whatever you do, just don't make CO2.'
Think he will?