Superstorm Sandy Caused By Smokers, Say Experts

Tobacco control researchers in England say multinational tobacco corporations and millions of their smoking customers are to blame for the recent superstorm ravaging the U.S. coastline.  Citing the Butterfly Effect in chaos theory (the sensitive dependence on initial conditions, where a small change at one place in a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences to a later state) and by cross-referencing data gleaned from a live feed of Australian Simon Chapman's excessive wind-farm rants on Twitter, the researchers' study concluded that the excessive exhalation of hazardous tobacco smoke by depraved nicotine addicts are causing disturbances in the world's weather systems.

Dr Annette Shillmore, of the Lifestyle Control Research Group, a taxpayer-funded NGO based in Bath, England, said there is little doubt in her mind that Big Tobacco is to blame.  "The initial idea came to me when I was walking past a group of shivering, disgusting smokers standing outside the local pub.

"I watched these dirty people blow their carcinogenic filth up into the air with such great force, far greater than the exhalations of your typical non-smoker it should be said, and I instinctively realised right then that smokers were to blame for bad weather all over the world. I mean, if one tiny butterfly can affect global weather patterns, it's blatantly obvious that smokers are responsible for cyclones in the Atlantic."

Dr Shillmore then lobbied for and received a Department of Health taxpayer-funded grant for £600,000 to commission and analyse a web-based, one-question survey targeted at 23 students at an east London hairdressing academy. The survey question was "Are smokers to blame for everything?"

82.3% of those surveyed answered "Yes."

"Those who answered "no" were probably smokers and cannot be trusted," Dr Shillmore explained.  "The survey data conclusively prove that Big Tobacco's consumers are at fault for superstorms since at least 1912.

"Besides," she added, "I found a damning tobacco company document from 1944 about ships from Cuba carrying cigarettes and cigars to American troops in Europe, and those ships had sailed through the Bermuda Triangle region. Why would they do that if tobacco companies weren't interested in weather phenomena?  I believe Big Tobacco has a super-secret base of operations there, and they have to be responsible for all those mysterious disappearances in the Triangle, too."

A spokesperson for the tobacco lobby said there was no evidence that smoking caused superstorm Sandy, but added that even if smoking outside could cause extreme weather, it could easily be prevented by repealing the public smoking ban and letting people smoke indoors again.

A recent satellite image taken of the Bermuda Triangle region
Source: Dr Shillmore - Lifestyle Control Research Group