The characterization of Lindzen as a contrarian has been reinforced by reports that he claims that lung cancer has only been weakly linked to smoking. When asked about this during an interview as part of an Australian Broadcasting Corporation documentary, Lindzen said that while "the case for second-hand tobacco is not very good ... the World Health Organization also said that” (referencing a 1998 study by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) on environmental tobacco smoke (ETS)), on the other hand "With first-hand smoke it's a more interesting issue ... The case for lung cancer is very good but it also ignores the fact that there are differences in people's susceptibilities which the Japanese studies have pointed to." Again, when asked to clarify his position by a climate skeptic blogger, Lindzen wrote, "there was a reasonable case for the role of cigarette smoking in lung cancer, but that the case was not so strong that one should rule that any questions were out of order ... the much, much weaker case against second hand smoke also being treated as dogma."