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Guest essay by Eric Worrall
“So, you’re awake. But you’re still going to die”. The first words I heard spoken by my surgeon, waking from general anaesthetic, after a horrific operation to try to repair the mess created by my ruptured appendix.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m very grateful to the surgeon, whose extraordinary skill undoubtably saved my life. But that day I believed his warning. I thought I was going to die. After all, he was a highly qualified surgeon, a credible source of information.
I learned something that week about credibility and evidence. People who follow WUWT might be aware of the flimsiness of the evidence behind sensationalist climate warnings. But most people don’t pay much attention to climate issues. Many of them remain susceptible to authoritative sounding scare stories.
Consider the following;
The world faces widespread food shortages due to global warming: Crops will become scarce as droughts ravage Africa and Asia
…
Widespread water shortages caused by rising global temperatures could lead to food shortages and mass migration, an expert has warned.
The head of the World Meteorological Society, Michel Jarraud has warned that of all the threats posed by a warming climate, shrinking water supplies are the most serious.
It is predicted that by 2025, some 2.8 billion people will live in ‘water scarce’ areas – a huge rise from the 1.6 billion who do now.
Parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia will be worst affected, with pockets of Australia, the US and southern Europe also predicted to suffer.
Mr Jarraud told Carbon Brief that although it has been a few years since a spate of major food crises, ‘all the ingredients are there for a food crisis to come back on a very large scale.’
Why isn’t this warning credible? For one thing, climate models have demonstrated no skill whatsoever at predicting climate on a global scale, let alone a regional scale. So making solemn announcements about specific future regional climate events, based on models which cannot demonstrate predictive skill, seems more than a little pointless.
But you have to know that climate models are useless at prediction, to be able to conclude the warning isn’t credible. People don’t have time to research everything they are told. If someone credible tells a person seriously bad news, about an issue of which they have little prior knowledge, many people simply accept what they are told.
I didn’t die – so my surgeon was wrong. Maybe I was just very lucky, though I believe there was another factor working in my favour. Everyone on my father’s side of the family live to an obscenely old age, and rarely get ill. The surgeon told me my appendix had ruptured at least a week before I was admitted to hospital. For most of that week, my immune system fought gangrene and peritonitis to a standstill, doing such a good job, I didn’t even know I was sick.
Even with experience and skill, prediction is a difficult. In my opinion, an authoritative sounding prediction based on unskilled models is downright reprehensible.
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I’m pretty sure your surgeon was right. He may have had a problem with the timing. (And I kinda wonder why he would say that if he knew you were listening.)
Right!
A famous doctor once said “Most patients don’t realize that ten out ten of them will die.”
It’s all about timing.
That’s right. In the course of human life, nobody gets out alive!
I like to tell people who are not listening closely, “Isn’t it a warning to us that everybody who ate green peas during the Civil War died?”
After we are actually born and until we take our first breath, we are superhuman, completely independent of outside energy sources. After that, life is all an extended dependency. Sigh.
I knew a physician who opened up the abdomen of a man who had a lethal case of gas gangrene. Realizing the futility of doing any kind of traditional medical intervention, (and also because this was in Mexico), he ordered his assistant to run to a nearby store and buy a 5-lb. bag of white sugar. They spread 5 pounds of sugar throughout the patient’s abdomen, and the patient fully recovered.
If they send a man to Mars, he will be the first person in the history of the earth to get out of here alive.
@Noaaprogrammer
Thanks for the amazing story.
Microb Pathog. 2012 Jan;52(1):85-91. doi: 10.1016/j.micpath.2011.10.008. Epub 2011 Nov 4.
Sugar inhibits the production of the toxins that trigger clostridial gas gangrene.
Méndez MB1, Goñi A, Ramirez W, Grau RR.
I’m Immortal……….so far
It’s like the guy who fell out of a fifty story building. As he passed the thirtieth floor, someone leaning out the window asked, “How’s it going?”
“So far, so good.”
It’s like the guy who jumped from the top of a fifty story building because he thought he was the last man on earth. As he passed the thirtieth floor, he head a telephone ringing.
Nope!
#1 cause of death is birth,
I had a very similar situation. I had been having abdominal pain for a couple of weeks which I had been trying to ignore. It got better for a while and then took a turn for the worse. When I started changing color my wife who is a nurse became alarmed and insisted that I go to the urgent care. I waited all day at the urgent care while every crying child with the sniffles went ahead of me. They finally took some blood and when the results came back and they took a closer look at my x-rays… the staff went into panic mode and insisted that I go to the hospital immediately in an ambulance. I refused and drove myself home and my wife took me in to the hospital.
They were already assembling a “surgical team” at the hospital when I arrived. Another set of pictures was taken and my wife heard a doctor exclaim, “Whoa!” when he looked at them. He then apologized to her. I asked the head surgeon if they couldn’t just put me on some antibiotics and let me come back to get things patched up when the infection cleared up. He said I would die if we tried that. I didn’t take him seriously because I had been working as a professional firefighter for over 20 years and have heard the same type of warnings from paramedics over and over to get people to do what they want. I was given no alternatives so I went ahead with the surgery.
To make a long story shorter. My appendix had been ruptured for a week and I had developed a pretty bad infection. They opened me up from hip bone to hip bone, pulled a bunch of my innards out, washed them off, irrigated what was left inside, loaded me full of antibiotics, stuffed everything back in, sewed me back up and called it good.
Surprisingly I never felt a lot of pain. My infection cleared up and since my wife is a nurse… they let me go home in just a few days after initially estimating I would be there for over a week. And if anyone really wants to hear a more colorful version of the event I will have my wife write something.
I took away a completely different lesson that does not have a good correlation with the global warming scam. Despite all the warnings of my impending doom from panicky sounding health care professionals I never did take this thing very seriously until a year later. I had a “probationary” firefighter working under me. He told me that his dad who was the same age as me had died recently. When I asked him what happened he told me a story very similar to my own experience only his dad died from the infection. Did I have better doctors, medicine, treatment, a stronger immune system, or was it just dumb luck? It wasn’t until then that I realized that the doctors weren’t kidding. I really could have died.
I had a dangerous job. I jumped off of mountain cliffs for fun into windy conditions with my hang gliders, along with a lot of other dangerous past times, but until the “probationary” told me his tearful story about his dad I never really thought about any of this stuff catching up with me. So now I do try and more carefully consider warnings that I am given; but I am still not a fool.
“Steven Miller
December 25, 2015 at 11:38 am”
The father of a workmate in New Zealand died the very next day from septicemia after cutting his arm on some rusty guttering while working (He was a builder). I was recently very ill from suspected food poisoning and a few months before pneumonia. Can’t be too careful.
You’ll die of stubbornness, but they can put “He was no fool.” on your tombstone.
Basically I’ve come to the conclusion when your time is up, nothing is going to save you, and similarly if it’s not your time, you’ll probably be the only survivor of a plane wreck.
About 5 years before he died, my dad had an abdominal aortic aneurysm, and lost half his blood according to doctors. The operation to repair the aneurysm was successful.
The doctor who operated on him later told my wife, “If it wasn’t for his heart and lungs, he never would have made it through the surgery.”
Dad had smoked unfiltered cigarettes for about 45 years, and wasn’t in the best physical condition.
Go figure!
However, I know someone who was told four separate times, to make her will be cause she wouldn’t survive more than a day or two. Four times, four different illnesses, each time she told the doctor “how do you know, you aren’t God.” So yes we all die, but nobody know when. Everybody know we all die, so I am not sure what your point is.
You were very lucky that your surgeon was not Australian Medical Association President Dr Brian Owler. Owler is a climate change alarmist who believes AGW sceptics like yourself are ‘scumbags’. Some of his followers advocate limited medical attention for sceptics and he may have ‘forgotten’ to sew you back up if he knew who you were.
Lawsuit!
Your surgeon did something very unethical and indeed, you had grounds to sue him is this conversation was witnessed.
No, he was simply giving me his professional opinion of the seriousness of my condition. I’m very lucky, small regional hospital in Australia, and I stumbled on the only surgeon for thousands of miles who knew how to give me a fighting chance. He had spent a decade in Yugoslavia treating gunshot wounds, so he probably had more experience treating severe stomach infections, than any other surgeon in Australia.
Well, there are what might be called mechanical defenses in the peritoneal cavity which serve autonomously to “wall-off” intestinal ruptures and abscesses (notably those of diverticula), and appendiceal infectious inflammation and rupture can present with such defenses well in train, temporarily limiting the spread and effects of enteric integrity failures to a surprising extent, said extent commonly discerned only at the time of surgery.
I have no precise idea of how frequently an appendicitis case will so present, but insofar as I know, it’s not a common phenomenon. Mr. Worrall may have lucked out in this fashion.
When physical findings, lab values, and diagnostic imaging led to a diagnosis either appendicitis infectious diverticulitis, I commonly recommended a “belt-and-suspenders” initiation of antibiotic treatment with parenteral ceftriaxone (Rocephin) and metronidazole (Flagyl) while blood cultures were cooking. The surgeons to whose services I admitted these cases never complained, and outcomes didn’t suffer because I’d pressed for such treatment modalities.
Possibly. I had no symptoms at all for most of the period after my appendix ruptured, and I was doing a lot of very physical work that week, we were moving house – shifting tons of furniture, driving hundreds of miles. 2 days before I was admitted I felt slight stomach upset, like I had eaten a dodgy kebab. I still felt well enough that I went swimming with my little girl, less than 24 hours before I was admitted to hospital.
We are equal in one way. We don’t know the future. Even the best in their respective fields are talking about probability when they make predictions. Even your eventual death is best understood as a probability (very very high correlation to the predicted outcome). The future is not known. You don’t need to understand climate models to notice the alarmists aren’t careful at all to explain their predictions as calculated probabilities. When IPCC says 95% certain – they just make up that number. Do they explain how they arrive at 95%? Do they show their math?
I was much like this. Easter 1995, I was home from university. I had a non-specific abdominal pain, so went to the local surgery. Doctor said it didn’t look like appendicitis, but if I’d not improved in a couple of days, to make an appointment.
Nothing improved, so a few days later, phoned to make an appointment, and was met by the receptionist telling me that I would not be seen under any circumstances.
Shrugged it off, and carried on for another week. Went for a walk one day, and felt an explosive pain in my stomach, but carried on still.
Easter Sunday morning, I couldn’t stand up straight, and my stomach had gone huge. Got to A&E, went downhill rapidly. Reacted badly to general anaesthetic, and had to be put into a coma for 24 hours while I was weaned off it.
Long story short, after an unstable white blood count and unstable temperature, 3 weeks later had an CAT scan (dates it there!) to find an abscess under my diaphragm, containing ~500ml of pus, which was removed via a hole between 2 ribs.
At that point, I realised that a local anaesthetic would remove pain, but not sensation. The feeling of having a large bore *something* jammed between two ribs felt like someone shoving a cube of beef onto a kebab skewer.
They used a large (100ml) syringe to remove vast quantities of gunge from my insides.
Merry christmas all!
@emsnews I’m sure surgeons everywhere would love to know your real name, so they can be sure to avoid ever having you as a patient, lest they may say or do something that gets them sued. Sheesh.
Telling someone he’s gonna die soon and being wrong is a serious mistake from a surgeon. For real. Almost as bad as telling they will be OK when they’ll die.
“Telling someone he’s gonna die soon and being wrong is a serious mistake from a surgeon. ”
So, rather than telling them his real prognosis and doing what he can (though he doesn’t expect it to help) he should either lie about their assessment and rose-color it, or not try to do what he can so that his prognostications come true?
When someone is struggling to stay alive, telling that person that he is going to die is wrong. Take it from someone who has attended to dying people: you give them optimism or gentle words, you don’t tell them they are doomed.
Also, you never know when someone will come back from the edge!
Exactly, tell a REAL prognosis, not a wild guess. If you tell me my prognosis and you’re plain wrong about it I can’t much value the prognosis you gave. Wrong prognosis is also a basis for wrong treatment, so it is not a thing to be taken lightly.
So if you can’t say, say can’t say.
It’s not unethical to give a patient an honest opinion about their prognosis. Unwise, perhaps. However, unless it’s a deliberate lie, then there is no ethical breach. Lying to spare harm during a hopeless fight is also not a serious breech, but it is actually the more ethically dubious option. Giving an honest opinion is the best, and straight is better than couching it in fine language.
Hugs, patients surprise you, and any doctor who can say they have never been wrong is a newbie or a liar.
I think you should be looking for the moral of the story and not who to sue next. Go back and read Eric’s last sentence under the dull light of CAGW rather than a surgeons bedside manners.
Surgeons are notorious for having terrible bedside manners. That’s why most of their patients are unconscious.
@Hivemind – Its the one time someone can get away with stabbing you and cutting off body parts. Anybody else would get prosecuted.
Yeah, doctors are caring and compassionate. Surgeons score high on sociopathy. Truth.
Writes Brian H:
Hrm. Being myself a physician, and having known a boatload of cutters over the past half-century or so, I’d give the “sociopathy” business a pass.
And while I like the “caring and compassionate” P.R. image for us Marcus Welby types, I doubt that you’re familiar with the levels of misanthropy common among the average hospital’s Department of Medicine membership.
Unfortunately, the whole of the media in the West seems obsessed by needing to predict everything for their fearful readers, who need to know everything about everything with utter exactitude.
Well, do they? Or is that simply the media being lazy in their understanding of their fellow human beings? Or are they shaping them to crave that, as it suits the purpose of their moguls?
Where ‘the end of food’ is concerned, I prefer to ask a simple question: ‘how much food, per human alive, has the world produced the past 100 years?’
That question should tell you, in the round, assuming no catastrophic events like enormous volcanoes allied to the sun going totally quiet taking place, what the prospects are most likely to be in the next 25 years. Of course, if population goes up exponentially, then the productivity increases required to maintain necessary per capita production levels become ever harder.
So the question prefer to ask is this: ‘Is there any reason currently why the per capita food production achieved by the world’s humans will not continue to be satisfactory in the next 25 years?’
That question allows you to manage risk effectively, whilst remaining sanguine, optimistic and grounded.
Of course the question must be examined rigorously and no doubt key assumptions may need to be made.
But if the data of the past 100 years is satisfactory, then seeking out the reasons why it won’t continue to be so seems, to me at least, a way to keep our leaders, our experts and our fellow citizens in a happier place……
It isn’t just the raw production numbers that matter; it’s also the ability to transport food to areas which aren’t producing enough. There have always been local and regional disruptions in food production. 100 years ago there wasn’t enough transportation capability to compensate for a large regional shortage; today there is, as long as local authorities allow it to happen.
“…as long as local authorities allow it to happen.” <– BINGO!
You know, as long as I have been aware that predictions of overpopulation and starvation have been publicized, they have always turned out to be false. From where I sit, it appears that having plenty of people on the planet means you have plenty of people to produce and distribute food.
Power Grab To the most part we can thank the gallons of fuel that allow us to produce and move all that food.
It’s all about News Headlines.
Which makes the news channels rather useless at their own hands. Karma at work I suppose.
IIRC, the theory is that more CO2 means more atmospheric water vapor, where water vapor is supposed to have a multiplier effect since it is a far more potent greenhouse gas. There was supposed to be a positive feedback loop between water vapor and CO2, which would spiral out of control and wipe us all out. However more water vapor means more wet stuff, not more dry and droughts. Maybe I don’t fully understand the CAGW hypothesis, but whenever I hear “drought” I automatically dismiss it as a consequence of CO2-induced warming based on their own theory. Am I wrong about how the theory is supposed to work? I quit believing it a dozen years ago anyway but I’m still curious how they come up with their claims, it just seems like they’re throwing everything at the wall now.
The meme about more rain and more droughts both happening arises from the Hadley circulation. This circulation at the equator gives both the rain belt (think Amazon jungle) and as the air descends the dry zones of the tropics. According to the models, this cycle should intensify with global warming giving both more rain (where it rains) and more drought (where it is dry). This does NOT apply where most of the people in the world live (like North America, China, Eurasia). There is also the little problem that the models don’t do the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone correctly, so their forecasts of how it should change…well.
Dr Loehle says: the models don’t do the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone correctly
Thanks for this, something I have not seen discussed online. Could you advise how readers might explore this further.
Also, the troposphere mid zone is much drier than AGW sez. The H2O feedback is a fraction of that assumed.
Maybe this article should be called “death and (carbon) taxes”
“Even with experience and skill, prediction is a difficult.”
Prediction is especially difficult if it is a prediction about the future!
markstoval,
I predict Coolidge will win.
See how easy that was? ;o)
Since several years back, I always end up with a smile on my face when I hear/read about meteorologists trying to predict the future further ahead than five days … 10 years …?
Wednesday ALL four local TV stations predicted a light snowfall, 1/2 to 1 inch max, for Thursday. One station even cited the results of three different weather models indicating the most we would get was 1 inch. By noon on Thursday we had 8 inches on the ground it was still snowing at 1 inch per hour and there were NO snow plows on any roads other than the major highways and interstate highways. News at noon indicated that there were over 100 traffic accidents. As I had put off buying needed medicine I had to drive the 1/2 mile on an unplowed road to the drugstore and counted nine cars off of the road and in ditches.
Meanwhile, last evening I sat outside in my back yard under the full moon with several friends. All of us were in shorts and t shirts enjoying a peaceful time around my fire pit. BTW, the fire was for aesthetics only as it was around 75F. Couldn’t ask for a better evening or weather.
Obviously, they didn’t polish their crystal balls well/hard enough …
A few inches of snow and below freezing wouldn’t hurt here in the middle between Stockholm and Oslo …
Look at the actual forecast where the TV weathercasters depend on somebody writing the script from the forecast which gives percentage chances over a particular area. Many of them have never read the forecast or learned how to interpret it. i.e. 50% chance of rain up to 1 in. That can mean anything from scattered sprinkles over the whole region to drenching thunderstorms delivering a few inches over limited areas.`The total rain averaged over the area is quite likely to be an inch. The area getting rain in 24 hours is quite likely to be 50%. It is a pretty vague forecast which basically means it’s not going to be dry and it’s not going to flood. Check out the window before you leave.
Around central PA the forecasters have finally caught on and highly emphasize that the local rain or snow depends on EXACTY where the front travels and what the temps are on either side of it. They’ve gotten burned so many times that if it’s anything but sunshine coming they put the weather map on screen and show a projected track for it, like a hurricane forecast!
How much more water vapor can the atmosphere hold once the Relative Humidity has reached 100% as it did here in rural Virginia yesterday with a temperature of 75F?
I think Eric’s surgeon was simply being wryly humorous. His meaning “I saved you this time but you’re going to kick off eventually from something or other anyway”. Can a patient sue a skilled surgeon merely because the patient doesn’t get the small joke?
Chris, the percent (%) of Relative Humidity is a function of the air temperature. So, if the temperature in rural Virginia increases to 85F today and the Relative Humidity remains at 100% then there will be more water vapor in the air than there was yesterday.
Some jokes are simply less funny than others. That one reminds me of this exchange just before hand surgery::
PATIENT: Will I be able to play the violin?
SURGEON: Oh, you’re a violinist?
PATIENT: No, but I thought it would be nice to play the violin.
Yet another candidate for “Worst Surgery Joke:” During administration of ether to a sedate, elderly minister (true story):
REV. PATIENT: Hey, Doc, do you know how to make holy water?
SURGEON: No, how?
REV. PATIENT: Put it on the stove and boil the Hell out of it.
I still think Eric’s doctor wins the prize.
At a 100% humidity you are in a fog and the moister in the air begins to condense out, and cover just about everything.
“So making solemn announcements about specific future regional climate events, based on models which cannot demonstrate predictive skill, seems more than a little pointless.”
The point of such solemn announcements is to frighten the populace, so they are hardly pointless. They are, at the very least, unfair; and, they are probably unethical.
If the person making the claim/prediction is aware they’re simply being alarmist and there’s no tangible evidence to support their claim, it’s unethical, and perhaps criminal; no different than shouting “Fire!” in a crowded auditorium, knowingly selling a horse with bad teeth, or snake oil to a sick person.
The problem is these people have been allowed to claim ignorance rather than malice as an excuse. It’s remarkable that society will excuse a con-man after the fact when he claims “ignorance” and lack of skill, since they themselves can’t predict the weather either. They willingly believe the incredible, then excuse the perpetrator afterwards because his claims were incredible to begin with. P.T. Barnum had it right, it seems as if people not only tolerate being lied to, they enjoy it.
It’s OK to be fooled if the purpose is entertainment. Personally it isn’t a type of entertainment I enjoy but I’m clearly in a minority. On the other hand I would not take being lied to by a professional, such as a medical doctor, on a subject that had grave impact on my life or livelihood. I’m almost certain that was the reason the FDA was created to regulate patent medicines, and why medical practitioners were forced to self-regulate; there are inappropriate places to intentionally mislead the public for personal gain.
In the late 20th and now 21st century we’re faced with a new type of snake oil and haven’t yet figured out how to control the retailers. In a sane world, the agency responsible for that regulation might be something like the EPA, unfortunately they’re the people who need regulating.
What I don’t accept is this: the average global temperature is about 14 degrees C, or 287 degrees K.
The climate scientists claim these dire consequences will occur when the global temperature increases by 2 Celsius degrees (or the absolute temperature rises to 289 degrees K. That represents a 0.7% increase in the atmospheric energy level.
Is the climate so sensitive that all H***L breaks loose with a 0.7% change in its energy level? If so, how on earth did our species manage to evolve and survive in such a delicate and sensitive environment? It must have taken hundreds of millions if not billions of years for us to evolve from single cell entities to a species that can contemplate going to Mars. It’s just not credible, and I don’t buy it on the basis of common sense.
Trouble is sense isn’t common these days & you cant model 97% of it.
You shouldn’t accept that there is an “average global temperature”, period.
I think it’s fair to represent an “average” global temperature. We should be able to talk about the average global temperature of Mars or Pluto. But for the metric to be useful it has to have error bars.
I’d be willing to bet serious amounts of money that the standard error of estimate for Earth’s average global temperature exceeds 1K. No one talks about that.
The usual condescending Bleeding Heart pleas for our poor brethren in Africa and Asia, but this time backed by the false spectre of Climate Change creating food shortages but no mention of uncontrolled escalating populations and resultant increasing food demand! Nothing like a bit of hidden guilt to sustain your self-righteousness!
These people should realise that:
1. Africa and Asia have always had the capabilities and resources needed for helping themselves, particularly sufficient labour, and without the West’s funding inputs; China alone has demonstrated that! Parts of Africa, for example Ethiopia with the exception of 5 years of Mussolini, have been independent for 100’s of years. Any problems they have are largely due to their own actions and inactions.
2. More CO2 means bigger crop yields and, as demonstrated by Malthus’s wrong predictions, increasing populations don’t impose future food shortages; given application of higher productivity for the increasing labour and some very basic technology on water retention and storage/distribution – much of which was available and practiced within the Middle East, Asia and Africa many centuries ago!
“Africa and Asia have always had the capabilities and resources needed for helping themselves”
Forty years working in Asia and Africa confirm that they have all the resources except what is needed to control how the governing elites operate and how to manage changes in government without bloodshed.
It is obviously not pointless or this extremely well qualified and intelligent individual, head of the World Meteorological Office would not have made the statement. He must know that the climate models are useless merely projecting their designer’s view of what will happen to far into the future for even an accurately based model to be correct. So the interesting question raised by his statement is ‘Why is he making it while knowing it to be almost certainly untrue?’
“So the interesting question raised by his statement is ‘Why is he making it while knowing it to be almost certainly untrue?’”
Um, maybe because like the rest of us he’s capable of lying from time to time? Surely, you’ve lived long enough to know that people do that.
Well of course – but the question that you have dodged is, why lie? After all the alternative is good news: there will be no catastrophic climate change and food is in good supply. He knows that the projections are incorrect but continues to weeping and waving shrouds. So why do it?
Ian W on December 25, 2015 at 7:28 am
“…why lie?”
Because he thinks human beings are inherently bad and gluttonous. Because doing so will offer salvation from “mankind’s greed and indifference” (quote from Sir John Houghton; former head of the IPCC). Because he thinks he has to scare us to get us to do what he thinks we should do. Because, even though he has no idea whatsoever of the volumes and percentages involved (probably no one does), he still has a ‘gut feeling’ (and that’s all it is) that the Earth is being depleted and therefore our lifestyles our unsustainable. Because he’s a joyless masochist.
I think in their mind it will create action to help these people. Proclaim catastrophe in the future and (presumably) it will mobilize a rescue reaction.
Something along the lines of: “Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”
Quote by Timoth Wirth, U.S./UN functionary, former elected Democrat Senator:
Because there are political and social rewards for what he is doing. There are also punishments for not saying things are going to get hotter and drier and we are in dire danger because of this. A weatherman in France was fired for going against the global warming crowd. If one wants to stay employed by the media, one says what one is told. Some people will not lie, some will. Those who do not generally have difficulty finding work in media, universities and government. It’s about reward and punishment, not about the truth.
Worse than that. He was right after all, in the long run, just missed the time scale completely.
Ian W December 25, 2015 at 5:32 am
I take it that’s a rhetorical question, Comrade Ian?
Not totally tovarish. More something to make people think. We know that the projections are incorrect, they have been falsified multiple times. He knows the same, yet continues to incorrectly trumpet catastrophe, when it appears the ‘worst’ case is an optimum with plentiful food and benign weather with less extremes – which we are seeing now. So what / who could persuade him to make the catastrophic pronouncements as even the gullibles will cotton on soon that the shroud waving is unjustified.
With the current position of the Jet Stream over North America ….. me thinks NASA and NOAA is gonna have a lot of fun trying to explain the “CO2 connection” to their claim of ….. “December 2015 was the very hottest HOT month ever”.
I wonder who will be the 1st to claim that atmospheric CO2 is directly responsible for the “meandering” of the Jet Stream?
It’s already happened: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/big-waves-in-jet-stream-mean-extreme-weather/
“The study is particularly relevant in the context of a controversial hypothesis championed by Francis that the jet stream will get more wavy in the future with climate change (ClimateWire, April 3).”
I suggest researching this further using the following key words: Rossby waves; polar vortex; H. H. Lamb.
In particular, H. H. Lamb showed how atmospheric waves were implicated in the catastrophe of the Little Ice Age, a period of hardship that was not caused by human activities, but nevertheless found many people accused of conspiring with the Devil to alter the weather.
Turnabout, Scientific American makes use of Rossby waves to support global-warming alarmism.
Who will dare be accused of conspiring with the modern witches and warlocks, identified as Deniers and Skeptics?
@ur momisugly Reality check
The meandering of the Jet Stream has been a primary “tool” for weather forecasters (meteorologists) for the past several decades. In other words, the more correct their predictions of said JS “meandering” is for the next 5 to 10 days, whatever, …. then the more correct their weather predictions will be.
This is the current position of the JS in the Northern Hemisphere, to wit:
http://squall.sfsu.edu/gif/jetstream_norhem_00.gif
And if you click the following “link” you can create an “animation” of what the Meteorologists are PREDICTING for the “meandering” of the JS over the next 6 day, to wit:
http://squall.sfsu.edu/scripts/nhemjetstream_model.html
And even though the Meteorologists don’t actually know the exact cause of the “seasonal” north/south movement of the JS …. or the exact cause of its “loopey” meandering, ….. they do know two (2) important facts about the JS: ……. 1) when the JS moves South it “sucks” the cool/cold Arctic air behind it; 2) when the JS moves North it “sucks” the warm/hot Tropical air behind it;. And iffen you look at the above JS graphic those “2 facts” are quite obvious and explains “why” they are currently experiencing “blizzard” conditions in New Mexico and Colorado ….. and the East Coast is enjoying June temperatures at Christmas time.
Sadly, Scientific American is no longer a source of scientific information, they’ve become a political mouthpiece after joining the Nature Publishing group back in 2009. I don’t know who owns the NPG, but if Sci. Am. is any example, the editorial bias is strongly oriented towards supporting the AGW hypothesis now.
Sadly the food shortage claim is basically correct. As the world cools so the ‘food growing window’ gets smaller. The world was just three weeks short this year and it had an effect, so blame it on droughts and global warming… a win win.
Glad you recovered.
“I didn’t die – so my surgeon was wrong. Maybe I was just very lucky, …”
It probably wasn’t luck. Doctors are not as good at predicting those things as people think. I had a doctor tell me, in no uncertain terms, from the results of a test performed in September 2003, that nobody lives beyond 5 years. I asked if there was anything they could do and that doctor told me no.
Well, there was something they could do: major organ transplant. The general guidelines at the time recommended against one until life expectancy was 2 years or less. What a crock! Nobody can figure that out, and the surgeon essentially told me that. Honest guy; he told me, “I could shorten your life.” Ultimately I declined pursuing the procedure.
Then in 2011 a genius doctor told me I had 6 months to a year left. I decided against sending in my copay.
Glad you’re with us and happy holidays and happy new year!
Thanks Tom – Merry Christmas 🙂
You’re most welcome. Your insight is a year round gift to us all.
Reminds me of the old Henney Youngman line:
“A doctor gives his patient 6 months to live, he couldn’t pay the bill so he gives him another 6 months.”
Glad you are still with us.
When I was 3 months old in the days before antibiotics I was diagnosed with cerebral meningitis. The physician said that I would be either a cripple or mentally deficient
But I have always been physically agile and did obtain high GPAs for MA and M.S. degrees at US universities.
However, the physician was not entirely wrong: I do have difficulty with certain mental gymnastics, such as those required to believe in catastrophic man-made global warming.
Eric, it was eleven years ago New Year’s Eve, while still reeling from the Indian Ocean Tsunami, That my appendix announced its intent to self destruct. I probably should have Medivac’d from the drilling site to the hospital, in Northeastern British Columbia. I arrived at Beaverlodge hospital after 180 Km in a big 4×4, feeling kind of, well, gray. The desk nurse didn’t look up when saying “fill this out”. I said “I’m not feeling like writing”….she looked up and saw my complexion….And went into STAT mode. After the X-Ray, even I could see the banana in my abdomen….which exploded during the flying ambulance ride to Grande Prairie. I got wheeled right through the waiting room to surgery prep…in complete agony. The last Thing I remember was the anesthetist, A calm Sikh gentleman with a lovely purple turban. I looked at him and said “Nice Hat”…..
….and woke up an hour later with a phalanx of concerned medical types crowded around shaking me to make me breathe. “We almost lost you” was the first thing I heard. I wondered if I had pissed off the Sikh fellow, in my giddy truth-serum hangover.
Merry Christmas to all, I’m not done pissing off the world yet, I guess.
Merry Christmas Mike 🙂
Hi Mike, “nice hat”, that’s pretty funny. Sometimes it pays to be quiet though. Last year I was in for a colonoscopy and as per policy the nurse asked me what I am having done that day as I lay on the table just prior to the start of the procedure. My first inclination was to say “tonsillectomy” but better judgement keep my usually smart ass mouth quiet for once. Had I done that, they would have cancelled the procedure, rescheduled and I would have had to do the prep all over again at a later date.
A few yrs ago I was having a brain op, in pre-op the nurse asked me what I am having done, ‘Pedicure’ says I, & she fills in the form. 2 days later I wake up & doctor comes round, tells me the operation went well but there had been a complication, he’d broken my toenail, so they’d broken open my skull to harvest materiel for a bone graft …the toe was now fine, but he didn’t know about the head, but as I was talking, unfortunately it looked like I would survive to annoy more of his staff !!
When I went back 9 mths later for discharge, at the end he gave me a piece of paper saying “the feelings mutual” , whats this mean I asked ?? “I take it you never want to see me again” he said
The Walton Hospital Liverpool, Brill place, staff & care.
Tom – They don’t cancel, just threaten to do the procedure without anesthestic. I shut up at that point, bad place to try to be funny. Nerves was my excuse as I was going under.
Ah Mike, that would have been Dr. Singh.
(aren’t they all)
Ps smartalecness is an affliction shared by many of us
http://junkscience.com/2015/12/eu-farmers-may-harvest-another-enormous-wheat-crop-in-2016/
http://agri.eu/eu-farmers-may-harvest-another-enormous-wheat-crop-in-2016-news6599.html
European farmers may harvest another enormous wheat crop for the third year in a row in 2016. Area is expected to remain strong. In the past month, French consultancy Strategie Grains and European farming federation Copa-Cogeca estimated 2016 EU wheat area to drop by less than 1 percent from 2015.
But the slight loss in area should be outweighed by gains in trend yield alone. Taking these area estimates together with trend yield, the EU would expect to harvest 152 mln. tonnes of wheat in 2016.
Oh well wrong again!
H/T Bishop Hill
The strange thing is that they may turn out to be right but for the wrong reasons. If they block the use of GM seed, Irrigation by electrically pumping water and the climate turns cold there could well be the disaster they are praying for. Brought about by their own corrupt thinking.
Global harvests, and particularly African ones don’t seem to have done too badly so far!
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/12/21/record-cereal-harvests-in-2015/
It always amazes me that the good side of the equation is ignored. For example, a two degree rise in temperatures in Canada would be a good thing, bringing moreand under agriculture and more crops Northwards. Same applies to Siberia, so any agriculture lost in the Sahara will be more than compensated for.
Isn’t global warming supposed to increase rainfall?
But not when it doesn’t.
Hence the miracle of “climate change”. Whatever happens, it’s bad, the fault of humans and worse than expected, while of course in line with predictions all along.
My Grandfather had a hernia operation in his 60s. They opened him up and found that his appendix was exploded all over his insides. It had happened 50 years earlier during a scarlet fever epidemic. The doctors thought he had scarlet fever when he was a boy. He survived a ruptured appendix with no medical intervention.
No food or water? That’s nothing. The Observer (Guardian) in 2004 told me of a Pentagon (Is nobody immune from this madness?) report in which by 2020 there could be
Flooding of European cities due to sea level rise
Nuclear conflict
Mega droughts
Famine
Global widespread rioting
‘Siberian’ Britain
Water shortages
Energy shortages
War
Crop failure
Famine
Disease
Mass migration
Global chaos
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2004/feb/22/usnews.theobserver
Guardian, I salute you. That thing is a thing of alarmist beauty.
There are still 4 years for them to get it right!!
50 years ago, following the first successful heart transplant by Dr. Christian Barnard in South Africa, there was a cartoon going the rounds of the project I was working on, overseas. There was no caption to the cartoon, only a sketch view into a typical double operating table transplant operating theatre. The organ recipient was sitting up on one operating table, relaxed and with a big grin on his face. On the second operating table, heavily strapped down, struggling to get free and with a look of sheer terror on his face was the donor: a donkey!
Many years back, while chatting with a couple of my engineering students, we were discussing doctors and I volunteered that I did not suppose the average doctor was any smarter than the average engineer.
“I don’t think so either,” said one of them (Scott), “they just have stronger stomachs!”
Quite so. Curiously, Scott’s family name was Worrell or perhaps Worrall! Spelling aside, I remember him well. We always remember the very best and the very worst. Scott was excellent and then some.