First here is Dr. Keith Briffa’s response in entirety direct from his CRU web page:
My attention has been drawn to a comment by Steve McIntyre on the Climate Audit website relating to the pattern of radial tree growth displayed in the ring-width chronology “Yamal” that I first published in Briffa (2000). The substantive implication of McIntyre’s comment (made explicitly in subsequent postings by others) is that the recent data that make up this chronology (i.e. the ring-width measurements from living trees) were purposely selected by me from among a larger available data set, specifically because they exhibited recent growth increases.
This is not the case. The Yamal tree-ring chronology (see also Briffa and Osborn 2002, Briffa et al. 2008) was based on the application of a tree-ring processing method applied to the same set of composite sub-fossil and living-tree ring-width measurements provided to me by Rashit Hantemirov and Stepan Shiyatov which forms the basis of a chronology they published (Hantemirov and Shiyatov 2002). In their work they traditionally applied a data processing method (corridor standardisation) that does not preserve evidence of long timescale growth changes. My application of the Regional Curve Standardisation method to these same data was intended to better represent the multi-decadal to centennial growth variations necessary to infer the longer-term variability in average summer temperatures in the Yamal region: to provide a direct comparison with the chronology produced by Hantemirov and Shiyatov.
These authors state that their data (derived mainly from measurements of relic wood dating back over more than 2,000 years) included 17 ring-width series derived from living trees that were between 200-400 years old. These recent data included measurements from at least 3 different locations in the Yamal region. In his piece, McIntyre replaces a number (12) of these original measurement series with more data (34 series) from a single location (not one of the above) within the Yamal region, at which the trees apparently do not show the same overall growth increase registered in our data.
The basis for McIntyre’s selection of which of our (i.e. Hantemirov and Shiyatov’s) data to exclude and which to use in replacement is not clear but his version of the chronology shows lower relative growth in recent decades than is displayed in my original chronology. He offers no justification for excluding the original data; and in one version of the chronology where he retains them, he appears to give them inappropriate low weights. I note that McIntyre qualifies the presentation of his version(s) of the chronology by reference to a number of valid points that require further investigation. Subsequent postings appear to pay no heed to these caveats. Whether the McIntyre version is any more robust a representation of regional tree growth in Yamal than my original, remains to be established.
My colleagues and I are working to develop methods that are capable of expressing robust evidence of climate changes using tree-ring data. We do not select tree-core samples based on comparison with climate data. Chronologies are constructed independently and are subsequently compared with climate data to measure the association and quantify the reliability of using the tree-ring data as a proxy for temperature variations.
We have not yet had a chance to explore the details of McIntyre’s analysis or its implication for temperature reconstruction at Yamal but we have done considerably more analyses exploring chronology production and temperature calibration that have relevance to this issue but they are not yet published. I do not believe that McIntyre’s preliminary post provides sufficient evidence to doubt the reality of unusually high summer temperatures in the last decades of the 20th century.
We will expand on this initial comment on the McIntyre posting when we have had a chance to review the details of his work.
K.R. Briffa
30 Sept 2009
- Briffa, K. R. 2000. Annual climate variability in the Holocene: interpreting the message of ancient trees. Quaternary Science Reviews 19:87-105.
- Briffa, K. R., and T. J. Osborn. 2002. Paleoclimate – Blowing hot and cold. Science 295:2227-2228.
- Briffa, K. R., V. V. Shishov, T. M. Melvin, E. A. Vaganov, H. Grudd, R. M. Hantemirov, M. Eronen, and M. M. Naurzbaev. 2008. Trends in recent temperature and radial tree growth spanning 2000 years across northwest Eurasia. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B-Biological Sciences 363:2271-2284.
- Hantemirov, R. M., and S. G. Shiyatov. 2002. A continuous multimillennial ring-width chronology in Yamal, northwestern Siberia. Holocene 12:717-726.
Now a few points of my own:
1. Plotting the entire Hantemirov and Shiyatov data set, as I’ve done here, shows it to be almost flat not only in the late 20th century, but through much of its period.
How do you explain why your small set of 10 trees shows a late 20th century spike while the majority of Hantemirov and Shiyatov data does not? You write in your rebuttal:
“He offers no justification for excluding the original data; and in one version of the chronology where he retains them, he appears to give them inappropriate low weights.”
Justify your own method of selecting 10 trees out of a much larger data set. You’ve failed to do that. That’s the million dollar question.
Briffa Writes: “My application of the Regional Curve Standardisation method to these same data was intended to better represent the multi-decadal to centennial growth variations necessary to infer the longer-term variability in average summer temperatures in the Yamal region: to provide a direct comparison with the chronology produced by Hantemirov and Shiyatov.”
OK Fair enough, but why not do it for the entire data set, why only a small subset?
2. It appears that your results are heavily influenced by a single tree, as Steve McIntyre has just demonstrated here.
As McIntyre points out: “YAD061 reaches 8 sigma and is the most influential tree in the world.”
Seems like an outlier to me when you have one tree that can skew the entire climate record. Explain yourself on why you failed to catch this.
3. Why the hell did you wait 10 years to release the data? You did yourself no favors by deferring reasonable requests to archive data to enable replication. It was only when you became backed into a corner by The Royal Society that you made the data available. Your delays and roadblocks (such as providing an antique data format of the punched card era), plus refusing to provide metadata says more about your integrity than the data itself. Your actions make it appear that you did not want to release the data at all. Your actions are not consistent with the actions of the vast majority of scientists worldwide when asked for data for replication purposes. Making data available on paper publication for replication is the basis of proper science, which is why The Royal Society called you to task.
Read about it here
Yet while it takes years to produce your data despite repeated requests, you can mount a response to Steve McIntyre’s findings on that data in a couple of days, through illness even.
Do I believe Dr. Keith Briffa? No.
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Even though the mainstream media is reluctant to touch this story I see it cropping up in climate-related blogs on mainstream media outlets. At least this is heartening. Perhaps if science is being discussed once again, there is a chance to avert the political lunacy. Yes, I am a hopeless optimist.
A couple of points,
1. Re Nasif’s post, can anybody explain how Dendrochronolgists correct for this presumably parabolic characteristic , i.e. that tree-ring widths can indicate both very high and very low insolation, and hence temperature, at the same time?
2. Professor Briffa, and his colleagues, and his supervisors/managers, were well aware of the extraordinary influence of his papers interpreting that data, and therefore the consequences of not releasing the original data. We can also say that, as soon as a market developed in carbon credits, they were all in a position to know that the decision to delay the release had an enormous financial value. So perhaps the regulators of the carbon-trading market ought to take a look, to satisfy themselves that there were no market abuses.
Please help 🙂
We read about the Briffa twist of data, which is relevant and alarming.
But to understand the impact: Can anyone give an oveview of where Briffas Yamal data was used, and to what degree it has affected the hockey stick and the later hockey stick?
It would be nice to know how much this alone changes the hokeysticks.
Hope you can help.
K.R. Frank Lansner
Regarding the “nobel prize” argument, here is what I said on my blog:
2.3 But if a researcher published convincing proof that CAGW is false, he would win the Nobel Prize.
Honestly, I doubt it. Julian Simon made a pretty convincing case against Paul Ehrlich’s “population bomb” scare. It doesn’t seem that Julian Simon has gotten the accolades he deserves. Anyway, it’s always possible to explain away evidence and arguments against CAGW. So if a researcher publishes results which contradict the CAGW Hypothesis, it’s not necessarily the case that he will be immediately acknowledged as some kind of hero. More likely he will be castigated.
History shows that’s what frequently happens to people who go against the dominant view, whether they are right or wrong.
Scott Mandia. The full paper of the link inthe borehole data of Huang @ur momisugly pollock
http://www.geo.lsa.umich.edu/~shaopeng/2008GL034187.pdf
There are two figures. The one you extracted was figure 2. They are at variance with each other, as figure one doesn’t show the present period as considerable as the holocene. Figure 2 then claims to be based on figure 1 but stretched out over the last 2000 years.
It also claims that both figures are based on data merged with the 20th century instrumental temperature database.
It seems this last point displays a similar principle to the disputed Briffa methodology: superadding inferred temperature proxies to the temperature database.
this paper sems to be a revision of the earlier paper on the sam esubject found here:
http://www.geo.lsa.umich.edu/~shaopeng/97GL01846.pdf
which didn’t merge the data with the 20th century instrumental record.
Heat flow measurements using proxies, like tree rings, don’t comply with the instrumental record: Merging them therefore looks erroneous. In the revised paper, there are quite a few references to the IPCC whereas in the original paper which infers a warmer medieval warm period warmer than today, there are not.
addendum to P Wilson (02:10:23
In their original article they emphatically state: borehole heat flow data : A warming period followed yielding temperatures that averaged 0.1-0.5 higher than today in the period 500-1000 years ago.
Importantly, this is data unmerged with the instrumental temperature record
Gene Nemetz (23:05:54) :
James F. Evans (19:14:33) :
Liar, liar, pants on fire.
McIntyre has distanced himself from all claims of briffa wrongdoing to the extent of even writing to the Telegraph for them to correct their article – See CA
For what it’s worth, I found the following links informative …
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/10/01/ross-mckitrick-defects-in-key-climate-data-are-uncovered.aspx
http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/GW_Part1_PreHistoricalRecord.htm
http://www.waclimate.net/burger.pdf
http://www.waclimate.net/briffa.pdf
In the latter, which is Briffa’s “Annual climate variability in the Holocene: interpreting the message of ancient trees” (2000), he makes some interesting comments on p15:
“The recent high growth rate of trees in northern and western North America and Siberia in particular, provide major pieces of evidence being used to assemble a case for anomalous global warming, interpreted by many as evidence of anthropogenic activity (e.g. Overpeck et al., 1997; Jones et al., 1998; Mann et al., 1998, 1999a). While this may prove to be a valid interpretation of the data, some caution is warranted at this time …
… The emperically derived regression equations upon which our reconstructions are based may be compromised if the balance between photosynthesis and respiration is changed by differential heating in the light and dark. Changes in the start, end, or length of growing seasons; changes in the efficiency with which water or limiting nutrients are used, as well as changes in CO2, UV radiation and a host of other environmental factors may all exert their influence on tree growth. To varying extents, such factors have always affected trees, but their recent influences, and especially the extent of their combined influence, requires serious investigation, beyond that undertaken to date.”
“Your sensitivity analysis replaces longer- with much shorter-lived tree cores and hence obscures the longer-term signal.”
The only “signal” is in the short term….
@ur momisugly janama (18:43:25) :
Hadcrut 1980 – 2009 = 0.5C
GISS 1980 – 2009 = 0.5C
UAH 1980 – 2009 = 0.4C
RSS 1980 – 2009 = 0.5C
This is a warming of approx 0.17/decade in the past 30 years
Take a look at this IPCC 2007 image:
http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/global_warming/images/global_mean_temperature.gif
Do you see that the RATES of warming are on the rise? The rate for the past 100 years is 0.07/decade.
The rate of warming has more than DOUBLED.
@ur momisugly Tom Jones (20:15:48) :
“What’s the use of having developed a science well enough to make predictions if, in the end, all we’re willing to do is stand around and wait for them to come true?”
— Nobel Laureate Sherwood Rowland (referring then to ozone depletion)
It has become clear to me and most others that waiting may lead to a solution that is more costly and more damaging. Regarding consensus, here is an analogy:
Suppose you are feeling very sick. You visit ten doctors and here are the replies:
[snip – Scott what kind of insensitive dolt are you? Briffa’s seriously sick and you use this sort of analogy? Don’t do this again – Anthony]
@ur momisugly John Nicklin (20:32:06) :
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/borehole/borehole.html
Pick any hole you like.
@ur momisugly anna v (22:43:35) :
The hockey stick shape comes only with the dendro misuse of data.
Because you are a scientist, all I can really say to this statement is: WOW!
coming out of the little ice age
And how is this a forcing mechanism? Wow, again.
Dr. Biffa writes: “My colleagues and I are working to develop methods that are capable of expressing robust evidence of climate changes using tree-ring data.”
Does he mean all climate changes or only those that support the hypothesis that the climate is warming due to man-made CO2? Will he and his colleagues publish robust evidence of cliamte changes that do not support the theory?
Smokey (18:57:27), elegantly put — thanks.
MattN (03:05:39) :
“The only “signal” is in the short term….”
No it isn’t. Steve McIntyre has plotted the indices for the recent Yamal cores at:
http://www.climateaudit.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/yamal_recent_trees.gif
There are trends on the data lasting more than a century. The combined RCS chronology also shows this clearly:
http://www.climateaudit.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/rcs_merged_recent_3series.gif
TomP
Please ask your friends at RealClimate why they are censoring every reasonable question posted on their site. Instead they allow an obvious strawman “Jeff” to ask textbook denialist questions which their pros quickly dismantle. Then they have “vg” post about how open to questions they are!
RealClimate is about as Real as selecting 10 trees from a population of what? Millions? Ask them how many studies used Yamal and ask them if any of those studies used the just-released Yamal raw data. Any scientist looking at that raw data would have rejected it. Instead they all apparently went along for the ride using the cooked data.
There is no honor among thieves, no disgrace upon scientists only more grant money to continue the study of answers.
Somebody famous said this once and I think it applies here when the global man warmers stand on a chair that has now had two legs cut off, maybe three.
Scott Mandia:
[snip – not your fault, Scott Mandia’s analogy]
To go with your analogy.
I think Dr Briffa isn’t at fault as he seems an honest scientist, going by some of th ecomments as above. What it seems to me is that he has been mandated to produce a particular result in the peer reviewing process
Whilst Keith Briffa works at CRU, it is illuminating to read the style of contract that the UK Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has issued for Climate Research. It actually contracts out the research and in this case the contractor is the Met Office Hadley Centre.
http://randd.defra.gov.uk/Document.aspx?Document=GA01012_6499_FRP.doc. Contract cost £145,760,582
“The Scientific Objectives as set out in the contract:
Background:
Increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases originating from human activity are expected to change the Earth’s climate significantly over the course of the century.
When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established by World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and UN Environment Programme (UNEP) in late 1988, the government took on responsibility for Working Group I covering the science of climate change.
The Department of Environment judged that climate change was set to become a major policy area and hence decided to expand its climate change research programme. In 1989 it asked the Met Office to establish a research centre dedicated to climate change (the Met Office Hadley Centre) and carry out the Climate Prediction Programme, building on the existing Climate Research Programme (CRP), funded by the Ministry of Defence over the previous 15 years.
The Climate Prediction Programme was a 17 year contract (renewed annually with new research deliverables as a 3 year rolling contract) which provided a programme of research into climate change, relevant to the formulation of government policy.
Aim of the CPP
The main aim of the Climate Prediction Programme (CPP) was to deliver to Defra (and other bodies as determined by Defra) a wide range of scientific results, analyses, information, data and advice which was required to inform government policy in the areas of climate change mitigation (through the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the UK Climate Change Programme) and adaptation (through the UK Climate Impacts Programme
The Climate Prediction Programme was not an academic research programme; its work plan and deliverables was driven by Defra’s requirements for science to inform UK government policy on climate change mitigation and adaptation. As the policy requirements changed, so did the research programme objectives.
Recent examples of significant scientific contributions are highlighted by the Met Office Hadley Centre contributions to the IPCC AR4:
We provided 8 lead authors, 1 convening lead author, 2 review editors and numerous contributing authors.
The report on the Economics of Climate Change published by Sir Nicholas Stern published in November 2006 relied heavily on the quantified probabilistic estimates of future climate change carried out in the Met Office Hadley Centre.
Sir Nicholas’s team used these results to feed into their economics models to produce a quantified risk based assessment of the costs of mitigation, impacts and adaptation in both the developed and developing world.
Agreed future work:
Defra has recognised the value of the work funded under the CPP contract and has just agreed a 5 year fixed price contract for an Integrated Climate Programme jointly funded with MoD to deliver policy relevant science as follows.
Met Office will support Defra in leading efforts to tackle climate change at a UK, European and International level to build an international consensus on the need for and shape of further action post 2012.
In order to do this the Met Office will undertake world-leading research into climate change and variability on behalf of Defra, as part of a wholly integrated (joint) programme of climate research in the Met Office Hadley Centre, partly funded also by MoD (Defence Climate Research Programme – DCRP).
The Met Office will focus on research that contributes to UK government policy objectives and will communicate the results to government and the public. This will be done through leadership of the UK climate community, collaboration with UK and world-wide institutions and internal customer-focussed links within the Met Office.”
This approach to climate science starts with a conclusion and asks contractors to find supporting data and to attribute it to human influence. If you pay someone to do that, logic says they are going to find something, come hell or high water, (both are predicted!).
Global warming is out there and it’s due to humans. Go find it.
Scott A. Mandia (18:12:27) :
In answer to your question – I’m afraid it has to be a yes. These thousands of brilliant scientists you refer to – are they all climatologist? Since so many contributors who raise perfectly logical questions about the science of “global warming” are abused for not being climatologists, then the validity of scientific opinion which accepts the arguments should similarly be discounted.
So this brings your “thousands of brilliant scientists “down to roughly how many?
I would also suggest that many of the scientists, whilst perfectly competent, would not justify the term brilliant.
I was also going to question the use of ice core proxies for 20th century temperatures (reference your link) when there are perfectly good (ish) instrumental records available. But P Wilson’s contribution has highlighted that the use of a single graph without explanation or qualification is not the best way to try to make a point. I would refer you to earlier threads on WUWT refering to Sandvik’s imaginitive Wikipedia artwork.
The reconstruction of climate over the past one to two
millennia has not been free of contention, because of its
relevance to assessing the significance of 20th century
global warming. An early reconstruction that drew considerable
attention was that of Mann et al. [1999], which was
prominently displayed in IPCC’s Third Assessment Report
[Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2001]. The
contentiousness followed from the statement by Mann et al.
[1999] and by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
[2001] that the temperatures in the last decade of the 20th
century exceeded any earlier temperatures in the entire
thousand-year period of the reconstruction, including the
so-called Medieval Warm Period (MWP; 1000 –
1200 AD). In the ensuing debate one of our publications
[Huang et al., 1997] (hereafter called HPS97) was occasionally
offered as evidence that the MWP was in fact
warmer than late 20th century [e.g., Deming, 2004]. Yet in
our later publications on climate reconstruction [e.g., Huang
et al., 2000] (hereafter referred to as HPS00), and in publications
by others addressing the climate history of the
last two millennia [e.g., National Research Council, 2006;
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007] there are
no references to the results of HPS97.
They later say:
There are important differences that need to be
understood between the 20,000 year reconstructions of
HPS97 and the more recent five-century borehole reconstructions
typified by HPS00. HPS97 is a broad-brush look
at the entire Late Quaternary (exclusive of the 20th century
as noted above), using a large but noisy, low temporal
resolution dataset of heat flux measurements aggregated in
50-meter depth intervals. The HPS00 reconstructions use a
smaller but higher quality and more homogeneous dataset of
several hundred borehole temperature versus depth (T-z)
profiles comprising actual temperature measurements at
10 meter intervals. The selection process for these T-z
profiles has been conducted under strict quality control
criteria, ensuring a much less noisy dataset than that used
in HPS97. In a sense these studies are complementary, with
HPS97 taking a long low-resolution view, and HPS00
making a more focused and sharper assessment of the past
five centuries.
After looking through your other links which maintain that there is always a “hockey stick” it appears that none of them go further than 500 years, which necessarily omits the Holocene optimum and the MWP
That was an extract from the yuang & Pollack paper the Scott mandia refferenced
Scott A. Mandia (03:31:13) :
Take a look at this IPCC 2007 image:
http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/global_warming/images/global_mean_temperature.gif
Do you see that the RATES of warming are on the rise? The rate for,ithe past 100 years is 0.07/decade.
The rate of warming has more than DOUBLED.
I refer you again to the icecore record: temperatures during the holocene are oscillating within +/- 1C on a slightly downward/cooling slope. Oscillating behavior allows rates to change too, on the upside and on the downside. example: Take a sine curve . The derivative is a cosine curve, and that is the rate of change, which is not constant of course and can be as big as the maximum change.
Regarding consensus, here is an analogy:
Suppose you are feeling very sick. You visit ten doctors and here are the replies:
Doctor #1: “You have cancer and you must quickly start chemotherapy. It will not be pleasant but it can cure you. If you wait you will surely die.” Doctor #1 is well-respected and well-published in the field of oncology.
….
Doctor #9: “You have cancer and you must quickly start chemotherapy. It will not be pleasant but it can cure you. If you wait you will surely die.” Doctor #9 is well-respected and well-published in the field of oncology.
Doctor #10: “You have bad allergies that will likely not continue if you wait a few years. Waiting will not kill you and it might actually help you. There is no cure but you will save money by taking no action.” Doctor #10 is well-respected and well-published in the field of allergies.
The analogy is false. You might have a leg to stand on if you had accepted doctor #10 to be also well published in the field of oncology, to speak of an analogy, though the ratio you would be giving is misleading, it is about 50/50 and even more so if we take away the graduate students of the peer review group ( who need jobs).
As it stands there are many climatologsts, palaeontologists and meteorologists in the #10 case.
And do not talk of the signers of the IPCC business, most of them are Gore type.
As it stands it is nonsense. And in any case it is always one person who pushes a paradigm to change and consensus in science is misleading and nonsense.
@ur momisugly anna v (22:43:35) :
“The hockey stick shape comes only with the dendro misuse of data.”
Because you are a scientist, all I can really say to this statement is: WOW!
Do you know what a hockey stick looks like?
Have a look. Maybe you are so immersed in science that you had no opportunity to look at a hokey stick
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/01/oh-no-global-warming-to-end-olympics/
The bore hole plots are consistent with the wikipedia icecore plots and they are not a hokey stick.
wow is right.
coming out of the little ice age
And how is this a forcing mechanism? Wow, again.
Forcing mechanism? now we are changing the playing field? I thought we were talking of hokey sticks.
It is hubris to believe that when we cannot explain the oscillating behavior of temperature of the last ten thousand years, ( forcings anyone?) of the last coming out of the ice age, we can look at the little edge in the time scale of ours and our grandfathers puny lives and talk of forcing mechanisms.
I am glad that the consensus is that there are no gods, otherwise there would be retribution against the hubris and mankind does not need a fast onslaught of the next ice age ( which is inevitable if we look at the ice core records).
Scott A. Mandia (03:31:13) :Regarding consensus, here is an analogy:
Your analogy is as predetermined as the hockey sticks. You assume that all the oncologists have emperical evidence that the patient has cancer. A better analogy would be that each oncologists says “based on our proxied models, it may be a possibliity that you might have cancer”. Now will you submit yourself to the dangers of chemo and radiation on that? No you wouldn’t, you would demand a biopsy for proof. Where is the biopsy for AGW?
**********************
Scott A. Mandia (03:31:13) :
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/borehole/borehole.html
Pick any hole you like.
************************
I took a look at some of the raw data. This is another case where the signal is minuscule – just very small variations from the trend. What about rain? Water seeps into the ground in many places. The ground is warmed mainly by the Sun, not air. This appears to be another case of shaky methodology. I bet if someone really dug into this, one would find the same sort of mess present with using trees. Using trees appears to be a really stupid idea from the “brilliant” scientists, why should be believe they do a better job with bore holes??
Scott A. Mandia (03:31:13) :
@ur momisugly janama (18:43:25) :
“Hadcrut 1980 – 2009 = 0.5C
GISS 1980 – 2009 = 0.5C
UAH 1980 – 2009 = 0.4C
RSS 1980 – 2009 = 0.5C
This is a warming of approx 0.17/decade in the past 30 years
Take a look at this IPCC 2007 image:”
The Earth is 4.6 Billion Years old and you are trying to make something out of a 30-year period? That’s not even long enough for one oscillation of the PDO or AMO or both combined.
To quote somebody recently on here: “Coming from a scientist, [you], all I can say, is WOW.”
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
The ‘cancer’ analogy is sickening; apart from the fact that it’s completely irrelevant. Don’t talk about illnesses that you know nothing about, especially in this context. You are just sounding like that fraud Gore.
But if you insist on drawing this ‘parallel’, perhaps you should correct it – “…the doctor will *force* you to have chemo, but we don’t know if it’s going to work, and also we are going to force everyone else to have chemo, just in case. We don’t *know* that it’s cancer, it might be, so why risk it? You also have to remember that taking chemotherapy creates a *huge* job market – it’s the up and coming industry: if you don’t take this chemo you will be leaving thousands upon thousands out of work, and prevent this economic boom. In addition, the ‘patient’ took it as given they had cancer, and needed to find 10 doctors who are specialists in their field to confirm it. In fact, the patient was living quite happily and requested no expert opinion, the experts came to you and told you you have cancer and lined up their own ‘associates’ – The Group – to confirm the original diagnosis…”
When you politicize science you come across, by default and at best, as having something to hide. With so much information being revealed, along with the fact that these ‘predictions’ are just not happening, why should anyone believe anything a scientist has to say with respect to global warming? Being in the pay of ‘government’ – especially a self-appointed one – will tar you with the same political brush.
REPLY: “The ‘cancer’ analogy is sickening;” I agree and Scott Mandia has been censured on this issue. No further discussion of this. – Anthony