One of the great things about WUWT is that people from all walks of life frequent here. We have PhD’s right down to Average Joe that read and post comments here. Everyone has something to contribute.
A general truism that I’ve noticed through life is that the people that actually work “hands on” with the things they study often know far more about them than the people that study them from afar. As in the case of the surface stations project, top scientists missed the fact that many of the climate monitoring stations are poorly sited because they never bothered to visit them to check the measurement environment. Yet the people in the field knew. Some scientists simply accepted the data the stations produced at face value and study its patterns, coaxing out details statistically. Such is the case with Briffa and Yamal tree rings apparently, since the tree ring data was gathered by others, field researchers Hantemirov and Shiyatov.
American Indians have been said to be far more in tune with the patterns of the earth than modern man. They had to be, survival depended on it. They weren’t insulated by technology as we are. Likewise somebody who works in the forest whose daily livelihood is connected to trees might know a bit more about their growth than somebody sitting behind a desk.
WUWT commenter “Caleb”, who has worked with trees for 50 years, wrote this extraordinary essay on Briffa’s lone tree core known as YAD061, which has a pronounced 8 sigma effect on the set of 10 tree cores Briffa used in his study. Caleb’s essay is in comments here, which I’m elevating to a full post. While we may never know the true growth driver for YAD06, this is one possible explanation.
Guest comment by Caleb Shaw:
I’ve worked outside since I was a small boy in the 1950’s, and have cut down hundreds of trees. I always check out the rings, for every tree has its own story.
I’ve seen some rather neat tricks pulled off by trees, especially concerning how far they can reach with their roots to find fertilizer or moisture. For example, sugar maple roots will reach, in some cases, well over a hundred feet, and grow a swift net of roots in the peat moss surrounding a lady’s azalea’s root ball, so that the azalea withers, for the maple steals all its water.
I’ve also seen tired old maples perk right up, when a pile of manure is heaped out in a pasture a hundred feet away, and later have seen the tree’s rings, when it was cut down, show its growth surged while that manure was available.
After fifty years you learn a thing or two, even if you don’t take any science classes or major in climatology, and I’ve had a hunch many of the tree-ring theories were bunkum, right from the start.
The bristlecone records seemed a lousy proxy, because at the altitude where they grow it is below freezing nearly every night, and daytime temperatures are only above freezing for something like 10% of the year. They live on the borderline of existence, for trees, because trees go dormant when water freezes. (As soon as it drops below freezing the sap stops dripping into the sugar maple buckets.) Therefore the bristlecone pines were dormant 90% of all days and 99% of all nights, in a sense failing to collect temperature data all that time, yet they were supposedly a very important proxy for the entire planet. To that I just muttered “bunkum.”
But there were other trees in other places. I was skeptical about the data, but until I saw so much was based on a single tree, YAD061, I couldn’t be sure I could just say “bunkum.”
YAD061 looks very much like a tree that grew up in the shade of its elders, and therefore grew slowly, until age or ice-storms or insects removed the elders and the shade. Then, with sunshine and the rotting remains of its elders to feed it, the tree could take off.
I have seen growth patterns much like YAD061 in the rings of many stumps in New Hampshire, and not once have I thought it showed a sign of global warming, or of increased levels of CO2 in the air. Rather the cause is far more simple: A childhood in the under-story, followed by a tree’s “day in the sun.”
Dr. Briffa should spend less time gazing at computer screens, and actually get out and associate with trees more. At the very least, it might be good for his health.
Here are a few other charts using Briffa’s data.
Briffa used other tree ring series in his 2000 paper as well, but it is the small Yamal series which produces the hockey stick.
http://img202.imageshack.us/img202/5976/otherbriffatrees.png
When others saw how the Yamal series looked after it got processed by Briffa, they continued to use just this small specific dataset in other reconstructions (and discarded the other ones of course).
Using all the trees that Briffa had available to him in regards to just Yamal, it is actually very difficult to see how it turned into such a hockey stick. We know he picked 10 trees out of the larger dataset but there is still something strange about it. Here is the raw tree ring widths from all the trees versus how the data turned out through selection and processing.
http://img202.imageshack.us/img202/6547/yamaltreeringmeasurment.png
And then the specific hockey stick tree, YAD061, there was actually 10 core measurements taken from it, and yes it has a hockey stick, but there is wide variation in the ring width measurements in each core/cross-section whatever was used.
http://img183.imageshack.us/img183/8500/treeyad061.png
Tree rings do not provide any evidence of the past climate. They are just a bunch of numbers going up, around and sideways. It is amazing there are still scientists trying to use them.
Briffa has also studied tree rings in Sweden at Torneåträsk (1992). A recent study found out that the adjustments made Briffa wiped out MWP. The new study, with more tree samples, makes it clear that MWP was the warmest peiriod in the last 1500 years there.
See http://people.su.se/~hgrud/documents/Grudd%202008.pdf
Thanks, Lucy. Here are a few more for you: More quotes from Anthony Standen’s Science is a Sacred Cow, [1950], 1958, Dutton Paperback.
Used copies are available inexpensively on Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/Science-Sacred-Cow-Standen/dp/0525470166/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213281131&sr=1-1
25: It all comes down to correlations …. Very often they argue that the one thing caused the other, when it might have been the other way round. Executives have been found to have a large vocabulary; therefore, learn ten new words every day and you will become an executive. Or else, there will be an argument that, in principle, runs like this: a man gets drunk on Monday on whisky and soda water; he gets drunk on Tuesday on brandy and soda water; and on Wednesday on gin and soda water. What caused his drunkenness? Obviously, the common factor, the soda water.
28: A theory is simply a well-tested hypothesis, but there is no sharp dividing line.
35: There is more truth in an old wisecrack of Oliver Wendell Holmes: “Science is a good piece of furniture for a man to have in an upper chamber provided he has common sense on the ground floor.”
43: Education, like everything else, goes in fads, and has the normal human tendency to put up with something bad for just so long, and then rush to the other extreme.
69-70; 85: Lord Kelvin was so satisfied with this triumph of science that he declared himself to be as certain of the existence of the ether as a man can be about anything…. “When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it….” Thus did Lord Kelvin lay down the law. And though quite wrong, this time he has the support of official modern Science. It is NOT true that when you can measure what you are speaking about, you know something about it. The fact that you can measure something doesn’t even prove that that something exists…. Take the ether, for example: didn’t they measure the ratio of its elasticity to its density?
82: If the idols of scientists were piled on top of one another in the manner of a totem pole, the topmost one would be a grinning fetish called Measurement.
112: Man is sometimes described as “one of the animals in a community of organisms,” although this gives quite a stretch, nay a violent yank, to the meaning of the word, “community.”
177: The most “advanced” thinkers today [are] quite possibly the least reliable—just think of the advanced thinkers of yesterday.
Caleb, well spoken. Your comment, “Dr. Briffa should spend less time gazing at computer screens, and actually get out and associate with trees more. At the very least, it might be good for his health” I have often said the same regarding climate scientists to experience weather which accumulates to climate. Playing computer games to prove hypothesises is just a circular mind game, the outcome is a given, based on the programming, regardless of the field.
Here’s one more:
68, 88, 179: “Physics is NOT a body of indisputable and immutable Truth; it is a body of well-supported probable opinion only …. Physics can never prove things the way things are proved in mathematics, by eliminating ALL of the alternative possibilities. It is not possible to say what the alternative possibilities are…. Write down a number of 20 figures; if you multiply this by a number of, say, 30 figures, you would arrive at some enormous number (of either 49 or 50 figures). If you were to multiply the 30-figure number by the 20-figure number you would arrive at the same enormous 49- or 50-figure number, and you know this to be true without having to do the multiplying. This is the step you can never take in physics.”
Or other sciences.
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bill (06:56:34) :
Note that grape harvest has not been converted to temp. so high temp = early harvest!
*****************
Does harvest time depend on rain also? I assume vintners have studied this?
Yep, it looks like the harvest date depends on rain also.
“Grapevines are particularly sensitive to the temperature and amounts of precipitation they’re exposed to at various phases of their 2-year fruit-production cycle.”
In this article, the harvest date of these grapes correlates with the NAO.
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Grape-harvest+dates+hold+climate+clues.+(Earth+Science)-a080393526
I decided to take a shot at explaining why tree rings simple don’t work for the purpose for which they are designed, given the selection process that is used.
Here is my explanation:
http://reallyrealclimate.blogspot.com/2009/10/tree-ring-chronology-selection-problem.html
Any feedback would be appreciated.
For once I was not snipped by Surrealclimate, but clearly, Mike (Mann?) does not like real debate. Read the papers and make your own judgement…..
Gavin, there appears to be a tension between the climate record as reconstructed using tree rings and that from tree lines.
Rashit M. Hantemirov* and Stepan G. Shiyatov (2002) A continuous multimillennial ring-width chronology in Yamal, northwestern Siberia. The Holocene 12,6 pp. 717–726
http://www.nosams.whoi.edu/PDFs/papers/Holocene_v12a.pdf
Page 720 shows how tree lines have moved South over the last 7000 years, reflecting decreasing temperatures at the Northern tree line.
Conversely the tree ring data, from the same location, says that 20th Century temperatures are unprecedently high.
What’s going on?
Mike, you say “Response: Forest ecosystems respond to climate forcing on multi-generational timescales. Evidence from fossil pollen, tree lines, etc. can thus in general only be used to infer climate change on multi-century timescales. They cannot be used to infer decadal timescale changes such as the anomalous warming of the past few decades.”
Yet Esper and Schweingruber report “larger-scale patterns of treeline changes related to decadal-scale temperature variations”.
Esper and Schweingruber (2004). Large-scale treeline changes recorded in Siberia. Geophysical Research Letters 31.
Again this is confusing since I know that Esper is one of your co-workers.
So do tree lines shift on centennial or decadal timescales?
[Response: This characterization is misleading. Esper and Schweingruber were not looking at the shift of treelines in the usual sense (e.g. as determined in the more distant past by looking at relict stumps, etc.). Instead, they were looking at the modern past (20th century) where other sorts of evidence can be established to look at far more subtle shifts in the ecotomes, e.g. the germination dates of saplings, whether they were upright or not, etc. This sort of more subtle evidence cannot be extended to past centuries, hence they are unable to provide a quantitative reconstruction of past temperature in the past, and certainly don’t attempt any such thing in this paper. Moreover, even if they were able to do this, the migration of the treeline depends on factors such as permafrost distribution which is greatly influenced by winter temperatures. Tree-ring growth in these regions, however, is generally reflective of summer temperatures. So even if a quantitative reconstruction from treelines were available, it wouldn’t even be comparable in terms of the seasonality reflected by the record. In short, there is nothing there that challenges the quantitative climate reconstructions provided by tree-rings. Take your talking points elsewhere. -mike]
Quotations from Henry Bauer’s well-reviewed
Science or Pseudoscience (2001). This excellent book is available from Amazon for $21 by clicking: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0252026012/qid=1070360257/sr=1-3/ref=sr_1_3/103-2148347-8449427?v=glance&s=books#product-details
2: as things stand, there is available no quick or easy guidance about what to believe, not only on the many matters over which apparently competent people differ but also over some where the experts seem to be in agreement. At times we do well to believe what we’re told; at other times we had better not. Sometimes there’s no better guide than the experience of what you’ve seen for yourself; at other times your eyes deceive you. We should be open to new ideas—but on the other hand we should always be skeptical and critical before accepting a new idea, for old beliefs are often well tested by experience whereas new ones may just be untested hunches. It’s good to see the whole picture, to be holistic, to be interdisciplinary—but on the other hand in many fields progress requires concentration on ultraspecialized techniques, theories, and facts.
5: Science has itself become a sort of church, and scientists are in that sense also priests (Knight, 1986). Science nowadays like the church in earlier centuries feels responsible for the intellectual orderliness of society.
6-7: Confronted with what they do not yet properly understand, those who claim to speak for science are reluctant to admit ignorance, and therefore their answers often discount or evade.
7: much popular wisdom idealizes science. Perhaps the most common illusion is that science uses a “scientific method” that guarantees objectivity (Bauer 1992a; Bauer and Huyghe 1999).
33: There exists no comprehensive account of all the premature or false trails that science has taken. By and large the history of science has focused on the successes of science.
45: some things are common to almost all disputes, and they feature in anomalistics just as they do in arguments of other sorts. We close ranks to defend our bedfellows, almost irrespective of how incongruous and self-defeating that may become. Arguments feature obfuscation and red herrings more than attempts to settle the issue by evidence and logic. Mountains are absurdly made out of molehills like spelling and punctuation.
Substantive issues get mixed up with personal ones. It tends to become a matter of who is right rather than of what is right. … Winning is what counts. Things are taken personally, arguments are made ad hominem, as though if the opponent can be discredited, the substantive argument has been won. One seeks ways of saving face, of putting it as though one had not been in the wrong.
50: even some purely material phenomena are indubitably real despite our inability to explain them. Cosmic rays are generated by a phenomenon whose energy is of a magnitude that baffles our ability to conceive of a mechanism. The homing instincts and communicating ability of insects are unquestioned, while our explanations for them are tentative at best. The ice ages did occur, but we don’t understand how or why they came about. And so on.
58: Whenever a claim is being supported by statistical argument, it is relevant to the estimation of statistical significance how often the experiment has been tried unsuccessfully, anywhere at all. There is the “file-drawer effect” ….
79: Scientists … are reluctant to admit the depths of science’s ignorance. Yet perhaps the most apposite assessment of the gaps in modern scientific knowledge is Lewis Thomas’s remark that the greatest of all accomplishments of twentieth-century science has been the discovery of human ignorance.
86: The god-professor was a characteristic feature not only of French science but also in Germany …. People who attained such a position, like Blondlot, could find it quite difficult to recognize that they had made an error, let alone admit it publicly.
101: Lord Kelvin was dogmatically wrong about the age of the earth. … It seems that if one is wrong more or less in line with the contemporary conventional wisdom, the error is no basis for personal attack; but being wrong and against the grain brings personal abuse ….
129: [Robert] Becker’s “Postscript: Political Science” (330-47) contains much that cannot be gainsaid: that greed and prestige-seeking are—or have become—about as common among scientists as outside science; that there are all too many instances … of petty jealousy and dishonesty; that the influx of huge research funds has corroded academic values; that “if it’s trivial, you can probably study it. If it’s important, you probably can’t.”
197: Perhaps much more generally damaging than any given belief are the fanaticism and dogmatism that hinder some people from deviating in any situation from rigid ideologies.
202: I believe it is important to resist not only religious superstition but also scientistic superstition, the notion that science and only science has all the answers.
204 (Quoting Joseph Needham): “There has … always been a close connection between this rationalist anti-empirical attitude and the age-old superiority complex of the administrators, the high-class people who sit and read and write, as against the low-class artisans who do things with their hands. Just because the mystical theologians believed in magic, they helped the beginning of modern science in Europe, while the rationalists hindered it. We cannot say that all through history rationalism has been the chief progressive force in society.”
Nor do right beliefs guarantee lack of harm; as ought to be well known, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
205: Those trained in science do not necessarily behave in socially useful rather than harmful ways, nor in individually useful rather than counterproductive ways.
211: One often hears, “Just look at the facts.” The trouble is, even deciding which facts to look at involves making choices, generally subconsciously.
221: When a matter is not yet clear, we have to be content with judging likelihood instead of insisting on a conclusive answer.
223: (Quoting Gratzer): “No proposition is so foolish or meretricious that at least two Nobel laureates cannot be found to endorse it.”
225: There’s a richly funny literature recounting the host of “expert” predictions that turned out to be absolutely wrong ….
228: The judgment that a given unorthodoxy contradicts scientific knowledge is in most cases really a judgment that it contradicts some extrapolation from existing knowledge…. But extrapolating (and sometimes even interpolating) is always risky.
229: The mysteries that science has cleared up are largely those where the phenomena are reproducible.
230: no matter what opinion one reaches or how, something might pop out of the unknown unknown to prove it wrong.
233: (Quoting I. J. Good 1978:337): “Many fallacies … have their origin in wishful thinking, laziness, and busyness. These … lead to oversimplification, the desire to win an argument at all costs (including the cost of overcomplication), failure to listen to the opposition, too-ready acceptance of authority, too-ready rejection of it, too-ready acceptance of the printed word (even in newspapers), too great reliance on a formal machine or formal system or formula (deus ex machina) … special pleading, the use of language in more than one sense without noticing the ambiguity (if the argument leads to a desirable conclusion), the insistence that a method used successfully in one field of research is the only appropriate one in another, the distortion of judgment, and the forgetting of the need for judgment.”
http://www.biocab.org/Insolation_Treerings_Growth.html
tallbloke (02:41:57) :
“My own lifetime of experience walking around the hills and countryside through forests has shown me the way a strong gust of swirling wind can knock down a stand of pine trees or larches in a tight, small area of forest. Especially where soils are thin and the underlying substrate is wet or sandy. Think about the effect on the trees immediately to the north of the suddenly cleared area, suddenly recieving much more sunlight with it’s warmth.
No human intervention needed, natures processes can produce the variety of patterns we see in remote and ‘pristine’ areas, including trees which suddenly show growth spurts.”
Quite right, and in arctic and northern temperate areas, a late spring or early fall ice storm can coat trees with ice to load them down and tear them down. I’ve lived through such storms, feels like you’re in a war zone as the trees crack and collapse around you. Next day the forest is much more open.
I was delighted to see my comment elevated to the status of “Guest Comment,” and have been flattered by many of the nice things people have said about it. However I feel I gave a false impression, for many seem to believe I am far more honorable than I actually am.
Therefore I would like to clarify that the reason I have spent so much time working in the woods is not because I am a successful lumberjack, but rather because I am an unsuccessful writer.
If you have any experience with writers you know that a major aim of all writers is to avoid working a real job. If my life had followed the script I wrote for myself as a teenager, I never would have worked a real job at all. I only worked real jobs because I ran out of people to mooch off. Therefore I should not be equated with honorable people like “Joe the Plumber.”
Many unsuccessful writers reach a point where they have to decide just how far they will go, to avoid getting a real job. Will you lie? Will you forge? Will you steal? Will you sleep with the editor?
Being something of a prude, I would not go as far as some of my peers would, to get published. Some suggested this explained my lack of success, (though I myself think the reason for rejections was that my writing put people to sleep.)
One trick, which my fellow writers seemed very adept at, was to get people to pay them for work they hadn’t done, and likely would never get around to doing. It was called “an advance,” and I had friends who were very good at getting advances. To me they seemed more like con artists than true artists. They were slick talkers, and landed an advance or endowment or grant, and spent all the money on wine, woman and song, and then awoke with terrible hangovers, flat broke. They called awaking with hangovers and being flat broke “the suffering of an artist,” and sometimes got patrons to pity them, and earned further grants and endowments and advances. It was quite a racket, but I was no good at it, and wound up washing dishes or cutting trees in the woods. Eventually I stopped telling people I was “a writer,” and just called myself “a landscaper and handyman.”
Therefore, if you judge a man by the company he has kept, it should be obvious I don’t deserve some of the flattering comments people have showered on me. However I did learn one thing, during my time as an unsuccessful writer, and that was: “How to recognize a con-artist.”
Naming no names, I often have felt I recognized the work of con-artists in the work of climate scientists, and have rudely and bluntly said as much. Over at Climate Audit my comments were quite regularly snipped, because I was too blunt. I feel Steve McIntyre deserves a great deal of credit for not allowing people like me to be rude and blunt, and to turn his site into a free-for-all. Rather than making accusations he keeps his cool, and politely states, “Excuse me, but it seems you made a mistake here.” I hugely respect his calm and collected manner, and am trying my best to learn how to emulate it.
In the end I feel remaining calm and collected will bring truth back to the science of climate. Also I believe people will eventually learn as I have learned, and recognize real jobs are better than con jobs.
Jarmo 9:29:09 wrote:
” Briffa has also studied tree rings in Sweden at Torneåträsk (1992). A recent study found out that the adjustments made Briffa wiped out MWP. The new study, with more tree samples, makes it clear that MWP was the warmest peiriod in the last 1500 years there.
See http://people.su.se/~hgrud/documents/Grudd%202008.pdf ”
No doubt some readers didn’t notice or didn’t have time to look at that pdf. But doing so is well worthwhile if only because it shows these papers don’t have to be nearly incomprehensible to get published.
It is about as clear an explanation of dendrochronology in action as an amateur will encounter. It also is useful for those interested in the Briffa Yamal matter.
Roger Knights: If your comments are intended to show that science, like any other endeavor, is subject to human error and frailty, that’s OK. If your intention is to denigrate science generally, then you’re being ridiculous. Many readers and contributors to this site, and many AGW skeptics generally, are scientists (including myself). My objection to AGW is that it is non-scientific, that is, it is not based on rigorous examination of all evidence and clear-eyed analysis with an agenda. That’s very different than just casting aspersions on science generally.
Caleb (13:14:20) :
I would like to clarify that the reason I have spent so much time working in the woods is not because I am a successful lumberjack, but rather because I am an unsuccessful writer.
I thought you seemed more erudite than the average lumberjack. 😉
Sorry, that should have been “without an agenda”.
Caleb said” YAD061 looks very much like a tree that grew up in the shade of its elders, and therefore grew slowly, until age or ice-storms or insects removed the elders and the shade. Then, with sunshine and the rotting remains of its elders to feed it, the tree could take off.
I have seen growth patterns much like YAD061 in the rings of many stumps in New Hampshire, and not once have I thought it showed a sign of global warming, or of increased levels of CO2 in the air. Rather the cause is far more simple: A childhood in the under-story, followed by a tree’s “day in the sun.”
Right, fully right.
A better proxy could be the whole production per hectare, because you will loose the individual effect of competition between trees. But on long period, we haven’t these datas. In natural forest, with irregular stands, the competition between young trees (or young trees and other plants) is very hard. The whole trees in the graphic show the same pattern at the begining of their life.
I also suspected a clearing of the conopy would have the effect (I had commented on this on an earlier post). I worked felling trees for a large comercial estate for a few years and had also realised the tree rings tell a story of the tree, they always interested me.
In order to use a tree as a climate metric you need to understand its surroundings, how it grew over time and how its surroundings changed. Just like weather stations, you can not apply a “one size fits all” equation. Thats something academics do all to often unfortunetly, and they just love the “black box” approach!
I’ve worked in Southern U.S. forestry for about eight years now (IT, but I work with the forsters and have an ecology minor) and can tell you for sure that reducing competition can dramatically increase tree growth rates: it even has a name – “Release”. We do it in forest mgt. all the time, hitting competing vegetation with chemicals or mechanically, usually in the second or third year after planting. Around 7-10 years we often thin stands for the same reason. Yes, the tree rings get wider after release. Similar things happen in natural growth when the canopy is opened by e.g., storms, fire, or the fall of a dead tree. Growth rates and ring widths will shrink with renewed competition/stress, during heavy reproduction periods, or as the tree ages. Not making any AGW judgement one way or the other, just commenting that Caleb’s observation is accurate.
Briffa vs McIntyre gets a bit more exposure:
http://www.examiner.com/x-9111-SF-Environmental-Policy-Examiner~y2009m10d5-How-global-warming-looks-without-the-various-versions-of-the-Hockey-Stick
Mr. Shaw states:
The bristlecone records seemed a lousy proxy, because at the altitude where they grow it is below freezing nearly every night, and daytime temperatures are only above freezing for something like 10% of the year.
I’ve been to the bristlecone pines several times in the summer, having camped and climbed nearby White Mountain (14,420′) three times. Mr. Shaw’s assertion is false.
While it’s rarely WARM in the White Mountains, temperatures are above freezing for much more than 10% of the year, and there are many summer *nights* where the temperature is above freezing, necessitating only a light sleeping bag. I have stood on top of White Mountain (3500 feet above the Bristlecone forest) in shorts and a light shirt in July without being cold at all.
I can’t immediately find complete temperature data, but please see
http://www.fs.fed.us/database/feis/plants/tree/pinlon/all.html
and search on “temperature.” You will eventually come to the sentences
In July and August, mean monthly temperatures average 50 °F (10 °C). Mean monthly temperatures are below freezing from November through April.
I have no views on the suitability of bristlecone pines as proxies, though from what I’ve read I agree with the skeptical position. But I think we should start by simply getting our facts correct.
A global scare campaign demanding near-complete political and economic realignment… all resting on one person’s interpretation of one damn tree. Untold billions (…trillions?) wasted that could have gone to feed and clothe and shelter real human beings. And it’s not just wrong, it has every appearance of being a deliberate lie.
People ought to hang for this. Not just the people who did it, but the people who we relied on to screen fact from fiction, whose word was taken that this was all true. They had a solemn responsibility to conduct due diligence and many of them took the food from the mouths of your children to support them for this purpose.
This isn’t ‘ha-ha’ funny at all.