Circling Yamal 3 – facing the thermometers
Guest post by Lucy Skywalker
Let’s look closely and compare local thermometer records (GISS) with the Twelve Trees, upon whose treerings depend all the IPCC claims of “unprecedented recent temperature rise”.
For my earlier Yamal work, see here and here. For the original Hockey Stick story, see here and here.
Half the Hockey Stick graphs depend on bristlecone pine temperature proxies, whose worthlessness has already been exposed. They were kept because the other HS graphs, which depend on Briffa’s Yamal larch treering series, could not be disproved. We now find that Briffa calibrated centuries of temperature records on the strength of 12 trees and one rogue outlier in particular. Such a small sample is scandalous; the non-release of this information for 9 years is scandalous; the use of this undisclosed data as crucial evidence for several more official HS graphs is scandalous. And not properly comparing treering evidence with local thermometers is the mother of all scandals.
I checked out the NASA GISS page for all thermometer records in the vicinity of Yamal and the Polar Urals, in “raw”, “combined”, and “homogenized” varieties. Here are their locations (white). The Siberian larch treering samples in question come from Yamal and Taimyr. Salehard and Dudinka have populations of around 20,000; Pecora around 50,000; Surgut around 100,000; all the rest are officially “rural” sites. Some are long records, some are short.
Russia has two problems. First, many records stopped or became interrupted around 1990 after the ending of Soviet Russia; worst affected are the very telling Arctic Ocean records. Second, during Soviet Russia (and possibly now for all I know), winter urban records were “adjusted” downwards so that the towns could claim more heating allowances. Nevertheless, it will become clear that these issues in no way impede the evidence regarding treerings.
Click to enlarge these graphs. The first shows the 20 GISS stations closest to Yamal and the Polar Urals. The second shows treering width changes over time (only 10 of the 12 trees here). This was supposedly compared with local thermometer records, and used to calibrate earlier treering widths as temperature measurements to create a 1000-year temperature record. It was a pig to turn these graphs into a stack of transparent lines at the same scale as the GISS records for comparison, but finally, interesting material started to emerge.
I scaled all the GISS thermometer records to the same temperature scale, and ran them all from 1880 to 2020 at the same time scale (GISS graphs do not do this). I overlaid them as transparent lines along their approximate mean temperatures for comparison. Mean temperatures (visually judged) vary from around -2ºC (Pecora) to -13ºC (Selagoncy, Olenek, Hatanga, and Ostrov Uedine) and even -15ºC (“Gmo Im E.K. F”). The calibrations are degrees Centigrade anomaly, and decades.
Ha! Straightway we see clear patterns emerging. Let’s agree them:
Thermometer records: (1) time-wise, thermometers show temperatures rising from 1880 to 1940 or so; (2) temperatures fall a little from 1940 to 1970; (3) temperatures then rise a little but do not quite regain the heights of the 1940’s; (4) despite mean temperatures ranging from -2ºC to -15ºC (total means range 13ºC), and a range of temperature anomalies from each mean of only 9ºC from warmest year to coldest year, when mean temperatures are aligned, clear correlations emerge; (5) there are high variations between adjacent years. We shall investigate all this more closely in a minute.
Treering records: I’ve shown here the full records given for the 10 trees that runs from 1800 to 2000; but below, I use the same timescale as the thermometer records (1880-2020) for comparison. It is useful to see a few things here already: (6) treering sizes are increasing from 1830; (7) before that they show a decrease; (8) they do show correlation from 1880 on (this is NOT proof that the correlation is due to temperature).
Yamal area: (9) The 7 stations around Salehard seem to go in lock step with each other pretty well. (10) The five Yamal treering records (YAD) also correlate with each other, showing spikes around 1910, 1925, 1940, 1955, 1965, and 1980-1990. (11) But the treerings fall out with each other 1990-2000; and (12) these treering spikes do NOT correspond to the thermometer temperature spikes; but (13) there is a slight correlation with the longterm temperature; however, (14) crucially, there is no hockeystick blade in the thermometer record (15) nor is there one in the treering record if we remove the red YAD061 which is clearly an outlier – only a plateau’d elevation of the peaks throughout the 20th century starting before the real CO2/temp rise (and this is actually matched by pre-1800 values at times).
Excuse me for wondering if treerings beat to a different drum than temperature – it is certainly curious that there appears to be something causing correlations in the treerings. Wind? Sunspots? The moon? But let’s check by zooming in a little closer…
Salehard close-up: (16) all the nearby thermometer records mirror Salehard closely, although stations are up to 500 miles apart, the range of mean temperatures is -2ºC to -9ºC, and the range of annual temperatures at each station is up to about 9ºC – altogether a remarkable consistency. Click to see animated version of these records. (17) The close fit of Mys Kamennij (pale sea-blue) is particularly significant, since it is maritime and rural, and the same distance as Salehard from the treering site (some 120 miles), but in the opposite direction; (18) Ostrov Waigatz (Vaigach Island) shows the same pattern but with greater extremes; (19) in comparison with all this, the treering records show virtually no correlation at all – yet since treering differences between summer and winter exist at all, one would expect to see some correlation with warmer and colder years. (20) Perhaps if a far larger sample were used, a correlation might be detected, but clearly (21) we have trees here that are far too individual – especially YAD061.
Polar Urals: Here are seven station records around the Polar Urals site, compared with the five Taimyr (POR) treering records. (22) Mean temperatures are lower here – further North but also more continental, so perhaps the summers are as warm as Yamal, with similar near-treeline environment. (23) more noise in the temperature record, but the overall pattern is still the same; (24) 1943, 1967, 1983 are warm in common with the Salehard records, and 1940 is cold; other years are harder to compare. (25) The early fragmentary records for Dudinka and Turuhansk still fit together and overlay the Salehard records well, showing clear temperature rise between 1880 and 1940. (26) The treering records are fairly coherent, more so than the Yamal ones, and (27) they fit the Yamal records’ spikes in 1910, 1925, 1940, 1955, 1965, and 1980 on, but (28) again, this does not fit the temperature record.
The best of both record series: Really rural thermometer records from the maritime Arctic: (29) show the strongest pattern yet which (30) fits the other two sets of thermometer records but (31) does not fit the treering records even though (32) the treerings show coherent patterns within themselves, despite the two sites being some 800 miles apart.
Briffa’s full chronology: The Yamal chronology Briffa used (black) is compared with Polar Urals (green) and shows recent temperatures exceeding the Medieval Warm Period but (33) this is highly questionable, as is the recent final uptick. No MWP supports the alarmist “Unprecedented!” yet Polar Urals generally have been shown to fit local thermometer records better than Yamal for the period of overlap.
More GISS Arctic graphs: There are many serious problems with GISS but we can only take the evidence here. (34) GISS 64ºN+ shows a misleading trend line – temperatures rise to 1940, fall to 1970, rise to 2000 but not higher than 1940, then level off after 2000; (35) I don’t know what stations went into this composite – the final uptick alerts my suspicions to some UHI or other station problems; (36) Tamino takes the biscuit for cherrypicked trends in the GISS 80ºN+ North Polar winter record (sea green) – it clearly opposes the general worldwide fall in temperatures 1940-1970. However, it’s interesting to see such extremes.
GISS’ homogeneity adjustments: Thankfully, only a few of these Russian records are “adjusted”. But the alterations are telling. Surgut spikes upwards over Salehard from about 1960 on – but (36) the adjustment (probably UHI) is perversely done by truncating and moving earlier records upwards, instead of adjusting later records downwards. And (37) why were Salehard’s and Ostrov Uedine’s earlier “raw” records omitted in the adjusted records? I think every correction here will tend to amplify global warming trends.
GISS world temperatures, 2008: This map was shown in Tingley & Huybers’ latest Hockey Stick presentation at PAGES conference. GISS’ own station records around Yamal and Polar Urals appear to show (38) this map is misleading, since according to GISS’ own records, above, averages local to Yamal / Polar Urals after 2000 are at the most 1.5ºC anomaly (above local mean).
CRU Arctic temperatures, seasonal anomalies: (graph by romanm) Since this is from uncheckable individual station records, (39) the figures could be contaminated by various “correction” factors, (41) UHI is especially likely in the winter. But note that (42) the difference in character between months, and between summers and winters, is striking – summers have hardly changed – and (43) still no definitive Hockey Stick as per illustrations and per Briffa’s Yamal treering record, nothing beyond the range of natural patterns clearly evidenced here. Even the known slight overall increase during the twentieth century takes place mainly earlier in the century.
Conclusions: There is no sign whasoever of a Hockey Stick shape with serious uptick in the twentieth century, in the thermometer records. Yet these records are clearly very consistent with each other, no matter how long the record or how cold, high, or maritime the locality, with a distance span of over a thousand miles. Neither does the Hockey Stick consistently show in the treerings except in the case of a single tree. Even with thermometer records that are incomplete and suffering other problems, the “robust” conclusion is –
“Warmist” treering proxy temperature evidence is falsified directly by local thermometer records.
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Bill P (09:22:29) : Polar Urals: “1940 is cold;” (?)
I think you’ve caught my sloppy work. It looked at first sight like 1940 but I think maybe it has to be 1942. This is the downside of working visually not with Excel. But I’ll try to do one really large graph of Salehard now and link it in, with finer calibrations if poss, as it seems a good standard.
Hi Lucy hope you are having a nice day.
It looks like you did a nice job of collecting the data. You should ( and so should everyone who posts) get in the habit of posting your data as used. You collected data from GISS. Since we know it always changes it would be wise to collect and post the SNAPSHOT you used. I beat the AGWers with this stick all the time, so good procedures on both sides.. Ok. Also merely posting to the
URL is not enough as we all know that they change, the data behind them changes etc. Ok? Anthony should just make a repository for the data from articles he
posts and if you guest post on wattsup you better have your data
and code ready to be posted. Show the other side HOW ITS DONE.
Next. A visual comparison of the annual temperature records and the tree ring chronology will not tell you much
Their procedure works like this. For the larch the growth season is JJA
june july august ( actually, I think a really short period within that )
For a tree ring series to be “counted” as a treemometer its rings have to
correlate ( you have to do the math) with temp record at certain values. Say, above .4
So the tree ring isnt corelated to the annual temp DIRECTLY, its correlated to the JJA temp.
Anyways, not an expert on this, dont endorse it, but I believe this is what they do in several cases.
Lucy, impressive work.
I noted in your study many references, but they are not listed here or on your website. I am particularly interested in:
“UHI is especially likely in the winter. But note that (42) the difference in character between months, and between summers and winters, is striking – summers have hardly changed”
Great work Lucy! I agree with Steven Mosher. He beat me to it. Did Briffa use only the growing season data for his “correlation”?
Soem years back, if memory serves, S. Macintyre noted that part of the Mann cherry picking was to use Gaspe cedars from the south (sunny) side of hills, but to leave out the north side ones, which showed no recent “warming”. Could the growth driver be insolation? Maybe the north side trees were in the shade of the hills and never experienced any direct increase in insolation. Murray
Thank you for posting, Lucy.
It appears that a lot can be accomplished by “eyeballing” ; – )
And after reading here and at CA about the faux wiggle-matches, inversion gymnastics, adjustment athletics, weighting exhibitions, scaling competitions, cherry-picking festivals and doublespeak demos by the warmers… well, let the “professional” who is without sin cast the first stone at this effort.
If I can rephrase some of what I’m learning here:
1. Individual temperature records from a wide area of Siberia appear to correlate pretty well. (The claim that Soviet-era record-keepers tampered with the numbers for heating oil allocations sounds likely. If it occurred, how do you think it affected the instrumental record?).
2. If (in spite of the alleged tampering) the these (relatively short) ground temperature records (Yamal and Polar Urals) can be believed, they negate the claim that warming in the last decade was an unprecedented occurrence, since both graphs show greater warming in the early 1940’s then in the 90’s.
3. There isn’t enough tree ring evidence (whether because of Briffa’s cherrypicking, or whatever…) to support any assumptions about modern temperatures – cooling or warming.
Somewhere I read that Briffa’s paleo record was better represented than the modern. In other words, that he had more tree ring samples from the period prior to the 1880’s. Do you find his graph of the paleo record any more compelling?
Steve S. 8:26:40 “And those who care deeply about our planet should be given an added extension of forgiveness and appreciation.
So be nice and let’s move forward with policies to acheive what’s best for all of us and the planet. ”
Are you for real? Are you kidding? What is your definition of “care deeply about our planet”? Scientists should cherry pick data, falsify data, hide their data for years, refuse to abide by the scientific method? This is how a scientist cares? Major BS — maybe elephantS nor whaleS — and a lot more besides. Take your bleeding heart and destroy some other society; not ours; not that part of the world that has no truck with totalitaria
There have been several comments to this effect:
“The calibration to yearly average temperature is irrelevant, Briffa’s actual proxy reconstruction is only calibrated against the growing period.”
Sure.
But the resulting reconstruction is then turned around and used as the ruler itself. It is often nice to know that your ruler actually has the slightest bearing on actually measuring the subject matter of interest.
Reductio ad absurdum A broken clock is both perfectly accurate and precise–and will thus have an astonishing correlation under any metric–when only used at precisely the time denoted by the hands.
Using Briffa’s reconstruction to determine average yearly temperatures should involve at last some checking on how well that concept might work in the available instrumental period.
Even ignoring uncertainties involved in extrapolating, or difficulties in determining the correct historical growing period, it is handy to perform the actual calibration of interest.
Steve S. 8:26:40 “And those who care deeply about our planet should be given an added extension of forgiveness and appreciation.
So be nice and let’s move forward with policies to acheive what’s best for all of us and the planet. ”
Are you for real? Are you kidding? What is your definition of “care deeply about our planet”? Scientists should cherry pick data, falsify data, hide their data for years, refuse to abide by the scientific method? This is how a scientist cares? Major BS — maybe elephantS nor whaleS — and a lot more besides. Take your bleeding heart and destroy some other society; not ours; not that part of the world that has no truck with totalitaria
Must have hit the wrong key in my excitable moment! To finish…not that part of the world that has no truck with totalitarian methods. What you want is for the elites who “care” to be able to falsify all evidence and control all information so they can force everyone else to do their will (so-called “save the Earth”). Sorry. That won’t pass muster here. The scientific method in a scientific enterprise or you are called out, shamed, humiliated and you will never regain your reputation as a scientist. And I am all for firing and/or prosecution. Wake up Steve S.
Nations with wealthy and free individual citizens voluntarily limit family size and work hard to preserve their environments.
Nations with poor and unfree individual citizens are forced to survive by relying on their offspring and so produce more of them. The environment must necessarily take second place to survival.
The Earth will only ever reach a sustainable people/environment balance if everyone on the planet becomes rich enough and free enough as fast as possible.
Artificial pricing of energy by political dictat takes us in exactly the opposite direction and will be far worse for both people and the environment than energy priced by market forces.
The conscience money that the more advanced nations are going to have to pay to the less advanced isn’t going to help the planet one jot.
It will just be a transfer of wealth from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries with a negative effect on global sustainability.
The net result will be lots of rich people in all countries dominating the vast unfree majority who will be kept poor forever with the most malign consequences possible for the planet.
Bill P (09:22:29) : Polar Urals: “1940 is cold;” (?)
Here is my new graph, added to the page. It was 1941 and I’ve added all the spike years which are hopefully correct now. Thanks.
“”” Stephen Wilde (13:41:29) : “””
Well you can’t force people to be successful.
We already violate Gaia’s rule of survival of the fittest; by insisting on ensuring the survival of those that Gaia would have the Sabre Toothed Tigers, and Dire Wolves eat. But that is what after all makes us human. That blind person (excuse me; sight impaired) that MN would destroy, just might be a very talented organist or pianist, and “pay” for their own survival by making life more pleasant for us with their talents; whatever they are.
So we freely violate Gaia’s law, since none of us is so smart as to choose who should survive.
But when we do it on such massivs scales, as to support those who just turn out to be lazy, besides being untalented. We should never abandon the unfortunate; but we shouldn’t encourage just plain slackers either.
steven mosher (12:17:12) :
Hi Mosh. good to hear you.
(1) Ha. Data. You are right of course. However, I didn’t draw the graphs fresh from the figures because I haven’t even learned excel graphs let alone R (it’s all done in photoshop) and don’t currently have the time to learn. BUT I did keep the original GISS graphs, which are date-stamped at time of download, around 21 October, I’ll do a screenshot of that. The truth is, I’ve not got years of science training and work behind me, just a reasonably sharp mind and eye and passion for helping the derailed science, so I use whatever tools are to hand and hope that others can take up the torch and improve my work. I could write a whole essay on this. BUT I do appreciate that standards are vital.
(2) June July August. Thanks for that info. For that I need to be able to construct the graphs from the data. I think I’ll download the data anyway so it’s close date-wise to the graphs used. And take a screen shot of the files. Any offers to construct those graphs? Will it make a difference? Possibly, because I see Briffa 2007 shows the classic UHI-looking uptick for the summer graph. See my note to Tom in Texas, below. I need to mull over this one. Any thoughts?
Tom in Texas (12:26:28) :
(1) References: my numbers in brackets were not done as per academic practice, referring to others’ work. I should have done something different. It was simply my own way of tallying the points I was noticing – because there are so many, many are only small details, but they all add up.
(2) I said in my piece, rather off the top of my head, that I reckoned UHI in winter was higher. This was a thought I had on the spot when I wrote and I shouldn’t have included it because it’s only a thought. I remembered the Russian winter heating that we all know about from exposed pipes shown at WUWT last year. But I see that Briffa 2007 has a temperature graph that flicks up in the SUMMER rather than the winter. Or at any rate, the winter noise drowns the signal. I think UHI is a serious issue that we need as a skeptics community to be able to crack, at least to reasonable approximations, for any given station, to bypass GISS and CRU.
Lucy, first I want to commend you on doing what you have done. This is to actually run the numbers yourself.
However, as a couple of other commenters have pointed out, the correlation is not with the whole year. In doing this kind of analysis, you first need to find out which month(s) the tree rings are correlated with. (I don’t know how Briffa did the analysis, but that’s how I do it.)
In this case, the correlation is with July, and somewhat June as well. I haven’t done all of the analyses, but I find the following correlations between the tree ring data and local temperature records for July alone:
Salehard – 0.60
Berezovo – 0.53
Mys Kammenyj – 0.60
In other words, it does appear that there is a signal in the Yamal records. Whether that signal can be extracted and used to reconstruct historical temperatures is another question … but I fear that your analysis above does not establish a lack of correlation.
Bill P (13:27:24) :
(1) yes, you’ve summarised it about right. And you appreciate the virtues of eyeballing (not that I would want to do without proper calculated material, just that visuals are important too, like anecdotal evidence, and show much that narrow precision can miss).
(2) my object here was to use the oldest thermometer records, linked to all the rest, to cover as (hehe) “robustly” as possible, the time of splice between supposedly steady past temperatures and recent “alarming” rise. I’m a bit dizzy with having seen lots of pics recently and I have the distinct feeling that somewhere I’ve seen evidence of treerings correlating to the MWP that (unlike what Bill suggests) we know very robustly exists from many peer-reviewed sources as well as anecdotal ones. Also I felt that some kind of pattern was evident in even the rogue treerings – see also my second Yamal post. It just wasn’t a correlation to the longterm temperature record. Not in that tiny set. So altogether, I’m definitely open to the possibility that treerings as temperature proxies may yet prove usable. But not until we get the AGW bias out of the way. And I don’t want to discount the possibility that treerings may beat to a different drum… like cosmic radiation. Evidence is appearing along such lines.
George E Smith (14:43:07)
I agree entirely.
But who supports the slackers ?
Anyone who supports tyranny (foreign aid to rulers and support for helpful tyrants rather than for the poorest of the ruled).
And anyone who buys votes with over generous payments from taxpayer funds.
In both cases over powerful government is the problem not the cure.
I call it ‘the decadence of democracy’ and there is no solution.
On balance I thing the West is on the way out, the East will gain control but with hugely different cultural imperatives and 500 years from now, if anything remains, the 500 years from Simon de Montford’s Parliament to the creation of the European Union will be the golden age long since lost notwithstanding the violent upheavals that occurred during that period.
I prefer a glass half full to a glass half empty but the present situation makes me glad that at my age I’m an observer rather than a participant.
Willis Eschenbach (14:53:32) :
I think Lucy’s point is that it for those who propose a correlation to prove it and not for her to disprove it.
She has provided more than enough doubt for the proposers of a correlation to have a serious case to answer.
I speak as a lawyer, not a scientist.
Lucy,
Don’t let your critics rattle you.
None of us have the complete answer.
What matters is to show that the ‘science is settled’ brigade are talking through their a**** and you have made a substantial contribution to demonstrating that.
The real world is telling us that more GHGs do not seem to translate into a measurable climate effect despite the absorption characteristics of those gases in the air.
Deciding that CO2 levels are a significant contributor to climate changes was always fanciful and that idea was opportunistically hijacked for political reasons by ideologues to the detriment of real climate research over the past 30 years.
Climatology as a science is not far from the foetus stage and we all stand to be corrected but its a certainty that the so called professionals haven’t a clue.
Great work Lucy Skywalker!! Another missile in the exhaust port!! You must have bulls-eyed swamp rats back home!!! Difficult to refute actual temperature data against proxy data. Some sleepless nights for Briffa once the data was released. I hope we see more data released. I suspect there will be more of this kind of result.
Willis Eschenbach (14:53:32) :
The point that you, Mosh, and others make, re correlation to summer months, is an important one, and I guess the one RC will most want to use. I was stalled by it now, and took time out to look at the issues. My first thought is that it is a case of being blinded by Science, so that we stop seeing and pursuing the obvious. It is long-term temperature changes we are looking for, and we should, therefore, IMHO, see correlation in temperatures at all times of the year ie the mean temperatures, not just the growing season temperatures. If we see one thing in the growing season and another at other times, surely this can only be because the sample is too small to eliminate noise sufficiently? I think we can see this issue in at least one other instance. If you look at Briffa 2007’s maps for different trends of different growing-season factors, they are all different. To me, this suggests strongly that we are seeing weather not climate (noise not signal) in this case because the variations are so small.
I shall go on thinking about this one. Thanks.
As others have noted the correlation was not with the annual temperature but with selected months depending on the site (e.g. Yamal, June, July). Bearing this in mind, Briffa has only shown the historical record of the temperature for these particular months. It is perhaps amusing to note that the correlation with the Nov temperatures also reaches 95% confidence, but with an inverse correlation, which clearly shows the relationship between treering and temperature is more complex than is suggested by the simple correlation. (Figure 6b(i) Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 2008 363, 2269-2282). In fact based on this, admittedly aphysical model, you could reach the reverse conclusions
Lucy, thanks for your reply. You say:
Actually, that’s not the case. It is frequently inherent in the plant itself. Some plants require cold at a particular time of year to grow well. Here’s some typical quotes off the internet, referring to various plant:
Thus, particularly in the arctic or sub-arctic regions, it is not at all uncommon for a tree or other plant to be positively correlated with temperature during one part of the year and negatively correlated with temperature in another part of the year. Not to mention uncorrelated with temperature during some other parts of the year.
Rather OT but something which might be of interest, looking at the paper Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 2008 363, 2269-2282, there is a very interesting comment with respect to climate modelling on page 2280
“Indeed even the maximum concordance values calculated for the series 101-year
windows reach only just above 0.3, barely significant, while values approaching 0.4 occur in the naturally forced experiment.”.
In other words the particular GCM with greenhouse gas forcings used was less successful at reproducing the observational and tree-ring temperatures than the natural forcings. Three interpretations if we accept the temperature record as correct, first this particular GCM was inadequate, second the GCM was applied in a way which it was not fit for, and third the changes in temperature have nothing to do with greenhouse gas forcing. I suspect the second is the correct one.
Eschenbach (16:47:38) “Thus, particularly in the arctic or sub-arctic regions, it is not at all uncommon for a tree or other plant to be positively correlated with temperature during one part of the year and negatively correlated with temperature in another part of the year. Not to mention uncorrelated with temperature during some other parts of the year.” In essence (and thoroughly established on WUWT on several posts), actual temperature measurements are far more accurate than any other proxy. Duh.
Lucy, a few days ago, Anthony did a story based on the article at http://www.expressnews.ualberta.ca/article.cfm?id=776 Can you have a look at what the tree rings say about that era? My understanding of the hockey shtick is that temperatures today, when the old western and eastern Greenland settlements are arctic tundra, are allegedly much warmer than 1000 to 600 years ago, when the western and eastern Greenland settlements were thriving agricultural communities. I.e. the hockey shtick is plain absolutely wrong, wrong, wrong. And if it is so spectacularly wrong about one of the few items we *CAN* cross-check, how many other errors are there in various temperature reconstructions that we *CAN’T* cross-check?
Willis, you’re playing a good devil’s advocate, thanks. It’s too late for me to ruminate further, but I know that in the past, folk like Tamino have, once I’ve digested their stuff properly, ended up giving me excellent ammunition. But at this point I’m not sure…