Posts by ChrisW
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and China will never be onboard.
I see what may be a pattern in James Bremner's thinking here - a difficulty with time, of how things change with time.
China may take longer to come on board than the US, but circumstances change, it will get there, if not ideally soon, then perhaps soon enough. China is also more vulnerable than many countries to catastrophic effects.
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To be charitable to James and focus on the underlying flaw in his argument, I think he mis-stated his concern as one of logic (then contradicted himself with the quote selected by ww), when really it's one of disagreement on the premise that the worst case scenario on the do-nothing side is heaps worse than the odd spot of financial bother if the world takes action.
The obvious flaw in his logic (and it is really obvious) is that he assumes that the dire predictions of global doom if agw happens are true. As I understand it, in previous times the earth has been hotter than it is today with higher concentrations of CO2 and the earth and life did just fine, so that assumption is wrong.
To the extent that James is looking back at all to those halcyon days of higher temperatures when life did just fine, he's looking from a safe distance of tens and hundreds of millions of years, or perhaps a mere 125,000 years.
Global and regional extinctions of species, population reductions of 99.99%? In the long-run, it doesn't matter, the survivors thrived and since then life has evolved and ecology redeveloped many times over, adapting to the changing circumstances. So all is sweet?
But on the human time-frames meaningful on the personal and societal scales of our species let alone all the others - years and centuries say - the worst case scenario of living through those times of changing and high temperatures would surely be many dimensions of catastrophic.
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I hesitate to help spread the word, but here's an overly detailed account from the Gisborne Herald of Wishart's presentation in Gisborne last month. The meeting was at farmer request, and seems to have been an odd one-off. Wishart presented in confident campaigning mode, with the cosmetics of science-content in respect of global climate but with minimal understanding of the substance or the science process underneath.
His mission is certainly not in quest for truth and a deeper understanding of the world's climate system. He ascribes to all others the same dubious selective manipulation of any snippet of information that might be used in debating fashion. As for the Emissions Trading Scheme and carbon taxes – a cunning plan hatched to fund the UN towards socialist world government. Nuff said.
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haven't we already got safe water, basic sanitation and healthcare?
Whose we?
Sofie's we.
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it seems a bit unfair for Coney, Bunkle and Cartwright's howler over the "two groups" -- and even given James' useful commentary, it still seems to me a truly terrible mistake -- to be deemed irrelevant.
Russell, if you were to listen again to the Paul/Hill interview, in particular at 4.50-7.05 and again around 32 mins, I doubt that you would consider that there was a Coney Bunkle Cartwright 'howler' and 'terrible mistake' in the matter of the two groups, that there was in principle an experimental study.
Paul seems totally credible, given her direct role in what seems to have been an exhaustive inquiry process - Green chose one group of women semi-randomly in advance (prospectively) for an "intervention" consisting of monitoring only, for comparison with the other one to receive conventional treatment.
But it was a "bad experiment" by which in context I think she means the prospective groups were not clearly defined and recorded, treatments were not by consistent protocols and that of individual women evolved from one group to the other in response to clinical decisions, and it was not properly analysed and reported.
When after Green's retirement McIndoe et al. analysed the data, they could not use the prospective grouping. Instead they grouped the patients retrospectively, nominally using clear smear tests (or not) at 2 years as the basis for their grouping. There is strong overlap but not complete matching between their retrospective group 2 and Green's prospective group for monitoring-only. Paul is also clear that the inquiry did not rely on the McIndoe et al analysis, but went well beyond it in thoroughness, though the impression and inherent confusion in this remains.
The McCredie et al 2008 analysis after subsequent follow-up takes fortunate advantage of the unethical, never-to-repeated, unfortunate experiment, to establish the frequency and rate of progression of untreated "carcinoma-in-situ" (CIN3) to invasive cancer - c. 31% after 30 years.
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Hoo, all quiet and then ...
@ChrisW -- ... I think yo're misinterpreting McIndoe et al., however.
It wasn't so much my interpretation of McIndoe et al 1984 that I was outlining, but the point that their descriptions of treatments and the retrospective basis of their group assignment for analysis of outcomes would, taken at face value by a reader such as Linda Bryder, reasonably lead to the interpretation that there was no experiment. (But it seems they didn't actually describe what happened in design principle or in practice - some may be implicit, but it's substantially obscured.)
It seems to me that this is the key point in the middle of the mess from which there has been such divergence in the overall interpretation and understanding of what happened.
I may be naive, but I reckon poor medical-science communication as well as poor science and pre-Cartwright ethics has a lot to do with this, more than ideologically driven revisionism.
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progressively = prospectively, sorry again for my retrogression
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The Kim Hill - Charlotte Paul interview and reading the McCredie et al 2008 Lancet Oncology paper with clearer presentation of the treatments and updated analysis lead me to regret casting aspersions on the Cartwright inquiry. Whatever Bryder's views - and I'm sure they are finely nuanced - my
Extending that just a little, the implication is that the inquiry was not about establishing the truth, that Silvia Cartwright did what was expected of her by the influential, did it well. And then went on to higher judicial honours and the Governor-Generalship.
was a gross extension, uncalled for. I farted in church: thank you all for politely ignoring it, as one should.
There are oddities on the matter of the "experiment" and its presentation. Paul was very specific that Green progressively (ie in advance, as opposed to retrospectively) chose a portion of patients with diagnosed CIS (CIN3) for monitoring-only "treatment", in fact she said on the basis of the day of the week (as a form of randomisation, a detail that might have been worth a "really?" follow-up question).
But the McIndoe et al 1984 paper that was the expose published after Green's retirement and purportedly the basis of the Metro article and inquiry - it says no such thing, and the groups 1 and 2 whose respective outcomes differ so markedly are clearly stated to be established on the basis of normal (negative) smear test results or not after 2 years, that is retospectively. Taking this at face value would seem to be a fair basis for an interpretation that there was no experiment. -
That apparent quote from Bryder may be symptomatic of what I would take to be her real concern, that the subject is vast and her evidence and conclusions are complex, multifaceted and perhaps subtle, recorded thoroughly in a book that as yet is unread, but not well suited to compression to brief interview and soundbite. So the new Listener has a 1-page article on Phillida Bunkle's response and two pages of letters including a lengthy one from Jo Manning, Ass.Professor of Law including "Bryder suffers from the misunderstanding that ...", to which Bryder replies "... All the points she raises are addressed in the book, which arrives at very different conclusions ...".
Seems fair enough really, come back when you've read the book.
Significant participants and others have contributed much feed-back on the Kim Hill interview.
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I'm not sure "theoretical" was a put-down. Heslop's article had 1 reference compared to 50 in the other paper.
Funny thing on the number of references - I heard Ian Wishart tell an attentive audience of 200 Gisborne farmers three weeks ago that his book demonstrating that anthropogenic global warming was a giant con by the thousands of scientists working on behalf of the United Nations towards world government - (pause for breath) his book was the real deal on the science because he had 18 references from peer-reviewed journals on one particular aspect, whereas Gareth Morgan's pathetic effort "Poles Apart" had only 2 references on this vital matter.
And I've worked many years on the interface between practitioners and researchers (in totally non-medical fields), I recognise the tensions and the language, I reckon in the context "theoretical" was a put-down. And it's germane to the subject, because the context is the confusion between clinical practice and research (and teaching), all of them evolving over decades, but not at all smoothly with a number of lumpy individuals involved, and seemingly no inbuilt processes for resolving the problems.
Consensus is a problematic word - does it mean unanimity, an overwhelming majority, 60%, 51%? And minority views may be right. If the question was a research one subject to hypothesis testing, then consensus of whatever degree is irrelevant.
But was the right research question posed? As Heslop pointed out - if H. Green's hypothesis was really as stated that CIS/CIN3 does not lead to cervical cancer, then one case disproves it, and publishable data was available in the 1960s to other senior people at National Women's, who did not act till the 1980s. So a systemic problem, rather than one unfortunate experimenter, who was really a practitioner. And the real questions were much more complex, but scarcely addressed, so again a systemic problem. Shades of grey.