  The authors recently presented new values for the octet baryon sigma terms.
These were extracted using the Feynman-Hellman theorem from a chiral
perturbation theory fit to octet baryon mass data from the PACS-CS
collaboration. Of particular interest is the precise determination of the
strangeness sigma term $\sigma_s = 21 \pm 6$ MeV. In this work, we elaborate on
the critical effect which the choice of scale setting has on this value. We
discuss the prospect that the comparison of direct and 'spectrum'
determinations of the sigma terms from the lattice can provide insight not only
into scale setting on the lattice, but into QCD itself.
