Covid & Climate Change - The Strange Tale of Two Statisticians and One Mathematician

In 2015, the BBC aired a much hyped program on man-made climate change entitled ‘Climate Change by Numbers’. It was last available on BBC4 in 2021.

The presenters were mathematician Hannah Fry and statisticians Norman Fenton and David Spiegelhalter. I wrote about the program here and here. This is how the producers present what they try to do:

Fry talks about global temperature data and ‘homogenisation’ (so called) of the raw data, supposedly to achieve a more accurate record. She also talks about the infamous ‘pause’ in global temperature increase from 1998-2013 which, amazingly has now been totally eliminated from the global temperature datasets by the wonders of . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ‘homogenisation’!

So, it’s no surprise when Hannah Fry says in the program that “mathematical manipulation of the raw data can look like fiddling the figures”. Ironic no, when the inconvenient Pause (not predicted by climate models) was admitted to exist in 2015 but has been disappeared in 2022 by the very same legitimate statistical techniques which she claimed at the time are viewed with unjustified suspicion by climate sceptics (aka climate deniers, aka conspiracy theorists)! But we know all about conspiracy theorists now don’t we, given the extraordinary events of the last two years, and we especially know all about the ‘anti-vaxxer’ conspiracy theorists. Guess what, Hannah’s back with the BBC! This time, she’s talking about those 8% anti-vaxxers in the UK who refused to get jabbed. 8%? Dr Claire Craig immediately picked up on this:

As you can see, according to the government’s own figures, the percentage of those eligible not vaccinated with even a single dose is 30%. Not 8% as claimed by Fry. Norman Fenton, Fry’s co-presenter on ‘Climate Change by Numbers’, is even more critical of her presenting such a claim:

Norman has become something of a hero in Covid sceptic circles, rigorously and consistently analysing and questioning the figures on all cause deaths, Covid deaths and vaccination numbers given out by the government. He’s certainly made up for his part in pushing BBC climate propaganda in 2015, but even back then, just after the program was aired, he stated his misgivings. I quote:

Being neither a climate scientist nor a classical statistician (my research uses Bayesian probability rather than classical statistics to reason about uncertainty) I have to say that I found the complexity of the climate models and their underlying assumptions to be daunting. The relevant sections in the IPCC report are extremely difficult to understand and they use assumptions and techniques that are very different to the Bayesian approach I am used to. In our Bayesian approach we build causal models that combine prior expert knowledge with data. 

Our ‘attribution study’ showed wages was by far the major influence. When wages was removed from the study, the resulting statistical model was not a good fit. This was analogous to what the climate scientists’ models were showing when the human CO2 emissions factor was removed from their models; the previously good fit to temperature was no longer evident. 

Much credit to Norman Fenton then, for expressing doubts about his simplistic warming attribution example, presented by the BBC in support of the IPCC’s attribution of warming since 1950 to man-made climate change and now, for questioning the BBC propaganda narrative on vaccination numbers.

Which brings us to the third presenter of the BBC’s ‘Climate Change by Numbers’, David Spiegelhalter, who has generally been supportive of the official Covid narrative and the vaccines. Back in 2015, he also told us that all global warming since 1880 was due to industrial greenhouse gas emissions, which even The Science (TM) did not say at the time:

Onto the last of the last of the guest presenters, David Spiegelhalter, who helps people like the NHS predict the future. I trust he is better at that than he is at assessing the past! 1 trillion tonnes of carbon he informs us, is our budget beyond which we can expect ‘dangerous’ climate change (2C rise above pre-industrial levels). We’ve already burnt around a half a trillion tonnes since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and “that’s given us almost a degree of warming”, says Spiegelhalter. So what he is saying in effect is that Hannah’s 0.85 degree temperature rise since 1880 is all down to the burning of fossil fuels. Even the IPCC does not go this far.

Now Spiegelhalter is telling us that the rise in excess deaths, particularly those in hospitals, may be due to the knock-on effects of lockdowns. Excuse me, but Joel Smalley was pointing out in early 2021 that the weekly 1000 or so excess deaths at home since March 2020, were due to the effects of lockdowns. Spiegelhalter acknowledges those deaths at home but doesn’t seem to connect them with the effects of lockdowns somehow. he says:

England usually logs around 9,000 weekly deaths at this time of year, but the figure has averaged 10,400 in recent weeks. 

Speaking to BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Sir David pointed to the ONS data.

Sir David said: 'Only a minority of those [deaths] are Covid. [So there is] lots of interest and concern about what’s going on. 

'People have said it might be excess deaths at home but that’s been happening the whole time, all the way through the pandemic, a lot more people have died in home than normal. 

'But we’re now seeing an excess of non-Covid deaths in hospital.'

'Some people are saying maybe this is the start of the signs of the impact of the measures against the pandemic and the disruption in the healthcare and people’s use of healthcare that is starting to have an impact,' Sir David added.

The start of the impact? Is he kidding? This has been going on since March 2020 and now there are additional deaths due to the toxic ‘vaccines’, which of course Spiegelhalter would not dare to mention on the BBC, even if he felt inclined to do so.

So there you are. A curious tale of three wise public voices on climate change and Covid, stretching over 7 years, where it turns out that only one can be said to be truly wise and rigorously truthful.