Professor Fenton - Hero or Zero?
John Ridgway has written an interesting article over at Cliscep which looks at Professor Norman Fenton et al's recent study re. vaccine deaths which I covered briefly here. John points out that Norman was one of the main presenters arguing the case for man-made climate change on the BBC's two part Climate Change by Numbers. I must admit, I had forgotten all about that, even though I wrote two articles critiquing the program at the time!
Norman is definitely a bit of a hero in Covid sceptic circles now for bravely pointing out so rigorously and meticulously the flaws in the current Covid/vaccines narrative, but he wasn't such a hero back then. Or was he?
John says:
PS. Another main message is captured by the article’s subheading: Hero or zero?
The point is that whilst Fenton was presenting stuff that seems intuitively true and accords with the authorised view, he was a hero. But as soon as he employs the same expertise to present stuff that is counter-intuitive, and goes against the authorised view, he becomes a zero. That’s how life works and we need to get used to it.
He was a hero of professorial expert calibre in the eyes of the BBC and other climate zealots in 2015 because of his advocacy of the claims of IPCC climate scientists that 95% of warming since 1950 was extremely likely to be man-made. This is the (in)famous IPCC AR5 'Attribution statement'. At the time, he was not a hero as far as I was concerned because, although he presented the statistical case for the above quoted statement, he failed to make the scientific case, and that is important.
I wrote at the time of his efforts:
Norman Fenton is a Spurs fan and a down-to-earth Londoner – so we have one thing in common at least! In order to explain the mystery that is an IPCC climate change ‘attribution study’, he chooses to model the performance of Premier league teams and finds that, in amongst a variety of factors, one stands out as having a very marked influence upon performance – the wage bill. Fenton creates a simple model which predicts the performance of teams based upon various factors. First he shows us the rather good fit of model vs. actual performance for Man City. Impressive. Then he shows us Liverpool:
Hmmm, not quite so impressive, but unabashed, Prof Fenton says that this good model fit is “true for all of the teams in the Premier League”. He goes on: “Now I know I can trust my model, we can move on to the clever bit”. He really does seem to have this IPCC attribution study nailed! The “clever bit” is isolating what factor, if any, has a dominant effect upon any team’s performance, which turns out to be the wage bill. This is ‘attribution’ and the principle is the same for climate change, albeit the latter situation is far more complex, with an extremely complicated web of interacting variables needing to be taken into account rather than just a few. Most of these variables are related to natural (internally and externally forced) climate variability but, nevertheless, the IPCC has looked at them all and concluded that their net effect is near zero since 1950 – hence they can attribute to CO2 emissions with startling 95% certainty virtually all global warming since 1950 (but not since 1880). How, you may ask? Well, firstly because of depressed Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius. He it was who, in a roundabout sort of way, first showed, “using maths”, that a doubling of CO2 could warm the globe by 4C via the so called Greenhouse Effect. So that’s one crucial piece of ‘evidence’ in place; now just to ‘prove’ the assertion that natural variability has played virtually no part in recent global warming.
Professor Fenton then proceeds to explain why natural variability as an explanation for recent global warming is precluded by the 'fact' that the pattern of warming in the upper atmosphere 'proves' that the warming must be anthropogenic:
Now, Fenton informs us that the that the models show that this pattern (tropospheric warming/stratospheric cooling) only fits well with anthropogenic CO2 being the principle cause of recent global warming. What he neglects to mention is:
The tropical mid-tropospheric ‘hotspot’ which we clearly see in his ‘actually happening’ representation above has actually failed to materialise, even though it is one of the key predictions of the climate models. There has been no observed accelerated warming of the mid troposphere over the tropics. So even though the troposphere as a whole has warmed and the stratosphere cooled, the mid troposphere has not warmed significantly compared to the surface.
There is an alternative (anthropogenic) explanation for stratospheric cooling and surface/tropospheric warming which involves CFCs. Basically, the hypothesis is that accelerated ozone loss caused by CFCs in the stratosphere has resulted in cooling of that portion of the atmosphere whilst, at the same time, UV energy which would normally be absorbed by stratospheric ozone (warming the stratosphere) has passed straight through to warm the lower troposphere. This might explain the ‘pause’ in global warming from about 1998 and the corresponding ‘pause’ in stratospheric cooling as a direct result of the decline in the concentration of ozone depleting CFCs in the upper atmosphere since the international adoption of the Montreal Protocol in January 1989.
The graphics which the BBC used to demonstrate this point are quite laughable. They say, that if it was the 'Sun wot dunnit', then the pattern of warming would look like this:
But 'actually' (honest guv, truly), it looks like this:
Damning evidence of guilt m'Lord. The case for the prosecution is proven beyond doubt. CO2 dunnit!
Well, 'actually', the second graphic is an output of the climate models and the actual data does not reveal such a clearly defined mid tropospheric hotspot, as I pointed out at the time, despite the best efforts of data revisionists and torturers.
So, the Professor might have got his stats right, but he was sadly misguided as to the robustness of the scientific case.
However, credit to Norman, he realised pretty quickly that this might be the case, in this article which he wrote soon after his celebrity appearance on a BBC 'flagship' climate change program. I gave him credit at the time:
Professor Norman Fenton appears to have had a bit of a rethink with regard to his presentation in the program. In his blog post he comes across as much more guarded about the role of humans in climate change than as portrayed in the program. Well worth reading.
Norman says:
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.
Norman is honest in that he admits his lack of understanding of the complex climate models and the assumptions which go into building them. In the second paragraph he basically says that the models are only a good fit, thereby proving the statistical attribution statement if the basic assumptions and physics of CO2-driven atmospheric warming are themselves correct.
So, Norman is still a hero in my reckoning. He quickly admitted to the limitations of his simple football analogy presented in the BBC program and now he has gone full sceptic on the Covid/vaccine statistics.