Climate Change By Numbers: 10 Years on
The “man-made climate change” scam is in the news again because of the developments in the case of “Climate Professor” Michael “hockey stick” Mann versus Mark Steyn.
Although last year Mann “won” his ludicrous 12-year defamation case against Steyn for calling out Mann’s hockey stick nonsense, the case exposed Mann for the pompous academic lowlife he is.
In the last few weeks the judge reduced the damages awarded from $1 million to $5,000, ordered Mann to pay massive legal costs, and has now sanctioned Mann for lies presented in his evidence. The climate change hysteria and its authoritarian net zero agenda preceded Mann’s flawed hockey stick “research”, but Mann’s work and influence have been a major factor in accelerating the UN/WEF Agenda 2030 of “you’ll own nothing and be happy” while being cold, unable to travel and eating bugs.
The net zero agenda is the most dangerous threat to our future freedom and sovereignty, so the more the work of ‘climate scientists’ like Mann can be exposed for the garbage that it is, the greater chance we have of stopping the descent into madness.
And that brings me to the reason for this article, as maybe I can now provide further evidence of the extent of the scam and the role mainstream media (and even myself unwittingly) played in it.
Ten years ago I co-presented, with Prof Sir David Spiegelhalter and Dr (now Prof) Hannah Fry, a 90 minute documentary for BBC called “Climate Change by Numbers”. For reasons that will become clear in what follows below, both of my co-presenters have gone on to become major celebrities as television science presenters, while this was my first and last BBC appearance. Spiegelhalter has fronted several major documentaries and is a regular guest on TV and radio news channels commenting on statistics and risk. Fry has become the face of TV science, presenting multiple BBC documentaries and series, being the Channel 4 election night ‘number crunching’ expert, and even guest hosting the comedy series “Have I got News For You”. Readers of this substack will also be aware of Fry from her presentation of the controversial documentary Unvaccinated, and of Spiegelhalter from his public comments on covid.
The three presenters had been selected as “mathematicians who had not been involved in climate research” and the intention was to present their findings as those of independent mathematics researchers explaining three crucial “climate change numbers”. The three numbers are those shown in the BBC 30-second trailer for the programme:
The programme was first screened on BBC 4 and has subsequently been screened several times on both BBC4 and BBC2. It won many awards and has been sold by the BBC to multiple TV networks worldwide.
Here is a 2-minutes clip (that is still on the BBC website) from the Programme in which I describe how the IPCC got to its 95% figure for the certainty that “humans had caused at least half of the recent warming” (spoiler alert: this clip shows the extent to which the programme was a propaganda piece for climate change hysteria. Regular readers of this substack will be justifiably sickened when they hear me speak here, but please read on as there are mitigating circumstances explained below!!)
Although the BBC was not aware of it at the time I was (unlike Spiegelhalter and Fry) somewhat sceptical of the whole man-made climate change narrative. But I was naïve enough to believe that the producers would be open to the idea of allowing some challenge to the ‘accepted’ narrative being part of the programme.
For example, we did one entire day’s filming in which I had written the script to explain why the 95% number was actually flawed – it being an example of the prosecutor’s fallacy.
Here is that explanation that I later wrote up for the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Contrary to the impression given by the BBC in both its promotional material and the way the programme was presented, almost every word that we three presenters said in the final edit was scripted by outside climate activists and academic consultants. Hence, instead of explaining why the 95% figure was flawed, the words they used from me in the programme presented the figure as a convincing ‘fact’.
Likewise, I was allowed to ask a couple of my own questions in a filmed interview with a climate science professor but these were also cut entirely from the final edit; one of the producers said this was because the professor was so unnerved by my questions that their subsequent performance was too ‘cranky’ to be used!
Unfortunately, the BBC had at the time made an internal decision to not allow sceptical views on climate change to be presented on any of its programmes since the ‘science was settled’.
This strategy was formally announced three years later. As such none of the material in which I was recorded presenting a more nuanced approach to the numbers made it into the final programme. Being under an NDA I was not (and I believe am still not) allowed to talk about any of the private communications made in relation to the making of the programme (which took place over a 6-month period). I did, however, write a blog piece (which the BBC only approved after some edits) shortly after the programme was screened; at the bottom there are 4 bullet points describing the issues that I wanted to include in the programme but never were. Here is what I wrote then:
But the programme also did not have the time or scope to address the complexity of some of the broader statistical issues involved in the climate debate …. In particular, the issues that were not covered were:
The real probabilistic meaning of the 95% figure. In fact it comes from a classical hypothesis test in which observed data is used to test the credibility of the ‘null hypothesis’.
The null hypothesis is the ‘opposite’ statement to the one believed to be true, i.e. ‘Less than half the warming in the last 60 years is man-made’. If, as in this case, there is only a 5% probability of observing the data if the null hypothesis is true, the statisticians equate this figure (called a p-value) to a 95% confidence that we can reject the null hypothesis.
But the probability here is a statement about the data given the hypothesis. It is not generally the same as the probability of the hypothesis given the data (in fact equating the two is often referred to as the ‘prosecutors fallacy’, since it is an error often made by lawyers when interpreting statistical evidence).See here and here for more on the limitations of p-values and confidence intervals.
Any real details of the underlying statistical methods and assumptions. For example, there has been controversy about the way a method called principal component analysis was used to create the famous hockey stick graph that appeared in previous IPCC reports. Although the problems with that method were recognised it is not obvious how or if they have been avoided in the most recent analyses.
Assumptions about the accuracy of historical temperatures. Much of the climate debate (such as that concerning the exceptionalness of the recent rate of temperature increase) depends on assumptions about historical temperatures dating back thousands of years. There has been some debate about whether sufficiently large ranges were used.
Variety and choice of models. There are many common assumptions in all of the climate models used by the IPCC and it has been argued that there are alternative models not considered by the IPCC which provide an equally good fit to climate data, but which do not support the same conclusions.
Although I obviously have a bias, my enduring impression from working on the programme is that the scientific discussion about the statistics of climate change would benefit from a more extensive Bayesian approach. Recently some researchers have started to do this, but it is an area where I feel causal Bayesian network models could shed further light and this is something that I would strongly recommend.
Because of the NDA I never spoke publicly about the programme until June 2023. Then, during this speech (from 1:40 to 4:10) at the Better Way Conference I decided to speak in general terms about the concerns I had about it:
Here is what I said (after speaking about the data manipulation and flawed modelling that had driven the entire covid narrative):
The same type of data manipulation and flawed modelling has been used for many years to exaggerate the ‘climate crisis’ and the impact of humans on it.
While I claim no expertise in climate science and not even any expertise in the mathematical and statistical simulation models the so-called climate scientists use to make their grandiose claims of imminent and inevitable catastrophe, I do have some relevant insights into the academic and media enterprise around this to know it is also an enormous scam.
That’s because in 2014-2015 I was chosen by a national publicly funded broadcaster (you can perhaps guess which one) to present a documentary about the mathematics of climate change along with two other mathematicians who have gone on to become extremely high profile science presenters for that broadcaster.
In contrast, my TV career started and ended with that documentary which, although it won many awards was fundamentally flawed. Working on it revealed to me how biased and corrupt the climate change industry is and how compromised the academics are.
After it went out I made a formal complaint about the way the programme was edited and I was especially motivated to complain because of a conversation I had with one of the programme’s academic consultants who actually wrote some of the scripts that I had to say.
I had previously made it clear that one of the main claims I had to state did not seem right but he had assured me there was overwhelming evidence to support it. After the programme went out I found out that this same professor had recently published a paper where he essentially contradicted the claim that he had scripted for me. So, I called him up and asked him about it. What do you think his response was: … “we all have to lie for the greater good”.
Even worse when I recounted this story to other academics instead of being horrified most were in total support of what the prof said. One of the few who was not – and who was genuinely well qualified to know that the statistical models were flawed – told me that they couldn’t go public on it as it would ruin their prestigious career.
So ten years on I finally make a formal apology for my own role in being part of such a blatant, but influential, piece of climate change propaganda. But hopefully, by revealing -as an insider – the extent to which such propaganda propels the climate change hysteria can make a small dent in the relentless net zero agenda.
I’ll end with an anecdote about the making of the programme. It was Martin Neil who first alerted me to the most serious aspects of the corruption of climate change science – long before the making of the programme. So, he needs to take credit for influencing my sceptical stance. However, neither of us had made any public statements about it which is why we were both auditioned for the presenter role (I will leave Martin to provide his explanation of why I was chosen over him!).
During the last filming session where all the presenters and producers were together, I did bring up in conversation a particular criticism that Martin had raised about the modelling.
One of the team’s response was: “Is he a dickhead?”
See more here Climate Dispatch
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