Re: [Phys-L] integrity +- climate change

["David Marx" <marx@phy.ilstu.edu>]

I'm not arguing all government funded research is biased either.  The
automatic rejection of research results if a scientist has had any funding
from oil interests is also unwarranted.

Secondly, there is plenty of bias in the climate research literature.  We see
lots of published reports of some observed change in a species, for example,
and the only explanation that is considered is anthropogenic climate change
without any consideration of other possible explanations nor any demonstration
of the veracity of the claim.  Yet, the reviewers and journal editors saw fit
to publish the work.  I consider that bad science.

In my cursory look at the work Richard Muller's team did, I was not impressed.
 They followed the same data handling process that the original researchers
did and got the same results.  They completely failed to address whether the
methodologies and corrections to the raw temperature data are valid. They
failed to address the effect of the electrification of the temperature sensor
network beginning in 1980, which moved most stations near heat sources.  There
is also the issue of the exclusion of temperature station data at high
latitudes, which had previously been included. Please correct me if I am
remembering incorrectly.






On 06/11/2015 10:00 AM, David Marx wrote:
> John Denker seems to be arguing below that a funding
source can lead to biased
> research.  This is true, but one should also recognize
that federal funding
> can do the same thing, since the requirement of federal
funding seems to be
> that one adopt a specific athropogenic narrative to do
any climate research.

That's nonsense several times over.

For one thing, that's not what I argued.

Secondly, it's not strictly true that he who pays the
piper calls the tune.   Richard A. Muller famously took
a bunch of money from the Koch brothers (and others)
and used it to perform a meta-analysis that showed the
climate-change data was dramatically /better/ than he
expected it to be.
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Earth

Thirdly, there is the small matter of /motive/ or
lack thereof.  I see it, everybody -- including me,
and including the government -- would be absolutely
delighted to discover that the CO2, mercury, etc.
from burning coal was harmless.