Funding Research Questions

For John, BLUF:  It would appear to me that your long funeral processions to the grave side are significant contributors to climate change, including increased snow fall.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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In today's edition of The Boston Globe is an OpEd by Mr Dante Ramos, that goes after Wei-Hock (“Willie”) Soon in a round-about sort of way. Dr Soon is one of four authors♠ of a paper published in Science Bulletin,♥ "Why models run hot: results from an irreducibly simple climate model".

The Globe article, "When scholars go rogue" has a subheadline of "'Academic freedom' can't be an all-purpose excuse for misconduct".  Here is the lede:

UPHOLDING INTELLECTUAL freedom doesn’t have to mean tiptoeing around questionable ethical choices or iffy data.

So Mr Ramos is going after Dr Soon, but, after dangling "iffy data" he goes after the fact that Dr Soon is not forthcoming with regard to his sources of funding.  In the last paragraph he does say of research institutions such as the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics:

Either they keep letting their names be connected with dubious research, or they risk making martyrs of scholars whose work legitimately comes under fire.

I am in agreement with Mr Ramos about people revealing their sources of funding.♦  What I don't get is his attempting to dismiss the paper based solely on the source of funding.  Has Mr Ramos read the paper and does he understand it?  Could he give us a quick synopsis?

Here is an extract from the lede in a Power Line article by Mr John Hinderaker, "The Smearing of Willie Soon":

The paper identifies flaws in the computer models that predict major global warming–which shouldn’t be a surprise, since the models’ predictions have flopped.  It concludes that due to mathematical errors, the models overstate the impact of CO2 on the climate by a factor of three times.

Mr Hinderaker, who didn't touch on the item in The Globe, pretty much trashes The New York Times for its approach.  He also claims there is dubious money on all sides, including Russian funding of Environmental Groups.

But, there is another issue and that is if the impact of Government funding is actually neutral.  Mr Ramos dismisses concerns in a flippant manner:

Soon didn’t respond to my request for comment; I did receive an odd e-mail, signed by an associate of his, quibbling with the premise that government grants confer more credibility than funding from corporate interests.

"An odd EMail"?  that is pretty dismissive.

At any rate, Mr Hinderaker, who seems to be a bit of a libertarian, ends his item this way:

The New York Times and other left-wing news sources assume that government funding is no problem, but private funding is a scandal. I think the opposite is true. It is a scandal that our government spends billions of dollars, enriching many compliant climate scientists–Michael Mann is just one of many examples–to promote its own power. Thank goodness that there is a tiny amount of independent funding that supports objective research and contributes to a debate that is being won, hands down, by climate realists like Dr. Soon.

So, basically, the question is, does math work differently for privately funded research than for publicly funded research?  Put another way, did the Koch Brothers make those hundreds of millions of dollars because they are purchasing with their money a better form of Math?  I don't think so, but I am open to Mr Ramos enlightening me.

Hat tip to the Instapundit for the Power Line item.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  The others were Christopher Monckton, Matt Briggs and David Legates.
♥  It's "Impact Factor", 1.321 for the year 2011, is fairly low.
♦  He doesn't even mention that Dr Soon received money from one of the dreaded and evil Koch Brothers.  Isn't that a touchstone of the Progressive mindset?