Because the source is important, to understand the motives. Don't you agree?

More important than the quality of the evidence itself? People you disagree with can still be right from time to time, even if they are "biased" as you suggest.

Yes they can be right, I agree. Also I never stated I disagreed with them.

I simply questioned their independence.

Let me give you another hypothetical example:

Would you trust a report on the impacts of fracking by a pro-fracking NGO, with private funding? Even if their data looked ok on face value?

The messenger matters.

Right, right, you never said you disagreed. You’re “just asking questions”.

The messenger matters less than the data, the collection methods, and the approach to analysis. Bias can be a reason to more carefully examine a conclusion and the methods, particularly if a source has had quality issues in the past.

But simply throwing out accusations of bias in the absence of literally any other reason to doubt a pretty straightforward conclusion (removing sources of NO2 makes NO2 go down, shocking!) is not a meaningful contribution to a discussion. Every researcher is biased. Every source of funding is biased. Hell, you haven’t even shown that they’re significantly biased, the only thing you’ve pointed out is that apparently some of their grant funding came from the EU, as if that’s some sort of smoking gun.

Did their bias lead them to an invalid conclusion? Do you believe it did? Do you have a reason to believe it did? If so, state it. If not, what was the point in making your comment other than to sow doubt?

Asking questions is how we learn. If I disagreed, I would have wrote that instead.

What, exactly, were you hoping to learn by accusing Airparif and the EU of bias?

All this time I’ve been asking questions of you, hoping to learn about your thought process: Who should be performing these measurements? Who should be funding them? Who is someone without bias in the outcome of this process? What is an example of any result on any topic you accept as having been produced by an unbiased party with unbiased funding sources? What do you think are deficiencies in this research caused by the authors’ biases?

Not only won’t you even attempt to answer these excruciatingly simple questions, but you make it obvious that you have no desire to. So it seems more than just a little disingenuous to suddenly hold up “just asking questions” as a virtue when you have zero interest in answering any yourself.

You should try addressing my original question, rather than deflecting with yours. Have you provided any evidence of their independence?

But you clearly can't. I give up.

This is ridiculous. The standard isn’t “are they unbiased” because it is utterly unachievable. You know this and you cling to it anyway. What matters is whether their bias materially influenced their conclusions.

They have provided analysis and data backing that analysis. It is now up to you as a skeptic to find fault in that. “They are biased” is lazy, intellectually dishonest, and utterly unconvincing. It is a canned response that can be given to literally every conclusion ever reached and so can (and has been) dismissed out of hand.

Of course I'd be skeptical. Skepticism is healthy, especially in your example. In that case, the most productive conversation to have would be examining (and either refuting or accepting) their evidence. So far you've refused to do either one here. Instead, you repeatedly engage in the genetic fallacy I linked to above, or insisting that we should consult some impossibly impartial oracle of objective truth instead.

That's your right of course. No one can force you to avoid using logical fallacies. But the longer you do that, the more it starts to look like you're avoiding or even conceding the real debate. It's up to you whether that matters to you.

But I have looked at their evidence in the article. I then done a web search to learn more about Airparif, who leads them (and their resumes), who funds them etc. because I never heard of them (I am not French).

I have literally done my own research, and came away questioning their independence.

Nobody on this thread has given me any evidence that they are fully independent, best I got was a comment with a link to the Airparif website.

Instead I got attacked for even daring to ask the question. Go HN.