Canadian Politics Today

I don't think he's arguing that anything be thrown away.  He's calling for a more standardized approach. It looks to me like the main thrust of his argument is that they very wildly, which suggests that the regulatory bodies that evaluate these studies don't appear to have clear standards in deciding what's good or not good. Maybe they just put the report on a desk and measure how thick it is. I don't think he's saying that any particular methodology is crap, just that there doesn't seem to be any way of telling which reports are crap and which are not.  There might not be settled science on these issues yet. And maybe going forward one can look at all these reports with these different methodologies and find which ones were better than others.

 -k

Projects in the same animal habitat didn't have the same species in their reports... 

This is not an oversight in some scientific methodology.    This is leaving entire species out of the oil company's environmental assessments...   hmmm...   I wonder how they missed that... 

"You would think that projects that are that close together, that are similar in nature, would have a more common set of shared species," he said.
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Some 316 different mathematical models were used to measure habitat and they came up with different results from each other 82 per cent of the time.

Only 33 of the models were independently verified by field data or separate statistical methods. Ford found the assessments that used verification were about twice as likely to project serious lingering environmental impacts.

Since there's so much variation with so little checking, there's no way to tell which assessments are more accurate, Ford says.

"Given the largely inconsistent approaches used to measure and rank 'habitat,' we have no basis with which to measure the performance, accuracy, or reliability of most habitat models used in oilsands (assessment)," the paper says.

If they are using accredited biologists (RPBio), I hope they remove the accreditation of these biologists that are doing this shoddy, and dishonest,  work.

Ford says the current approach has real consequences for real people.

"There's people who live on this land (whose) culture and way of life is tied to those animals. And we're telling them we're pretty much making this up."

They're just "making this up".  And you're trying to defend the oil company's "scientific" work?   It's like defending big tobacco when they found no links between smoking and health.