From the Seattle Times – the end game of ‘polarbeargate’:
Scientist who saw drowned polar bears reprimanded
An Alaska scientist whose observations of drowned polar bears helped galvanize the global warming movement has been reprimanded for improper release of government documents.
JUNEAU, Alaska —
An Alaska scientist whose observations of drowned polar bears helped galvanize the global warming movement has been reprimanded for improper release of government documents.
An Interior Department official said emails released by Charles Monnett were cited by a federal appeals court in decisions to vacate approval by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management of an oil and gas company’s Arctic exploration plan.
The official, Walter Cruickshank, deputy director of BOEM, said in a memo that an inspector general’s investigation contained findings that Monnett had improperly disclosed internal government documents, which he said were later used against the agency in court. He also said the investigation made other findings in regards to Monnett’s conduct, but he wasn’t taking action on those. He would not specify those findings.
Cruickshank called Monnett’s “misconduct very serious,” and said any future misconduct may lead to more severe discipline, including removal from federal service.
Monnett was briefly suspended last year during an inspector general’s investigation into a polar bear research contract he managed. The inspector general’s report, which was released Friday, said its investigation was set off by a complaint from an unidentified Interior Department employee who alleged that Monnett wrongfully released government records and that he and another scientist, Jeffrey Gleason, intentionally omitted or used false data in an article they wrote on polar bears. During that investigation, authorities also looked into the procurement issue.
full story here
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From balance of article on ST webpage:
Hmmm … confliect of interest.
Hmmm …. no autopsy; jump to conclusion.
Nothing to see here, move along (/sarc) …
.
In the private sector, this chap would have seen the pavement faster than you can say “Bob’s your uncle” but government employees pretty much have to commit the wrong kind of treason to get fired.
Reblogged this on Climate Ponderings.
Suggest he be reassigned to the Post Office in Nome, where he can get up close and personal with the polar bears.
Gee. A money grab by a ‘researcher’ of money grabs. What a surprise. Meet modern American science.
Something Al Gore said was based on a lie!?!?
So are we or aren’t we all doomed?
Gunga Din on September 29, 2012 at 12:06 am
Something Al Gore said was based on a lie!?!?
So are we or aren’t we all doomed?
———–
Since the polar bear reports were not based on a lie and since you are are insisting there was without any evidence what does that make you?
Speaking of Al Gore…..
he has lost a mint in “green” investments:
http://www.wnd.com/2012/09/al-gore-bails-from-green-energy-investment/
So, he gets a slap on the wrist…
As noted, in the real world he would have been canned in short order.
This guy HAD approval to publish from his local office. Now they are going after him years later as the balance of power in his head office has changed.. He reported what he saw. It may not have been great science but it was honnest. The fact it was used for a political agenda does not mean it is acceptable to go after the scientists Only go after the science. We can not complain about luke warmers being punished for thier work or views if you are silent when it happens in the other direction. Some papers will be plain wrong. Some of the observations will be misinterpreted. Mistakes and debate are part of the process. That means giving lots of room to the scientists to work – away from political pressure to get the “RIGHT” answer. .
No scientific wrongdoing then. Some context of MMS (now BOEM) at the time Monnett was whistleblowing:
* Inspector General’s Inquiry Faults Regulators
* MMS Corruption: What The Oil-Rig Cook Saw
* Way Past Time for an Intervention
* Corrupt MMS inspectors exposed by email
* US government department criticised for failing to collect oil revenues
Amino Acids in Meteorites says:
September 29, 2012 at 12:43 am
Speaking of Al Gore…..
he has lost a mint in “green” investments:
———————————————————————-
Al Gore: “The Profit of Doom.”
“As for them drowning, they can easily swim nonstop for hundreds of kilometers in Arctic-cold seas, their natural habitat, so it takes some pretty extreme weather to drown them. It’s not for nothing that their official name is Ursus Maritimus or sea bear; they actually spend most of their waking time in the sea rather than on ice or land. In an article published in this year’s January edition of Polar Biology, the U.S. Geological Survey gave the details of a bear they’d tagged that had swam for nine days continuously and covered a total distance of 687 kilometers.”
http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2011/09/15/polar-bears-going-extinct-yawn/
The bear in question was a female; the males, being a lot bigger, can swim a lot further.
Pointman
Ursus Oceanus is a remarkable swimmer but shit happens so some must perish at sea. Their numbers are 20-25K so not endangered at all.
Monnett reported what he wished to see and not what he actually did see. Being in an overflying aircraft, he was in no position to definitively prove the polar bears were killed by drowning due to loss of ice floes, killed by drowning, or perhaps killed at all in all four examples or any examples. Even if all four polar bears were actually killed, and were killed by drowning, Monnett had no evidence whatsoever to conclude they were killed by loss of ice rather than natural causes due to age and/or other natural causes. Even if the polar bears drowned, were drowned due to loss of ice, and were not disadvantaged bby natural age; there is no evidence humans had any significant influence upon the natural variations in Arctic ice extent. In other words, Monnett was being dishonest about his observations and interpretations of his observations in an ill considered decision to give unscientific and untrue testimony in support of the political cause he adopted.
In other words, it not only was not “great science”, it was not science at all. Instead, it was a betrayal and perversion of the science, truth, and political trustworthiness.
The fact it was used for a political agenda does not mean it is acceptable to go after the scientists Only go after the science. We can not complain about luke warmers being punished for thier work or views if you are silent when it happens in the other direction. Some papers will be plain wrong. Some of the observations will be misinterpreted. Mistakes and debate are part of the process. That means giving lots of room to the scientists to work – away from political pressure to get the “RIGHT” answer. .
What is really interesting is the fact that his research was academical poor in quality, but then this seems to a growing trend in academics more interested in advocacy than academic rigour.
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/may/20/opinion/la-oe-ellis-uc-bias-20120520
Aided by less than neutral gatekeepers
http://www.wnd.com/2009/12/119745/
‘An Interior Department official said emails released by Charles Monnett were cited by a federal appeals court in decisions to vacate approval by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management of an oil and gas company’s Arctic exploration plan.”
He “released” emails (without years of FOIA requests and stalling) that resulted in an oil and gas company being denied a previously approved arctic exploration plan.
This is the REAL story.
“An Interior Department official said..”
Shouldn’t that be “Inferior Department”? Note that it takes just one of his pals to crash his party, but the entire Climate Realist blogosphere complaining about it for years with evidence didn’t make so much of a ripple. Some results are worth waiting for 🙂
I await the warmists claims that he was a whistleblower. In the meantime they can go to Churchill Falls, Manitoba to hand feed the few remaining starving polar bears. I suggest bacon.
The investigation was a farce, and it ending up showing that the entire thing was conducted because he demonstrated that the BOEM suppressed information. They found no scientific misconduct. The issue with the contract was Monnett being asked by a researcher what the BOEM was looking for in a proposal. As it turns out, he was not at the time in charge of approving contracts yet anyway; he started that after the incident in question.
How this can be spun as a win for the BOEM escapes me. The science he conducted was untouched in the final report and his work with contracts was not found to be faulty. The only thing they “got” him with was whistle-blowing, which was the real reason he was attacked in the first place. The BOEM looks vindictive and petty here, while Monnett has been exonerated.
The government isn’t the least concerned with the scientific misconduct such as this ” investigators found that Monnett and Gleason used an incomplete database as their primary source of information to write the article, made conflicting statements to investigators regarding the writing and editing process and understated data in the manuscript” . Just shows what sort of government it is.
For Lazy Teenager and any others questioning this, as D. Patterson pointed out and I will repeat, the writer did not report factually. Factually, he found four dead polar bears floating in the ocean after a storm. That’s all. Anything beyond that is just speculation unless the guy has photos of the bears swimming for days and days and actually drowning plus footage of their prior activity to put the swimming in context. He would also need many more examples of polar bears actually drowning, plus a count of floating polar bears from the early 1900’s to show warming in increasing drowning bear numbers.
When one presents wild speculation as fact, as was done here, that is called a lie. So anyone using this story to push global warming lied. Straight up, they lied.
Semi-related: BBC’s “More or Less” program has an excellent debunk of another media extinction story. The UK Telegraph had stated that North Sea Cod were basically extinct, with only 100 left. Terrible! Horrible! We’re killing them all!
The debunk began with a phone call from an actual fisherman who said this number was bizarre; that the cod catch this year was the best in living memory, and keeps increasing. They tracked down the 100 number as follows: The Sunday Times had used a UK government database of cod population estimates. The database tried to account for cod of all ages, up to the age of 13 which is the oldest age ever recorded. By normal curves, the database guessed there might be 100 of those cod codgers still around. Sunday Times, seeing only extinction, took this number to be the count of “adult cod”. When the Telegraph picked up the story, they dropped “adult”, leaving 100 as the total count of all cod in the North Sea.
How many cod are actually in the North Sea? “More or Less” used the same government database CORRECTLY and came up with 460 million, which is just slightly more than 100.
Nobody ever bothered to check with a fisherman, or a fish wholesaler, or anyone who might have direct knowledge of actual fish. It was all statistics and wishful thinking.
Was he in the anti-Islam production as well?
_Jim says:
September 28, 2012 at 10:53 pm
Maybe the bears died on the ice from natural causes and were subsequently washed into the ocean by the storm.