Federal Official: Monnett suspension unrelated to "drowned" polar bears

Am I the only one that thinks that there is something weird going on here? The man has been suspended and not told why.

it is likely due to how he distributed the $50 mill budget or its accounting

Jumped the Gun early. Excuse me.

No, the whole thing is weird. I was wondering what could have triggered the investigation because I didn’t believe for a moment that bad science alone could be the reason.
Wait and see.

Then why were they grilling him on the polar bears? The plot thickens!

Is it necessary to (re)produce a transcript with so many natural pauses and breathing spaces?
“Yes, uh, we only looked at that superficially, uh, and not in any, uh, great detail.”
The questioner is quoted flawlessly, I note.

Rhoda, there has been “weird things going on around here for many years”! I wouldn’t doubt he is trying to figure out which of many things has been discovered. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my.

@Rhoda Ramirez July 29, 2011 at 12:58 pm
Monnett reportedly has been told why he has been suspended, but not specific charges.
http://www.adn.com/2011/07/28/1989382/arctic-scientist-under-investigation.html
“The federal agency where he works told him he’s being investigated for “integrity issues,” but a watchdog group believes it has to do with the 2006 journal article about the bear.”
[…]
“Investigators have not yet told Monnett of the specific charges or questions related to the scientific integrity of his work, said Jeff Ruch, the watchdog group’s executive director.”
This is fairly standard procedure, in both the government and private sector. In fact, prior to investigation, specific charges would be — to put it gently — premature.
Heck, I knew a guy who was suspended, then fired without being told even this much (and in violation of his contract); once into arbitration, the company did give a reason, but proceeded to change its tiny collective mind every day of hearings.

PhilJourdan says:
July 29, 2011 at 1:12 pm
Then why were they grilling him on the polar bears? The plot thickens!
=======================================================
yeah right……
We spent half of our interview on something that didn’t matter………….

Yep, nothing to see here… move along folks.
Why did we depose him over the polar bear study?
We were testing the polygraph.

Dunne at 1:16 p.m.
I agree. Typically it is not necessary for transcripts to include things like “uh”, “um”, etc. These are normal pause sounds in English (other languages have different pause sounds), that are used as the individual searches for a word. It is not necessary to include them in a transcript. Precious few of us would have the ability to respond to a series of questions without including plenty of pause sounds, and it is generally considered unfair to reproduce quotes with lots of pause sounds in order to make the person sound foolish.
The one exception might be if in a proceeding there were a question about whether the responder was trying to avoid questions or whether the very manner in which the responder responded was relevant to the issue at hand. In that case, one might look at the pause sounds and try to draw some kind of conclusion about the responder’s conduct during the interview itself. If we’re just trying to find the underlying facts, however, it is not necessary to include all the pause sounds, and really amounts to a mild form of ad hominem

What does this mean?
That same day, July 13, a stop-work order was issued for a polar bear tracking study, entitled “Populations and Sources of Recruitment in Polar Bears.”
I’m probably just ignorant, but how does one recruit a polar bear?

Still weird that they’re so tight-lipped about the specific allegation. It would appear that maybe doing something questionable that could influence an endangerment finding is a big no-no, but I can’t say for sure.

Re:Shaun Dunne says:July 29, 2011 at 1:16 pm

Is it necessary to (re)produce a transcript with so many natural pauses and breathing spaces?

Yes. The transcript is a verbatim, official record of the session.

The questioner is quoted flawlessly, I note.

Probably because the interviewer is more practiced at these kind of ‘viva voce’ style sessions. If an academic can’t defend their work at that kind of level then they perhaps have no business managing $50m in funding. The polar bear session is for us possibly a bonus, for the interviewers more likely establishing sloppiness and perhaps a similar lack of robustness when it comes to accounting for where that $50m ended up. Following that kind of money is worth investigating, the shoddiness around the polar bear paper is just a windfall.

Uh , Mike , Monnet himself admitted that his work was “sloppy” . Except within the discipline of climatology , sloppy science is not sound science . Read the interview .

I still cannot believe the transcript is real. If it is then “Beargate” is surely on the cards.

Mike says:
Oh please… the science is sound? Let me boil it down for you. They flew over 11 square miles and saw 3 dead bears. They then extrapolated and “calculated” the number of dead bears that must be “out there” in the areas where they didn’t fly over. They further asserted that those bears had died from drowning due to the AGW-caused loss of terra-firma habitat (magnificent bit of veterinary medicine).
Using the same logic I should be able to convince my bank that my mortgage is fully paid. Perusing 1 week of entries on my bank statement, I note that there is one mortgage payment and therefore I can deduce that the other 51 weeks of the year must also have had a mortgage payment. Ergo… debt free. Yahoo!
Using the same “sound science” they could have just as easily asserted that 3 bears were drowning per hour. To paraphrase Hitler: if you’re going to pull something out of your arse, might as well make it big.

dunno why it’s said that they didn’t reveal the topic under investigation because they did.
“7 General‟s Office is that we receive allegations, and we go out
8 and investigate those allegations. And the reason we are here
9 today is that received, our office received some allegations
10 pertaining to scientif- – potential scientific misconduct
11 perpetrated by you and your, uh, coworker, Mr. Gleason, okay?
12 So that‟s what the scope of this interview is going to be is
13 your participation in the bowhead – the BWASP program?”
http://www.alaska.boemre.gov/ess/bwasp/xbwasp.htm
that’s their transectual adventure, um, ah, er, you know?
the polar bears were apparently not the subject of the study, so one can make believe the investigation isn’t about polar bears…lol
but it is.
“ERIC MAY: Well, and, and let me – it, it – so incidental
17 sightings of marine mammals, which are not the focus and target
18 of the survey, do not represent, statistically speaking, the
19 valid data and, therefore, wouldn‟t it be questionable as to why
20 the data was used to extrapolate such new scientific findings as
21 your manuscript presented?”
it IS all about the polar bears and nothing but the polar bears.

gnomish says:
July 29, 2011 at 2:21 pm
ha ha ha!
this is very good. they know what it means if this political groupie in a lab coat gets called to account, don’t they? it means that their poster bear suddenly becomes the skeptic’s poster bear.
it’s like losing your queen in a chess match.
***********
More like having your queen taken by a pawn on your back rank. Your queen becomes his.

right, paul. quite right. thanks for fixing.

“OLD44 says:
July 29, 2011 at 3:15 pm
Monnet saw them from a plane and presumed they drowned, from that he deduces the survival rate of the remaining bears, if any. Well, if that isn’t a scientific observation of the first order, I have never seen one.”
Not sure if there was sarcasm there or not.
If not, Monnet’s problem in this paper is his sample size. 4 dead bears out of 11 seen swimming in a single year. Since his survey area was only about 11% of the total and his observational time frame was only a single year, he really didn’t have a lot of data to go on. As a “scientist” he really should have known better.
But lack of data never stopped a good ecomentalist story.

I hope ERIC MAY gets a bonus. The transcript reads like a Columbo interview.

Where’s ‘Creaky’ Gates? Only ‘Mike’ dared pop his head up with a slightly fuzzy attack on the story, NOT a ‘defense’ of the ‘scientist’.
Even the faithful, dyed in the wool Warmists are staying away from this one…wow!
As DirtyOilBerta…said above – the Polar Bear can now be used as a rod to beat the Alarmists!
(pardon the mixed metaphor)

Rhoda Ramirez says:
July 29, 2011 at 12:58 pm
Am I the only one that thinks that there is something weird going on here? The man has been suspended and not told why.
In my experience, when Government funds are involved, and the research starts to look dodgy, a suspension is normal operating procedure if The GAO becomes involved, which means an audit of everything; fuel, computer time, money, food, etc.

This is good, page 36 of the interrogation.
http://www.peer.org/docs/doi/7_28_11_Monnett-IG_interview_transcript.pdf
ERIC MAY: Okay. Well, your manuscript, so when you put this together, was it peer-reviewed?
CHARLES MONNETT: Oh, yeah.
ERIC MAY: By whom?
CHARLES MONNETT: Uh, well, it was, it was reviewed here. 25 Um, Lisa Rotterman, my wife, who is a, you know, Ph.D. ecologist, um, reviewed it and, and, you know, she took the first cut. 1 Cleve Cowles, um, gave it a thorough read. I think Paul Stang 2 did, who‟s a manager, and I wouldn‟t call that a peer review. 3 That‟s a, that‟s a political correctness review.
##############
First he mentioned his wife, then the political correctness review.
Is this guy really in charge of 50 million dollars when he speaks like this in a deposition??
“We were out there flying around, dude,” page 67
“Well, that‟s not scientific misconduct 19 anyway. If anything, it‟s sloppy.” page 83, the 50 million dollar man accuses himself of being a sloppy scientist
#############
ERIC MAY: Uh, in your, in your manuscript, you use a 11 lot of, um, like, uh, “we speculate,” “we further suggest,” “potential,” “may pose.” If you –
CHARLES MONNETT: Yes, meticulously so (laughing)
#############
“Oh, yeah, four dead polar bears. Okay, that‟s kind of cool.” (yeah sloppy dude!)
But after a slow skim of this whole thing I am not sure what he has done wrong, except being a terrible verbal communicator.

Beesaman says:
(…)and was that three or four dead Polar Bears?

I reckon there were three polar bears and one Cartesian bear, which is nothing but a polar bear under a different coordinate system. 🙂

nomnom says:
July 29, 2011 at 4:59 pm
“There’s nothing wrong with what he reported. He pointed out that his extrapolation to 27 bears dead was under the assumption that the observations were of 11% of the population. It’s perfectly reasonable to consider what you’ve seen in an area in terms of the greater area.”
Where are the bodies?

Derek Sorensen says:
What does this mean?
That same day, July 13, a stop-work order was issued for a polar bear tracking study, entitled “Populations and Sources of Recruitment in Polar Bears.”
I’m probably just ignorant, but how does one recruit a polar bear?
————————————————-
Recruitment is the term for adding new members to a population, usually through reproduction. Its usually used when reporting whether a population is growing or declining. “The recruitment for polar bears has been good over the last 40 years” indicates an increase in the population and that population may not be yet in equilibrium.

“Then why were they grilling him on the polar bears?”
How much money was “spent” on the study?
It’s about money, how it is acquired, how it is spent, and if spent efficiently. The Feds probably leaked the Polar Bear interview part for laughs..

thanks, ClimateForAll.
i went and posted a comment.

Now that i’ve read the whole transcript I suspect that the commenter above is correct. His rant against the agency at the end of the interview accusing the agency (the ex MMS) of scientific misconduct is the reason he was placed on administrative leave. Just my guess, unless they found kiddie porn on his hard drive.

Uh , Mike , Monnet himself admitted that his work was “sloppy” .

No, he didn’t. He was characterising the nature of the allegation, differentiating it from mendacious. He was making the point that if sloppy calculations is what he is accused of, then that does not require a formal investigation, which examines allegations of deceit.
The level of calculation in Monnett’s observational note is so basic that even mathematical illiterates (including myself) could work it out in seconds.

http://www.peer.org/news/news_id.php?row_id=1503
Suspended on ‘full pay and benefits’ – I suppose that this is marginally less pathetic than being paid to whip up fear among school children – but what happened to ’employment at will’ in the United States of America?
Do free market concepts only apply to the people doing productive work*?
*’productive work’ (for those readers from governmental institutions) means – something which is honest, is customer-centric, commands a market price leading to a profit, and makes other people’s lives better and/or more productive.
Thanks to people like Monnett, Schmidt and their ilk – a large percentage of the US labor force are currently looking for productive work.

I know it was a goof, but shouldn’t the last line of Rattus’ comment be snipped? Monnett may be something a joke himself, but he is a real, live human being. Comments like that aren’t appropriate.
{WUWT moderates with a very light touch. Comments like the one you refer to are routinely apporved; it is up to those with another point of view to deconstruct them. Eventually, readers are able to sift the truth from the chaff. That is science in action, and it is the reason that WUWT is the internet’s “Best Science” site. ~ dbstealey, mod.]

Monnett complains about suppression of scientists (the rant), and the agency puts him on administrative leave?
The guy who reports on dead and swimming polar bears, the one everyone here wants to see fry, is complaining of suppression of his and others’ views and work by the Federal Government Agency he is working for?
You sure this is the narrative you want to spin, Rattus?

KR,
The rant was in February. Look at the date on the transcript.

nofreewind says:
July 29, 2011 at 5:03 pm
…”But after a slow skim of this whole thing I am not sure what he has done wrong, except being a terrible verbal communicator.”
==============
Well said, now we await the true meaning of the words, an explanation is sure to come.

Abysmal Spectator says:
July 29, 2011 at 9:57 pm
As I said in another comment on the Monnett case, It’s not just skeptics who get a raw deal if they cross their backers. He who pays the piper calls the tune. This is pretty common when there are vested interests involved, e.g. the Pusztai GM case and many other unpublicised cases that I know about from colleagues.
======
Try another blog, comments like this get digested before breakfast here.

That is quite an important thing to report – that if the other 8 transects were similar to the one they surveyed that indeed the number of dead bears was probably about 27. I mean that’s only what anyone reading the paper is going to calculate anyway.
No it is not what anyone reading is going to calculate. Not even close.
Let’s make a quick and dirty back of the envelope test. Assuming we did say that they were drowning through some warming related event. Then we might say take a Poisson distribution, put the mean drownings (lambda) at one per transect, then calculate the chance that any transect has at least 4 drowned bears. The probability is 1.9% for each transect, so about 12% when allowing for the fact there are 8 transects. In other words the 95% margin for error reaches down as low as about 7 drowned bears from our original observation. (Of course the upper estimate could be as high as 80 easily.)
In fact if a wildly unexpected result, which is never repeated, comes to light the first thing I think is that it is an outlier. The assumption that the other transects have similar rates doesn’t come into it.
Noone in their right mind is surely going to expect all the dead bears just happened to fall in the transect they covered.
Why not? The cause could be something entirely discounted in the whole discussion about which we are unaware. Some disease or local weather condition.

@Abysmal Spectator
You seem very well informed.
Where would you rate the science of “I saw three dead polar bears on one day a couple of years ago” in relation to the science of crop circles, cattle mutilation, or ufology?

Drave Robber says:
July 29, 2011 at 5:09 pm
I reckon there were three polar bears and one Cartesian bear, which is nothing but a polar bear under a different coordinate system. :
rofl!!

With a changing climate we aren’t likely to see _new_ things happen but find the same things happen at a different frequency and/or intensity.
We don’t go from no dead bears one year to 30+ dead bears the next.
One part of me wants to go easy on this guy, he shouldn’t be used as the fall guy for everyone else’s rubbish, but then again, gotta start somewhere…. he (they, 2 authors) shouldn’t have attached the climate change link in the discussion, they flew their flag right there.

cirby says:
July 29, 2011 at 4:58 pm
and others, I agree, the cost of all the flights seems most likely to be where the real interest is. The polar bears are just a delicious side dish.

Thinking outside the box…
He said his observations included ships, that he could see down to a depth of 100ft, and that he reported to people other than his employers.
He could’ve been spying on the US navy for a foriegn power. Given that potential, the US authorities would want to be sure they had a “sound”
man in that post.

Read the transcript of the interview with Eric May and cry! It has to be explained to Eric May that 9×11=99 which is close to 100. With due respect to Mr May he did admit he has not been trained in scientific method but junior school mathematics? I find it hard to believe but it is there in plain print. Mr Eric May should be ashamed of his ignorance and if he is a fair representative of his profession then our civiliastion has no hope.

Here’s the ‘truth’ as told by those paragons of jounalistic virtue, The Guardian.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jul/28/arctic-scientist-polar-bear-oil
Its a good read after a slab of beer, a couple of joints and a whack on the head, it sort of makes sense.
regards

If they were out there getting paid to count whales and then it turns out they spent their time writing a paper on drowning bears and global warming, that could indeed have raised some questions about funding, scientific misconduct, etc……
Not necessarily. I work in mycology and while pursuing collections and research on the original project, I find other interesting things not directly related. And I research them a bit and write about them as well. Do you think a researcher should intentionally forget or ignore anything not related to the original project, that was observed while researching it? That would be a stupid idea.
The problem isn’t whales OR bears, the problem is the shoddy collection data method and the fact, that the paper was made a political icon.

Updates:
1) The suspension is related to Monnett’s oversight and management role in respect to a research project being performed by Andrew Derocher, Ph.D., University of Alberta, entitled “Populations and Sources of Recruitment in Polar Bears: Movement Ecology in the Beaufort Sea
2) A little web research show that Dr. Derocher is a signatory to WWF ads as a “concerned scientist”
Observations:
What in the heck were Monnett’s so-called lawyers (for of them on the call) doing in letting him ramble on off-topic when he is the subject of a criiminal investigation? Note, after the investigator had indicated that the interview was complete, no less? Legal incompetence.

“So the data recorder allowed you to log polar bears …on land, polar bears swimming, but not dead polar bears?”
“…normally, if the bear was alive, we would record it… up to that point, we had never seen a… dead bear to record. Um, we did have swimming … as one of the behavioral choices, because whales swim.”
Sometimes, whales die. And this program for the study of whales didn’t allow recording dead whales, but did allow recording all living bears? Did it allow for the recording of whales on ice? On land?
How does bear tagging affect their survival chances? Any studies on that?
Michael Bromwich, named in the PEER complaint of July 28, was appointed director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (previously MMS) by Obama in June, 2010. He’s a litigation attorney with an interesting background [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_R._Bromwich] [http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/president-obama-announces-bromwich-fix-oil-industry-oversIght].

ZT wrote: “@Abysmal Spectator
You seem very well informed.
Where would you rate the science of “I saw three dead polar bears on one day a couple of years ago” in relation to the science of crop circles, cattle mutilation, or ufology?”
Before I start, a bit of a disclaimer – I have nothing to do with polar research or climate research, and I am an AGW skeptic, just in case anyone thinks by defending Monnett that I am some CAGW shill. I’m also assuming the transcript is indicative of what this case is all about, and that relevant game changing stuff isn’t being hidden by PEER.
What seems to be happening here is that a note on an unusual observation is being given a weight that the authors probably never intended it to have, both by the people commenting on this topic and by the CAGW crowd. This makes boths sides look slightly deranged.
Skeptics get it in the neck enough without providing ammunition to the other side by showing an ignorance of what is reasonable practice, misrepresenting what is in the interview transcript (as well as being reviewed by his wife and colleagues, it was also reviewed by three anonymous reviewers for the journal and this was clearly stated in the transcript), and suggesting that he has been remiss in his duties of counting bowhead whales because he published a note on incidental observations that arose during his work. Burn the witch! Yeah! I get annoyed when I see other skeptics acting like “axe grinding cranks, ” as it makes the message easy to dismiss.
So here is my perspective based on my experience:
In certain parts of science, especially in some areas of biological sciences, because of the way in which experimentally unrepeatable observational information arises, these sorts of notes are quite common and acceptable. (They wouldn’t be acceptable in solid state physics, or biochemistry where unusual observations are amenable to experiments – context is everything.) You’ll get notes reporting sightings of species in strange places, or unusual behaviour for example. Unusual observations should be recorded. They are viewed as anecdote by other scientists. Not all published science is equal and that is recognised by every practitioner I have ever met. Politicians and campaigners, on the other hand, don’t seem to make these distinctions, and that is where the strife starts…
As a reviewer, you’d take the nature of the paper into account when recommending it for publication or not. The article is very brief, reports an observation and its context. If this was my area of expertise and I had received the article for review I would probably have said “yes, publish it.” On the other hand, if Monnett and Gleason had submitted something twice as long and tried to make some grand claims with attendant statistical analyses based on 3 or 4 dead polar bears, I would have torn the thing to shreds.
If I had been subjected to the interview that Monnett had been, I would have been lawyered up and reacted more or less the same way he did – nervous, defensive, confused and wary about the strange line of questioning, and when finally realising that all it was about was some high school math in a throwaway note (that had admittedly become emarrassingly politically prominent) would have been thinking “WHAT THE F$#&?!”, been pissed off I had been grilled and was being judged by someone who had difficulty with fractions and understanding context, and had a good ol’ rant like he did at the end of the interview. And then, when it had all sunk in, I’d have been pretty disturbed about just how much the piper wanted to call the tune.
As I said before, in my opinion that last bit is the important conclusion of this debacle. In my experience happens too much in “modern” science. I certainly know of people who have had their careers destroyed because they spoke out on some topic or another, either by their funders (medical science is rotten in this respect) or by powerful colleagues with a different viewpoint. That is the real poison in the system.
I apologise if this perspective is too balanced and reasonable.

@Abysmal Spectator
No doubt you are a very balance and reasonable person. However, you did not answer the question:-
‘Where would you rate the science of “I saw three dead polar bears on one day a couple of years ago” in relation to the science of crop circles, cattle mutilation, or ufology?’
And no doubt your reams of obfuscation are well intended. I have no complaint concerning your comments. I also have every sympathy with Monnett and his arduous professional chore of disposing of the tax payer’s $50m in the most inane fashion possible.
However, his speculations concerning the causes of unusual observations can rightly be questioned, IMHO. That after all is the scientific method – or does that not apply in this case?

I drove from Uniontown, PA to Cincinnati, OH and saw six (6) dead deer along side the road. As far as I could see to either side of the highway, there were no live deer. Ergo, the survival rate of deer between Uniontown and Cincinnati is zero (0) percent. I wonder if I can get that peer reviewed by my friends and get it published? Heck, if I say it was an unusually warm day and blame it on climate change, maybe I’ll even get a government grant. My wife was traveling with me so I could probably slip her a few thousand dollars to help me with my calculations. 100% dead means 0% survival doesn’t it? Or maybe it’s 200%, or 67%? Dang, these numbers really confuse me.

Jesse, if you want to analogise, spend 9 years driving that stretch of road and record what you see, live deers and all. Then compare your observations with those made by others for the decade before your own observations. Cross-reference. Speculate, and explain the limitations of your speculation. After your wife has reviewed your notes, show them to your colleagues and your boss, and if they approve, submit it for an independent review by anonymous experts in the subject. If they clear it for publication, you now are now in the same boat as Monnett.
But to complete the circle, you are investigated for an allegation that your accusers refuse to disclose, and they interview you about your notes and your calculations, when it is clear that they have trouble with basic maths. News of the investigation makes the news cycle.. People who don’t like your work explain that you are a liar and a fraud on internet blogs. When news arrives that the investigation is not about your work or about the deer-sightings, people still think your paper on deers is a fraud, while some accept the news and one of those suggests you may be being investigated for “kiddie porn,” potentially an attempt at humour (but the joke isn’t that funny).
Viola, you are now Charles Monnett.

Ooops, a bit of illiteracy. I wasn’t suggesting the paper made such unfounded leaps.

Now that it established that Dr.Monnett’s administrative leave is unrelated to his observation of drowned polar bears, I found this section from an article in the
Alaska Dispatch rather revealing :
….oil companies have raised specific concerns about Monnett and some of the studies he has directed be done in his role as the official who oversees contractors for BOEMRE.
Action comes as Obama under pressure to drilling in the Arctic
This week, BOEMRE began issuing stop work orders to some of those contractors, leaving them without funding to finish the work they’d started. One study that tracks polar bears is being continued through the researcher’s own funds, according to letters sent to BOEMRE and obtained by PEER.
Increasingly, the Obama administration has come under pressure to approve drilling operations in the Arctic Ocean. Although those same permits were on hold or challenged during the Bush years, it is the Obama White House that is taking flack from industry as well as environmental groups in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t kind of way.
http://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/why-scientist-offshore-oil-agency-under-investigation
BOEMRE has been under a lot of pressure to approve sign off on Chukchi Lease Sale 193.
Not only from the White House, but also from Alaskan politicians :
http://www.alaskanewspapers.com/article.php?article=1128begich_pushes_for_arctic_oil_gas_development
and of course from the oil/gas industry directly :
http://www.aoga.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/07112011-API-AOGA-Comments-RDSEIS-LS193-FINAL.pdf
With Monnett pointing out qualitative flaws in the environmental studies and the process BOEMA is supposed to perform (see Monnett’s interrogation) he may be considered an obstacle to reek in these billions of dollars the American Petroleum Industry is talking about.
The head of BOEMA did not waste time announcing the change in course :
http://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/boemre-director-bromwich-weighs-suspension-arctic-scientist
Note that Bromwich does not mention Monnett by name, states rather surpisingly that his dismissal has nothing to do with Monnett’s science or his dead polar bear observation, but instead “it was the result of new information on a separate subject brought to our attention very recently.” and leave little doubt that Monnett would not return.
I wonder if this “new information on a separate subject” may be related to Chukchi Lease Sale 193….

He did not have “a quarter of a million kilometers of flying time over a decade”—he had hearsay (anecdotes) from previous team leaders who didn’t remember seeing any dead bears.

Nonsense, the flights he started undertaking in 1999 had been going since 1987. He stopped flying in 2006. From 1987 to 2004, the data period of Monnett’s note, nearly half a million kilometers had been flown. (The figures are in Table 1 of the report)
The flight records over those years include notes on whatever animals they had time to include as well as bow whales. These records are his primary data.

And conflating the effects of the storm with the stresses from a warming world is logical?

Immaterial. The report doesn’t make that connection.

Was it reasonable to generalize that the high wind event that hit the 11% being surveyed had the same effect across the entire habitat when it “was actually not a very severe high”?

The note states that the high winds occurred “across the study area.” It is reasonable to extrapolate with appropriate caveats, which was done. This was not meant to be, nor was it pretended to be, a formal study on polar bear mortality.
Read. The. Study.
Not just the transcript.

“No, the whole thing is weird. I was wondering what could have triggered the investigation because I didn’t believe for a moment that bad science alone could be the reason.”
It could be that the investigation of Mann turned up something interesting in the emails, etc, and the Feds were asked for corroborating emails, evidence, etc?

kcrucible, you omitted what directly follows;

And, uh, then we sent it to, um – well, we sent it to Andy Derocher, who’s internationally – he’s the, he’s the, the head of the IUCN, uh, polar bear, uh, specialist group and, uh, Ian Stirling, who’s probably the senior, like the dean, you know, the, the all-time most famous polar bear guy in the world… …and I had spoken to them on the phone about the result, and I just told them, “Hey, we saw, you know, some weird stuff this year, and what do you think?” And they said, “Well, that’s – you probably ought to write that up. Uh, you know, it would be useful to have that in the literature.”
…And, uh, then we sent it to journal, and they sent it out to three peer reviewers, anonymous peer reviewers.

barry says:
July 30, 2011 at 10:24 pm
I assume that refers to the Monnett study. The content is factual, but in the context of the film, it rises to polemic.

That is incorrect. At best you can say it is logical. However since no autopsy was done on the bears, the cause of their demise remains undetermined. For all we know, a ship may have hit them, or they were shot with tranquilizer darts. The only fact is that they were found floating in the ocean. Gore again displays a decided lack of integrity of facts.

barry says:
July 31, 2011 at 9:26 am
Nonsense, the flights he started undertaking in 1999 had been going since 1987. He stopped flying in 2006. From 1987 to 2004, the data period of Monnett’s note, nearly half a million kilometers had been flown. (The figures are in Table 1 of the report)
The flight records over those years include notes on whatever animals they had time to include as well as bow whales. These records are his primary data.

So you agree that previous flights may have seen dead polar bears, but that the crew didn’t have “time” to include that in their notes. Except for the fact that previous team leaders claim that they didn’t see any dead polar bears – which is hearsay.

So you agree that previous flights may have seen dead polar bears, but that the crew didn’t have “time” to include that in their notes. Except for the fact that previous team leaders claim that they didn’t see any dead polar bears – which is hearsay.

You work with the data you have. If everyone says they can’t remember sighting a dead bear, and the notes corroborate that, then you are left with the first recorded sighting of dead bears floating in the water.

Monnett’s comments about being suppressed on the polar bears by his (government) department has precedence.
http://www.ofcomswindlecomplaint.net/emails/USAdministrationPolarBearMemo.pdf
In 2007, the US Department of the Interior – the same department hassling Monnett today – issued directives restraining scientists traveling abroad from talking about climate change, Arctic sea ice,and polar bears.

God himself smote the bears. Said bears had apparently been complaining amongst themselves about the lack of ice and the odious distance they were required to swim. It was, of course, somewhat warmer than usual and bears don’t much like warm, so they were in a bad mood.
God summoned forth a wind storm to teach the unruly bears a lesson.
“Go forth and swim ‘ye unruly bears,” bellowed God.
God is English, by the way.
God’s intent was not to have the fate of these unruly bears be widely known. It was a message to other bears, not a message to Man. It was mere happenstance that a couple of researchers happened by and observed the smote bears. Or is that smitten bears?
Anyway, not satisfied with the mere smiting of the bears, God summoned his Legion to investigate, to . He could have picked a couple of Legion that passed high school math, but they were busy “doing God’s work” at Goldman-Sachs.

We sort of figured that out anyway… nobody gets investigated simply for being an idiot. Of course, the investigation did manage to highlight how bad the original work was. Too many assumptions that were unsupportable ultimately led to extrapolations that had floor to ceiling error margins.
Of course, stating that the good Dr. is under investigation for his ethics regarding contract management doesn’t do a whole lot of good for his reputation as a scientist, either. The ABC article makes that claim almost with glee failing to realize that the “they didn’t like his science” angle no longer works. “It has nothing to do with his bad peer reviewed science, rather, it is because he cannot be trusted with government money!” just doesn’t do it for me.
Mark

barry says:
August 2, 2011 at 10:12 am
You work with the data you have. If everyone says they can’t remember sighting a dead bear, and the notes corroborate that, then you are left with the first recorded sighting of dead bears floating in the water.

1. Hearsay shouldn’t be used as data.
2. In the absence of adequate data, conclusions shouldn’t be offered regardless of the disclosures used.

barry says:
In 2007, the US Department of the Interior – the same department hassling Monnett today – issued directives restraining scientists traveling abroad from talking about climate change, Arctic sea ice,and polar bears.

Probably because they had been embarrassed by too many “scientists” making unscientific claims that weren’t supported by sound data collection.

barry says:
August 3, 2011 at 8:54 am
The data was 18 years of direct observations of polar bears,recorded at the time of sighting from research planes.

So they can then comment on LIVE polar bears, not dead ones since no recordings or records were kept. Ergo that is hearsay. Please stick to the facts, and not your opinion or your “feelings’ on the subject.

Oh puhleeze. Unless there were autopsies or direct hands on inspections of the dead bears, its ALL HEARSAY. For all we know, the bears could have been shot and then run to the water, which is their nature. The entire issue is based on an incomplete data point. 3 or 4 dead bears, no established reason why.

Hearsay is rumour or the reporting of someone’s words by a third party. These were direct recorded observations that included longitude and latitude of the observation, and whether the bears were in the water or on land or sea ice. This is not second-hand verbal testimony, which is the point I was making to wobble, who thinks that the data was acquired entirely by calling other researchers. wobble gets this idea from comments throughout this and the other thread/s, I suppose, where this erroneous impression is given many times. I wish you had made the correction, because the misapprehension would have died more quickly with your imprimatur.
In mounting a hypothesis, it is best to make plausible presumptions. The notion that all four bears were shot is less plausible than that they drowned in the storm. The evidence most strongly points to that conclusion, so it is used as a premise. This is Occam’s razor in action.
Criticism of the kind you and others are making rests on the faulty notion that this is a formal study on bear mortality and cause, instead of a hypothesis based on the information to hand, calling for more investigation so that the hypothesis may be tested. This is normal practise, so what people really have a problem with is the scientific method. Monnett asked experts if his observations and hypotheses were worth publishing, and they encouraged him to do it, and three anonymous reviewers gave his study a tick. So I guess now the complaint will be that there is a conspiracy amongst polar bear researchers to present bad science.

wobble, the data was recorded in a notebook. There are no records of dead bears in the sea, and other researchers have no memory of having seen one.
Think about the sequence of events. Monnett sees 4 dead bears in the water. He’s never himself seen that before in 6 years of overflights. He checks the written records and sees that there are no other dead bears in the water recorded. Does he assume there have been none? No, he goes another step and checks with other researchers to see if they remember seeing any. This is a reasonable and obvious way to firm up the data.
Monnett doesn’t assume that he has the whole story, but the data that he has strongly suggests a scenario. Look at the language in the intro to the note:

We speculate that mortalities due to offshore swimming during late ice (or mild ice) may be an important and unaccounted source of natural mortality given energetic demands placed on individual bears engaged in long-distance swimming. We further <b.suggest that drowning-related deaths of polar bears may increase in the future if the observed regression of pack ice and/or longer open water periods continues.

The rest of the note is the argument underpinning the hypothesis. Even the last section is qualified with language like this. And note that the authors speak of ‘natural’ mortality – this is a long way from comments upthread asserting that the note purports to tie the dead bears to global warming.
Wobble, we may have different ideas on what conclusive means. Shortly, this note is self-identified as speculative. There is no ‘conclusions’ section. I can’t see how it could be read as a conclusive study. Perhaps you can provide examples of what you mean.

Smokey
I would actually be quite happy if the investigation is about misdirection of funding or nepotism, rather than an investigation intended to suppress reporting scientific anomalies. The more of that stamped out, the better. The interviews of Monnett and Gleason, however, do not reassure me on that point. I await actual charges or the dismissal of the investigation, whichever occurs.
Occam’s Razor is a reasonable rule of thumb – the simplest explanation possible is the most likely. Monnett did not state that for a fact the bears drowned, but simply that drowning was the most likely explanation for the bodies. Far from baseless, given the weather in the previous week, and the ~8.5 km average distance from shore for the bodies. Would you have preferred a hypothesis of simultaneous coronary artery disease, aliens on a hunting expedition, or Gypsy curses?
If the investigation is not about the polar bear papers, why did the investigators return to it over and over again when interviewing both authors?

But storms occur regularly – without any reports of dead polar bears. Therefore, Occam’s Razor indicates that storms are not the cause of polar bear deaths.

This is a hypothesis based on even less data than Monnett’s, and ignores observed factors (lowest observed sea ice coverage coverage for the area, leading to choppier waters in high winds), and is, therefore, less plausible. The storm and low ice coverage was observed. Hunters were not.

With polar bear pelts going for $30,000+, gunshot wounds are every bit as plausible as polar bears drowning from storms.

You’re suggesting that hunters managed to let $30 000 float away – four times in the one season? You think that is as plausible as Monnett’s hypothesis?
I think there is one hypothesis that is nearly as plausible as Monnett’s – disease. However, disease in polar bears is rare, and there are few (any?) records of bears having died from disease in the wild. My hypothesis relies on accepting more from less than Monnett’s.
The truth is there is little known about polar bear mortality. People here are casting Monnett’s work as concluding something, when he is only suggesting he might have a piece of the puzzle. If criticism were directed towards activist groups’ use of Monnett’s work, I would agree with much of it.

barry says:
wobble, the data was recorded in a notebook. There are no records of dead bears in the sea, and other researchers have no memory of having seen one.

Data that doesn’t exist can’t be recorded. Or are you suggesting that all the flights since 1987 had specially recorded, “No Dead Polar Bears Seen Today”?
Telephone conversations with previous team leaders is a terrible way to collect data.
Offering conclusions based on this is terrible. And don’t try to tell me that conclusions weren’t offered.

New Police Chief: There were no occurrences of jay walking between 1987 and 1999.
Investigator: How do you know?
New Police Chief: Because there is no record of jay walking in the past.
Investigator: Were records of jay walking required to be kept in the past?
New Police Chief: No.
Investigator: Then why would there be any record of jay walking in the past?
New Police Chief: I spoke with the old police chiefs and they don’t remember any jay walking.
Investigator: So you’re relying on their memory, and your paper relies on hearsay?
New Police Chief: No. There is no record of jay walking in the past.
Investigator: Were records of jay walking required to be kept in the past?
New Police Chief: No.
Investigator: Then why would there be any record of jay walking in the past?
New Police Chief: I spoke with the old police chiefs and they don’t remember any jay walking.
Investigator: So you’re relying on their memory, and your paper relies on hearsay?
New Police Chief: No. There is no record of jay walking in the past.
Investigator: Were records of jay walking required to be kept in the past?
New Police Chief: No.
Investigator: Then why would there be any record of jay walking in the past?
New Police Chief: I spoke with the old police chiefs and they don’t remember any jay walking.
Investigator: So you’re relying on their memory, and your paper relies on hearsay?
New Police Chief: No. There is no record of jay walking in the past.
Investigator: I think we’re going in circles here.

barry says:
Gleason corroborates that they referred to a database for their data – 30 years of observations, according to Gleason.

I bet there are no entries in the database for sightings of other aircraft. That doesn’t mean that other aircraft were never sighted.

the Department of the Interior was trying to muzzle such discussion.

This is a baseless accusation.

There are even Dep Int memos (posted upthread), ordering scientists traveling abroad not to speak about polar bears, Arctic sea ice, or climate change.

This is probably because smart people within the Dept of Int noticed that many of these opinions were based on junk science and were trying to protect the department from international embarrassment.