As some WUWT readers theorized yesterday, something, perhaps even more egregious is the root of the suspension. The AP obtained an internal memo from the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, sent via email circulated to staff.
From the Sacramento Bee:
JUNEAU, Alaska — A federal official says the suspension of Alaska wildlife biologist Charles Monnett is unrelated to a 2006 article Monnett wrote about presumably drowned Arctic polar bears.
Michael Bromwich also says it’s unrelated to Monnett’s scientific work and instead a result of new information on a separate subject recently brought to light.
Related WUWT posts:
Read the investigation transcript:
Announcement of suspension:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/07/28/al-gores-drowned-polar-bear-ait-source-under-investigation/
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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.
PhilJourdan says:
July 29, 2011 at 1:12 pm
Then why were they grilling him on the polar bears? The plot thickens!
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+1
Re:Shaun Dunne says:July 29, 2011 at 1:16 pm
Yes. The transcript is a verbatim, official record of the session.
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.
It may well be unrelated, but given the transcript of his interview with the IG, all they asked about was the polar bear papers. Nothing else.
If it is unrelated, we’ll have to wait and see what they suspended him for.
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 .
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. when poster.bear no longer elicits donations from the gullible but concerned, when the previous believers and check signers see poster.bear as a reminder of their gullibility – they gonna be angry.
poster bear with a hockey stick comes next – and everything poster.bear touches is tainted.
they wired poster.bear into the psyche by repetitiousness and post normal insistence – now it’s there and can’t be removed. but now it will have the completely opposite meaning.
poster bear says: only you can prevent agw fraud. crush all phonies dead out.
the coming days will be a treat – i can hardly wait to hear the shuddering cricket chorus of romm, gavin, revkin, monbiot and the rest.
delingpole should have some fun comments on this, too.
sharpen the mocking needles, then, cuz this will be the one if they can’t stfu the message – and it seems they aren ‘t going to be able to do that this time.
finafreakinly – head on a post!
I still cannot believe the transcript is real. If it is then “Beargate” is surely on the cards.
This is probably the cover up for the warmists. I advise anyone suspecting that the ‘scientist’ was doing ‘good’ science to review the transcript – so thoughtfully posted by PEER, here:
http://www.peer.org/docs/doi/7_28_11_Monnett-IG_interview_transcript.pdf
Purely speculative on my part, but when $50 million is being spent, misappropriation of public funds is always a possibility.
The real story is that the Polar Bears didn’t drown, but were executed by the DOJ to shut them up about the GunWalker program. Polar bears are squealers.
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.
In the source transcript hosted by PEER, the inital pages replay the introductions and the request from PEER for a complete verbal transcript. As awkward as it is to read those ‘uh’s and ‘uh-hm’s, that’s typically how most of us speak in conversation, when we’re not consciously presenting in a public speaking mode. Anyhow, PEER’s request suggests to me the reason for every vocalization.
So the same day he is suspended they also stop the Polar Bear tracking project and we are supposed to believe it is unrelated? Why did they talk about it so much when he was questioned?
This cult will do anything to save face.
Just read the full Monnet interview transcript and the interviewer was really interested in those dead bears. It seems that three were seen on the set transects, and one off. Details were kept in note form as they didn’t have a input code for dead Polar Bears on the computer program they were running on the laptop in the plane. Apparently no dead bears were seen in earlier years, according to verbal communications Monnet had with other team leaders, something the interviewer seemed surprised by.
Monnet might have ended his career with his present employers with his rant at the end, he might question the wisdom of that in the future.
An interesting look into how tax dollars etc are spent.
The quote I noted from the interview referred to it lasting over one and a half hours – the pieces i’ve seen quoted so far don’t add up to that much, so we are only seeing certain bits. I would not trust PEER’s extracts to be complete since they are – by definition – making a case for Monnett being hounded – although they have had the side-effect of showing just how poor the science was in the paper. I am not sure how much of the transcripts are now available – Anthony again focussed on the questions around the polar bear study.
i still think the investigation is about something else/more – you don’t sent two investigators to Alaksa to ask about polar bear numbers.
My apologies, it’s Monnett with two ts and was that three or four dead Polar Bears? (sorry couldn’t resist the last bit).
There is no truth to the rumor that Monett is under investigation for being a real Alaskan. None at all.
Actually in the transcript it says exactly what they are investigating:
ERIC MAY: Well, the scientif- – well, scientific misconduct, basically, uh, wrong numbers, uh, miscalculations, uh –
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.
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.
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.
Unless he expects to get some Tides prize for it. Watch him show up in six months making twice as much at Greenpeace.
right, paul. quite right. thanks for fixing.
This is messy but you can see how it could happen. IF for example (and this has NOT HAPPENED) Bob Brown or Christine Milne of Greg Combet were found out / caught at doing something seriously wrong or inappropriate you can imagine the headline and the mileage the media and blogs would get out of it. I seem to remember a quote regarding Caesar (or his wife) needing to be above reproach…… Maybe we need to sit and wait to see what it is this chap has actually done / of is charged with having done……
“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.