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/
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
the transcript was great. peer reviewed my arse. fraud is more the truth on this.
…….call me doctor …rich !
I hope ERIC MAY gets a bonus. The transcript reads like a Columbo interview.
Monnett saw polar bears every year, mostly on land.
ERIC MAY: Okay, understood. During your participation in the BWASP, did you observe – well, you did observe polar bears.
CHARLES MONNETT: Absolutely, every year.
ERIC MAY: Okay, can you elaborate on your observation of polar bears and what years and be a little bit more specific?
CHARLES MONNETT: What years?
ERIC MAY: Well, I mean, what was the first year you observed a polar bear?
CHARLES MONNETT: Oh, I don‟t know. I imagine I saw a polar bear the first year I was out there, so that would be ‟99, but I don‟t know. I don‟t remember. I didn‟t review the reports. That‟s, that‟s too far back.
ERIC MAY: Okay.
CHARLES MONNETT: We saw polar bears under three sets of circumstances generally. One was polar bears out on the ice, offshore, which were dispersed over in a large area. Another was polar bears on barrier islands all along the coastline, and then there were a couple of places, particularly one at Kaktovic, where the bears concentrated at a bone pile, a bowhead whale, it was, it was left over from the harvest. The Natives would drag all the carcasses, and the bears would gather around there. In a normal year, you could count on seeing 20 or 30 polar bears at certain times of the year there. So all you had to do was go look; they‟d be scattered around the village. And so we made a point to – another was Cross Island, which is also a, a whaling site, and so we made a point to visit those sites a, a couple of times to document the numbers. And we also made it a point to record any bears we saw out on the ice. And we had a few behavioral variables that we – that were in the database specifically for polar bears. One was if they were on a kill and, otherwise, I think they were pretty general.
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)
I would like to read in my local newspaper why he was suspended ….
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.
I’m betting it’s not about the bears.
I think it’s about the billing for the flight times. When you’re paying millions of dollars for rental and fuel for aircraft, it becomes trivially easy to start adding in “extra” flight times for things like vacation trips (or, more likely) kickbacks from pilots and air charter services for billed flights that were not actually taken… which would make the questions about the “bear” flights more pertinent. If you list events that are supposed to have taken place on flights that didn’t happen, it’s easy to get caught. They could probably make some really good headway if they cross-referenced flights with weather and ground/ocean visibility records.
Because the guy has been proved a liar doesn’t mean his lies about global warming are lies.
Re Brian R says:
“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.”
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.
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. Noone in their right mind is surely going to expect all the dead bears just happened to fall in the transect they covered.
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.
Mike says:
July 29, 2011 at 1:09 pm
So the science is sound. But the doubt mill got some mileage out of the story and that’s all the oil companies really need.
============================================
Mike, did you read the same transcript that I did? More, history has already deposited the paper in the dust bin of posterity. Have there been more storms there? Yes. Is there less ice? Yes. Have we found more polly bear floaters? No. Then the paper was nothing but an unintelligible blathering of gibberish. It should have never been published by anything. And, it certainly can’t be passed off as science.
Let’s review…… they saw 4 dead polar bears in the water. One day and only one day, after years and years of flying over the same areas.
From that we extrapolated, 1) that they drowned. 2) that shortage of ice was part of the causation 3) there were probably many more occurrences. 4) this is likely to increase in frequency.
That’s not science. That’s not even rational reasoning.
I reckon there were three polar bears and one Cartesian bear, which is nothing but a polar bear under a different coordinate system. 🙂
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.
=====================================================
He’s not done anything (that I can discern from the transcript) but produce horrible science. I believe the horrible science should be cause for dismissal. My goodness I hate to think how much we’re paying him to look for whales. If he wants to produce horrible science have him do it on someone else’ dime and time.
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?
gnomish says:
July 29, 2011 at 2:21 pm
i can hardly wait to hear the shuddering cricket chorus of romm, gavin, revkin, monbiot and the rest
Wait no longer.
livescience.com just posted an article entitled,”Polar Bear Researcher Suspended, Spurring Alarm”
Here is a small taste:
Maybe Gavin is next on the investigative chopping block.
That wouldn’t be an outrage, that would be righteous !
Do the officials “protesteth too much?”
Let’s see… in the interview transcript Dr. Charles Monnett indicates he’d
gotten a “personnel action” (warning? reprimand?) for not completing
the work on an annual report.
This was at the time his was working on his paper part of the time, working
on his two postings for meetings, managing a slew of programs which
included where some of the funding he oversaw went, interviewing
former observers or their “Team Leaders”, and still putting in a lot of
time getting to and flying the transects.
The side questions relating to him being visually farsighted and not
using field glasses or a spotting scope to make observations of whales
up to a mile away at 1,500 ft +/- altitude are unsettling.
I have the feeling a great many readers of the transcript wonder if
Dr. Monnett could pass an unannouced “physical” exam.
Dude.
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.
R.S.Brown says:
July 29, 2011 at 5:51 pm
I have the feeling a great many readers of the transcript wonder if
Dr. Monnett could pass an unannouced “physical” exam.
Dude.
=====================================================================
That was my first thought……………………..LOL
“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..
Hmm defense of the polar bear carcass extrapolator science by Gavin (see the http://www.livescience.com/15313-polar-bear-researcher-suspended.html link above).
Well, I guess that provides a quantitative measure of a) Gavin’s dedication to his publicly funded NASA duties, and b) the quality of AGW ‘science’ in general.
thanks, ClimateForAll.
i went and posted a comment.
cirby says:
July 29, 2011 at 4:58 pm
I’m betting it’s not about the bears.
I think it’s about the billing for the flight times….
————————————————————————————————–
I think you are very close to the true reason. They probably realized that this guy was spending millions of dollars and has almost nothing to show for it. The polar bear paper is just on of the most glaring example of this.
You spent how many millions of dollars and how many years and you only saw 11 bears?
Exposing the fraudulent science is just a very nice bonus. If this was just about disproving the effects of AGW you would never see a federal official involved in this current administration and you would certainly see the circling of wagons. This is about misappropriation of funds and everyone else involved is running.
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.
Rattus Norvegicus
His rant at the end of the interview was well after he was suspended. I don’t think that’s directly related unless he had started ranting about it prior to the suspension.
And he’s hardly the only scientist to rant against MMS – they had a 50% turnover rate in the polar areas, a lot of which was apparently due to restrictions on actual science.