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/
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.
Seems someone hasn’t learned the the old saw about assumptions.
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.
Is it DeadPolarBearGate yet?
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.]
So when does sloppy science become misconduct? Never?
“We saw one dead bear and one live bear, we extrapolate that 50 % of the bear population died”.
I disagree with readers that an even (random) distribution across the entire research area can be presumed. This event required a convergence of a number of factors: the storm, the sea bound bear population, and their flight which covers 11 % of the area had to find them within the required time frame.
Do bear populations cluster? I would have thought so.
Did the storm cover the whole area as is presumed? Do they normally? The same intensity across the whole area?
How often do they fly?
How often do they fly WHEN stormy weather is around? They admit this stops them flying, they can spend weeks in the cabin (darts? poker? administering Wikipedia?)
The transcript describes one flight, or transect, in which the bears were observed swimming. Then a storm hit. Then they went out again in pristine weather (better than Hawaii) and observed the carcasses. Ideal viewing weather following a storm. How often does this occur? Often stormy weather persists and you’d never make a flight whilst the bears are out there getting dunked.
I don’t believe they couldn’t have observed one dead bear in all the years prior to this. These aren’t immortal bears outside of global warming triggered bear ravaging events.
And lets remember their primary reason for being there, for doing these flights, was to record whale movements. So this whole bear stuff was peripheral to their main purpose and wasn’t even recorded in the main computer log. Obviously this fact doesn’t bode well for the assumption that previous flights would have recorded dead bears if they were seen, they might not have bothered. In fact it’s admitted that some observers just didn’t have the ‘eyes’ of experience to record some aspects that others did.
It would be interesting to note how many and what papers have been released by this division in total. I hope their $50 million budget hasn’t only produced ‘drowing bear’ papers when that isn’t even their reason for existing.
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?
None. Monnett’s observations were made during flights scouting for bow whales – that was the main area of research he was undertaking at the time. Details on other wildlife were recorded as well.
KR,
The rant was in February. Look at the date on the transcript.
This was the first time dead bears had been observed floating in the open sea. Read the original report. It tables previous observations, which Monnett used as a reference.
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.
Hmm. This wasn’t bad science. The paper wasn’t anything more than an unusual observation noted by someone experienced in a particular field. You get these sorts of paper in ornithology (for instance) all the time. The paper/note doesn’t purport to be anything more than it actually is. Not all science is double blind 10,000 subject experiments you know. Perfectly reasonable thing to publish: he flies over an area for years and never sees dead polar bears in the water, and then manage to get in the air after a big storm and see 4 temporally close together. That is an unusual observation. The sort of thing that should be recorded for other polar bear researchers to know about in the future.
(It should be noted that the “survival rate” appeared in the discussion without any confidence intervals and not as a statistic in the results and as Monnett himself points out in the interview, there just wasn’t enough data to do anything else.)
Where Monnett has come unstuck is that other politicized parties have taken this paper as something more than it is – an interesting observation – and promoted it as hard evidence of the impending human induced mass extinction of polar bears. Now someone doing normal science is getting hammered for what others have made of his data.
I don’t quite see why so many on here want to get stuck into Monnett. He’s the wrong target. The polar bear sob story is frustrating, but no real scientist would take Monnett’s note and make anything of it other than an interesting observation.
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.
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.
Paul Deacon says:
July 29, 2011 at 3:16 pm
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.
Glad someone(s) actually plays chess (well).
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 says:
July 29, 2011 at 9:57 pm
“I don’t quite see why so many on here want to get stuck into Monnett. He’s the wrong target… no real scientist would take Monnett’s note and make anything of it other than an interesting observation.”
Indeed. The real story here always has been how this nonstory – some polar bears, like some people, have always drowned – was transformed into a giant AGW scare story. Same for the ‘cannibal polar bear’ story.
The best thing about this development is that it exposes the inconvenient truth that the whole myth is only based on four dead bears, in one place in one year. Shouldn’t the place be littered with them by now?
@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?
How about this. What is the likelihood of a group of guys who like shooting things chartering a boat in Alaska to do some exotic hunting probably interested in whales or walrus or anything. As luck would have it they come across a polar bear swimming, shoot it, drag it aboard. The carry on over a day or so to see if they can find any others and they find two more. They do the same and pose for photos on the boat. Now they can’t take the bears back to the mainland as they would get into trouble so they, say, extract the canines as souvenirs and dump the carcasses over board.
Pretty unlikely. How unlikely? Once in 23 years unlikely? Hmmm.
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!!
Re Mooloo says:
“(Of course the upper estimate could be as high as 80 easily.)”
Exactly. And that’s why the number is important, he is conveying the point that the 3 dead polar bears he observed were in just a 11% section of the area, and therefore it is highly likely there are more than 3 dead bears in the total area. As far as sample error goes, it will go both ways.
He is not stating the numbers are definite, in fact he’s clear that accurate estimates are not possible given the sample size.
Precise numbers are not required for the point of the paper though. The paper is really about the subject of bear mortality from storms during low ice conditions. The paper claims, whether it’s true or not, that this mortality factor on bears has not been considered before. The paper links to other studies that only consider bears use of energy when swimming long distances, not the impacts of storms.
The study seems more than just ok to me, it is even beginning to look quite good as it’s bringing new considerations into light. It’s saying we cannot ignore the impact of storms on swimming polar bears during low ice conditions. That low ice conditions will increase in the future has obvious impacts on this.
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.
Hey, dude.. tears of mirth down my cheeks on reading the transcript. Having now seen one comedian posing as a scientist I am extrapolating that all (climate or green) scientists are comedians. And my wife peer reviewed it…
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.
Many are commenting here without having read the transcript. Others are upset by
the ums and ahs and the odd apostrophes. Here are a few extracts. Sensitive souls please avert their eyes
ERIC MAY: How many observers are on a flight? I mean, who’s actually on the plane during a mission?
CHARLES MONNETT: A standard flight would be the, the pilot, the copilot, a Team Leader, who was an observer, a person that was designated as an observer, and it usually was a right-left aircraft thing. And then we would have the – I don’t remember what we called them, our data, uh, entry person, and that person was at a window and might or might not look out the window. Um, usually if there, if there was lots going on, they were too busy entering data, um, but if something interesting was seen, they might look out the window, or if it was slow, they might look out the window.
[…]
ERIC MAY: Okay. At the end of the year, um, is there a final report?
CHARLES MONNETT: There’s supposed to be an annual report, and when I inherited the project, Steve was two years behind because, unfortunately, our managers don’t, they don’t, they don’t recognize the amount of work adding something like this on generates.And then, uh, it took me a very long time to do this report, just because I was too busy. And we had, uh – if you look in the reports, you’ll see that they’re very heavy on graphics and, and calculations and things and summary tables. And we had programming for a while that helped generate a lot of that, but primarily we worked with a GIS contractor, someone, you know, that, that the unit here I had a contract with that came every day and would work with data and produce graphics and summaries and that for us. And that person’s time was, um, heavily in demand and, and I got pretty good support, um, up to about ‘07.
And then they got rid of them shortly after that. So I had – that – they don’t even have software – so we’re out of the mapping business. [note: Monnett had previously mentioned that he was sometimes grounded by bad weather and spent 30 days “in his room”]
[…]
CHARLES MONNETT: Okay, how come you’re so, so careful about your own title, but you won’t call me “Doctor”?
LYNN GIBSON: Ah.
ERIC MAY: Oh.
CHARLES MONNETT: (Laughing).
ERIC MAY: All right, I apologize for that, Dr. Monnett.
CHARLES MONNETT: I never use that except for when somebody denies me it, then I – (laughing).
ERIC MAY: Oh, understood. All right, Dr. Monnett. All right, Dr. Monnett,
[…]
ERIC MAY: Okay. And did these observations all get recorded or –?
CHARLES MONNETT: No. Um, well, I think the, um – they got recorded, but I can’t remember whether we punched them in the program. We were recording them in our book, because that’s one of the anomalies I was talking about that we really didn’t have any way to signify a dead polar bear. And so rather than have that in the database when really what we wanted to analyze were live polar bears – remember, the stuff is all automated.
ERIC MAY: Right.
CHARLES MONNETT: And so somebody has got to go through and delete it, um, or do something, um, and I, I don’t remember whether it’s – we recorded the location in the database or just wrote it down. I’m guessing we recorded the location, uh, but it would have been shown as a live bear.
CHARLES MONNETT: So the, the, the drowning part, the dead bear part is in our books. It’s not in the database. I, I, I think – and I don’t remember whether the bears are in the database or not at this point.
ERIC MAY: Okay.
CHARLES MONNETT: They might be.
MONNETT: – you know, in the, in the profession, you write little Notes. Jeff Gleason, I don’t know if you saw some of the stuff. When Jeff was here, he was being, uh, very creative in these. He, he saw some mallards eating salmon one time in a stream up north, and he checked all the literature and found that nobody had ever documented that before. And he wrote a Note, and it got published in some little crummy journal.
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. 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. Cleve Cowles, um, gave it a thorough read. I think Paul Stang did, who’s a manager, and I wouldn’t call that a peer review. That’s a, that’s a political correctness review.
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.