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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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.
Onion2: I was just pointing out the error of the poster who thinks it logical to conclude from one event a whole population. Nothing could be further from the truth. I wasn’t suggesting the paper much such unfounded leaps.
The real test is whether the unusual event is repeated. If it is just a once-off virtually nothing can be concluded sensibly from it.
(Incidentally, I think I made some errors in my stats calculations, but the general point holds.)
Ooops, a bit of illiteracy. I wasn’t suggesting the paper made such unfounded leaps.
I looked up the quote about polar bears in gore’s film, to see what it actually said.
http://www.global-warming-truth.com/environmental-tv-movies/unofficial-transcription-of-an-inconvenient-truth-part-2.html#a19
I assume that refers to the Monnett study. The content is factual, but in the context of the film, it rises to polemic.
barry:
I write to offer some friendly advice.
Attempts to defend the indefensible make the defender look foolish.
Monnett’s “study” was an extraploation of an anecdote: it was not science and, therefore, it is not defensible that the”study” was presented in a journal as being a scientific finding..
Richard
water
On the contrary, doing extra work gets more bang for your buck. And it was normal practise for those expeditions to collect data on other animals.
Monnett: “Hey is that another polar bear?”
On-board agency rep: “You are tasked to monitor bow whales, not polar bears.”
Monnett: “But there are no whales to see just now. We always note other animals.”
Rep: “You: close the notebook and put the pencil down. Mr Monnett, if you keep doing work extra work, I will have to advise the comptroller that you are wasting taxpayer’s money.”
Monnett: “My eyes are on the water, someone else is making notes. Look! Another bear. And there’s the third seal for the day.”
Rep: “I ask you again to cease making observations outside your remit. We may interview you at some point in the future…”
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….
barry wrote:
He sees four dead bears in the open water for the first time in a quarter of a million kilometers of flying time over a decade, and checks aerial data for the decade previous (comparing apples with apples) and finds this is the first record of dead bears in open water.
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. How reliable are your memories of events five or ten or fifteen years back? If someone else on the survey team had seen a dead bear, they still wouldn’t have had any record of it because the database they were using “did not have a way to record the dead ones in it.”
barry wrote:
Monnett notes that the region has been warming and the ice retreating, suggesting this may put stress on polar bears. That’s hardly controversial. He speculates what may occur if the ice continues to retreat in a warming world.
And conflating the effects of the storm with the stresses from a warming world is logical? 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”? Isn’t that like saying a Cat.2 hurricane that hits Galveston is simultaneously affecting New Orleans to the same degree?
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.
Immaterial. The report doesn’t make that connection.
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.
I still think the suspension is a case of misused Government funds, like surfing porn. All those lonely hours in airplanes counting whales must take its toll. It has to be one of the most boring things in the world. Interesting that he claimed he could sight whales that nobody else could see.
In my opinion the polar bear study was a misuse of Federal funds in that the project was funded to count whales. The so-called study was obviously written to bolster Monnett’s resume. On top of this he testifies that he didn’t have time to produce the annual reports.
I would have fired this malingerer.
“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?
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.
So a “live bear” in the database becomes a dead bear in his paper?
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.
Hahah! My” wife looked at it, and someone else made sure it was potically acceptible”… yeah, really stringent! 🙂
kcrucible, you omitted what directly follows;
The Guardian has a transcript of an intervew by Eric May with Monnett’s colleague Jeffrey Gleason at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jul/29/transcript-jeffrey-gleason
No explanation why, which is most odd. Gleason talks like a normal human being, unlike Monnett
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.
A great interrogation of Gleason ends with this:
ERIC MAY: One last thing, because this is an ongoing investigation, I need to ask you not to discuss what we discussed in here with anybody, particularly Mr. Monnett, you know, talking with us, because it is an ongoing investigation, okay?
JEFFREY GLEASON: Okay. And if I might ask, “investigating”?
ERIC MAY: The validity of the paper and the photos. Nothing? All right, that concludes our interview. It is now 12:42.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jul/29/transcript-jeffrey-gleason
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.
A paper that implies conclusions that rely on a Galveston hurricane affecting New Orleans is irresponsible regardless of the number of disclosures included.
I can’t count 5 horses in my neighbor’s backyard, calculate that my neighbor’s backyard is 1/1000th the area of my town, and then conclude that my town has a horse population of 5,000 regardless of the number of disclosures I include. It’s a bad scientific conclusion. Bad science isn’t made acceptable by disclosures.
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.
It does. They presume the bears drowned because they were all between 34 and 104 kilometers from land when discovered after a storm. They presume it because no one has seen a dead bear in the water before and here are four in the one season,far out from land after a storm. No, they don’t know the cause of death for sure, but drowning is likely enough to build…. a hypothesis.
Does the paper claim the bears were definitely drowned?
No.
Does it say that there are definitely more than 4 dead bears?
No.
Does it say that AGW caused the bears to drown?
No.
Does it say that the dead bears corroborate that global warming is happening?
No.
Does it say there have never been drowned polar bears or dead bears in the sea before?
No.
Does it build a hypothesis from a small data packet and call for more investigation on bear mortality while swimming?
Yes.
If you answered yes to all but the last question, you either haven’t read or don’t understand the observational note Charles Monnett wrote in 2005.
It’s a hypothesis, not a formal analysis of polar bear mortality from swimming. Essentially the message is this: these dead bears we saw may have drowned due to less sea ice and a storm that caused normally calm waters to be rough, and there were likely more bears affected by these conditions than we saw. Someone should look into it because there’s nothing about this kind of event in the scientific literature, so we could be missing a part of the polar bear life/death cycle, and we may see more events like it if sea ice cover continues to shrink.
That’s really all it is saying, plus some data and illustrative figures. Read it and see for yourself.
http://www.alaskaconservationsolutions.com/acs/images/stories/docs/Polar%20Bears-ExtendedOpenWaterSwimmingMortality.pdf
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.
Barry,
Since you seem to have all the answers, please explain the article’s title for those of us who would like to know the reason for Monnett’s suspension.
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.
Polar Bear Scientist Suspended for Management, Not Quality of Research
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