Inspector general's transcript of drowned polar bear researcher being grilled

Anthony, you say this was “peer-reviewed” and wonder why it’s such a terrible piece of “science”. Only only has to look at the level his “peers” operated at–his level, to see it didn’t take much to get trash like this published. The surprise is that it got the traction it did (but as you said, Gore isn’t a scientist), and an even bigger surprise it is being investigated now.
From this I’d say the climate for climate research has changed dramatically–perhaps even to a tipping point. The current climate seems to be pessimism of past pronouncements–perhaps even a modicum of skepticism!

Maybe we could apply the Drake equation to figure out how many polar bears drowned?

I can’t believe they are scientists, I just can’t!

They have never been introduced to science 101: the scientific method.
They look at a tiny part of the Arctic, for a tiny bit of time and think it is acceptable to extrapolate and assume the total Polar bear activity from that tiny shred of information?
I look out of my office window and count 10 people walk past on the street below. I extrapolate from this that the population of the town is 100,000 people.
An hour later (when the shops are closed) I count 2 in the same amount of time and extrapolate that climate change has killed 80,000 people in my town.

William Briggs mentions this in his blog:
“In a hilarious exchange with investigator Eric May, Monnett tries to deny that the 25% statistic was a statistic:”
http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=4177

Yuk! and it wasn’t even a real bear in the video. 🙁

Anecdotal. Undocumented. Apparently they hadn’t been keeping a count of sightings of dead polar bears, so the previous years’ numbers prior to those 3 (or was it 4?) dead bears were hearsay. Lying with statistics.

Surreal.

The sad part is that the general public will never know about this or understand what it means. They have been taught to believe “scientists” and don’t know how many “scientists” are not really worth the name.
This should be read on the nightly newscasts in all the Western countries.

How did they know they drowned? Couldn’t the cause of death been something else? Just because a body is found in the water doesn’t mean it drowned.

I wonder how many other “sensational” “peer reviewed” papers would read like this under real peer review? The transcript was hard to read because of the stumbling of Charles Monnett. You would think he only had a few minutes to read the paper before being grilled.

Ken Hall says:
July 29, 2011 at 9:27 am
They have never been introduced to science 101: the scientific method.
They look at a tiny part of the Arctic, for a tiny bit of time and think it is acceptable to extrapolate and assume the total Polar bear activity from that tiny shred of information?
I look out of my office window and count 10 people walk past on the street below. I extrapolate from this that the population of the town is 100,000 people.
An hour later (when the shops are closed) I count 2 in the same amount of time and extrapolate that climate change has killed 80,000 people in my town.
=============================================================
Exactly Ken, this is ridiculous. It’s one single observation that they turned into a statistic.

Did I read that right? Did he say his own work was sloppy? And by extrapolation (hey, I’m just doing what the researcher did with his observation) the peer review process would have also been sloppy for not catching it? If anything, this is enough to make a reputable journal decide to remove the article from publication.

I take the stumbling as lying. If he were confident in his paper and confident in his results – and more importantly – confident in his uncertainties (honestly this is important), then he would speak with clarity and sincerity.
Yet, I’ve not met a liberal that can be alone in a quiet spot, comfortable in their own mind. They will have the radio on, cell phone stuck to their head, iPad going, something is distracting them from their own thoughts. This guy, Monnett seems like one of those folks.
Interestingly enough, Charles Monet, was the name of the index case of Ebola Hemmoragic Fever in the book, “The Hot Zone”, by Richard Preston (1995)

I’ve been thinking lately about the universal power of the default leftist mindset of absolute egalitarianism. Everything is identical, nothing has its own innate characteristics, all behavior is Brownian motion until it’s pushed by a Social Force.
Same thing at work here.
Polar bears are extremely intelligent mammals, and nothing they do is randomly distributed. When they’re in one location, it’s because that location has something they want. Seals to eat, a girl bear in heat.
Monnett automatically and leftishly assumed they would behave like air molecules, and couldn’t see the problem with his assumption.

The error bars on their estimate of drowned bears probably exceed the total population of same.

…..And to think this bloke managed 50 million dollars worth of research projects. Unbelievable.
So…… How much of that 50 million in funding does this sorry excuse for a scientist have to pay back ?
I hope he realizes that the Gore’s of the world get to walk away scott free and rich as sin from any dealings they do…. It’s little people like him that are left holding the can…. and deservedly so.
I think the term for people like him is, ” Useful idiot.”

But on the other hand, I’m not sure this kind of sloppiness qualifies as “misconduct” sufficient to suspend his job, which includes overseeing other research programs. I’d really want to see evidence that his oversight of other researchers was sloppy or that his unit had published additional bad research papers. He’s not really responsible for other people over-interpreting his paper.
One curious fact, though; after Gore and the greens got all excited about his paper, he says he stopped listing himself as an author on other work from his unit, to keep a low profile and avoid controversy. I don’t know too many scientists who would give up publication credit to avoid controversy. (Indeed, most warmers love controversial claims as long as they are in favor of more warming.) I wonder if there is something else going on. PEER claims he is being targeted because his research gets in the way of exploiting arctic resources, but that does not ring true today. The Obama administration is not exactly a friend to the oil industry.

Kill AGW with mockery, ridicule, irony, and satire.
Full script.
Are videos available?
“Who’s on First”
“Abbott: Strange as it may seem, they give ball players nowadays very peculiar names.
Costello: Funny names?
Abbott: Nicknames, nicknames. Now, on the St. Louis team we have Who’s on first, What’s on second, I Don’t Know is on third–
Costello: That’s what I want to find out. I want you to tell me the names of the fellows on the St. Louis team.
Abbott: I’m telling you. Who’s on first, What’s on second, I Don’t Know is on third–
Costello: You know the fellows’ names?
Abbott: Yes.
Costello: Well, then who’s playing first?
Abbott: Yes.
Costello: I mean the fellow’s name on first base.
Abbott: Who.”
http://www.psu.edu/dept/inart10_110/inart10/whos.html

Welcome to the delightful world of post modern science. Where science doesn’t mean science.

And if there were no dead polar bears observed, the conclusion would have been ‘Polar Bears Don’t Die’.
Works for me! /s

Looks like the polar bear myth is at a tipping point…

The highly vaunted peer review system at work. What surprises me though is that the Obama administration is doing the investigation. Is this the beginning of a U-turn in policy?

They had to add up all the flights to get the 11%area surveyed but you don’t sum the dead bears with the live ones to equal 7 bears total? Wouldn’t 3 out of 7 equal a 57% survival rate? Using 3 dead bears out of 4 live bears assumes these ARE THE SAME THREE BEARS which equals his stated 25% survival rate.
Holy crap! Who peer reviewed this? Shouldn’t the misconduct extent to the reviewers as well?

Of virtually anything I have ever read, from climate gate, to the garbage in Al Gore’s film, this is completely over the top.
If the science community does not instantly and forcibly and massively repudiate the testimony and witness that they’ve used to support the polar bears are endangered by global warming, the science community is completely finished.
I consider this the Watergate or worse climate gate of the science community. This is not the trial of some buffoon. This is about not some post on WUWT where perhaps some jokingly mention that jobless people could be given grants to generate electricity on stationary bicycles we place on street corners for these people to earn their keep.
This is the final last straw and will be an indictment of the whole climate science community in how they handle this issue. The revelations of this testimony is indicative if any shred of integrity exists in the climate science community.
There must be an INSTANT and FORCEFUL REPUDIATION of this evidence from the science community, or simply put they have nothing left in terms of credibility.
This is by far the worst scandal of anything I’ve seen in any regards anything perpetrated within the science community in regards to global warming. Hide the decline, and hockey sticks pale by this breach of public trust. Preventing peer review and ignore FIO requests pales by this revelation. Brochure material from Greenpeace appearing in IPCC reports as peer review is a scandal but pales in regards to this revelation.
This one tops them all!
How that science community which is desperate for restoring credibility deals with this will define if that community has any hope of being salvaged. This is not even funny anymore.
In a word – UNBELIEVABLE.
Super Turtle

Theroretically speaking in terms of CAGW research ethics, can you partake in scientific misconduct when you are quite obviously not a scientist? Shouldn’t that be called layman misconduct?
If the polar bears peed in the water but Monnett never saw it, can the addition of liquid into the system count towards sea level rise?
How much did the evolution of thermal energy released by the decay of the rotting bear carcasses raise the temp in the Arctic, since it’s alledgely never happened before in recorded history?
Inquiring minds want to know…..

So how may dead polar bears did he NOT observe due to their dead carcasses sinking or being eaten by other predators of the sea. Perhaps his guess was too low.

As a basis for his counts Monnett says the bears were drowned but this was a flyby. How could he determine the cause of death from an airplane or chopper flying over. For all he new each bear had a 30-06 slug in the head or a traq dart or died of starvation. This is preschool science.

Horrifying – no doubt Monnett and PEER (Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility) are pleased that they requested that a transcript be made of that terrible inquisition. (Isn’t it a basic tenet of climatology to conduct your own closed ‘independent’ reviews)? (These guys must be beginners).
Perhaps Gavin and RealClimate will be able to explain the mathematical rigor to a curious world.?
And I wonder if /. will pick up on this?

Asking the big questions..
Three dead bears..
WHERE WAS GOLDILOCKS??
JC

mwhite says:
“The polar bear is the only bear considered to be a marine mammal. Why?”
The one thing missing from your list, in MHO the most important thing, is the fact that the guard hairs on polar bears have a hollow core. A wonderful adaptation to living in a frigid arctic environment, the dead-air spaces within each hair act the same as dressing in layers when you go out on a cold winter day. The extra added benefit is that each hollow hair traps a small amount of air that acts like a life preserver for when the bears enter the water. What makes a cork float? The same thing that makes a polar bear float… trapped air. The reason polar bears can swim hundreds of miles in open water is that they’re not just buoyant due to their blubber. They’re buoyant due to their fur coats (remember the ridiculous notion a few years ago that some well-meaning but otherwise completely uninformed environmentalist came up with to propose life preservers for polar bears? Staggers the imagination!). Polar bears don’t actually have to expend any energy to stay afloat. All their energy can go into moving through the water. When they dive, they actually have to pull themselves down under the surface. If they stop swimming, they’ll eventually come to the surface all on their own. It might be slow, due to their mass, but they’ll eventually come back up. The idea that polar bears would drown because they got tired and couldn’t keep themselves from going under is pure unadulterated bull-pucky.
BTW, completely off topic of AGW, but a couple of little factoids that I always found fascinating about polar bears: Their fur is actually pigment free, and their skin is black. The reason they appear white is due to the way light refracts off of each hollow hair shaft (like the way snow appears white due to light refraction). For a time, biologists hypothesized that the hollow guard hairs acted like fibre-optics, transmitting the sun’s energy to the “black body” of the polar bear’s skin. Unfortunately (it would have been such a cool adaptation), the hypothesis has been since rejected by later studies.
It was this point, in “An Inconvenient Truth” that I had my eureka moment about AGW. Up until that point, I was (head bowed in shame) a believer. But, when I realized that Gore was not telling the truth about polar bears, I started to look at the subject more closely. THEN I realized all the other “creatively licensed” facts that also didn’t hold up to scrutiny. I truly feel fortunate that I had the specialized education in the physiology of polar bears to recognize the truthfulness of Gore’s statements. If I catch you lying to me once, I will have a hard time believing anything you say, ever again.

Well, that science looks pretty settled !

Tip of the rotten ‘Conservation Biology’ iceberg. It is not a real science. It is advocacy masquerading as science, and the graduates pumped out are indoctrinated missionaries. Their junk science is not limited to polar bears. They learned many of their tricks for them by sharpening their Big Lie skills on grizzly bears. Etc.

political correctness gone insane. Continual droughts and extreme poverty in Africa still not resolved and all the the middle class liberal greenies have to worry about is 4 dead f**ing polar bears…sorry 3.

Ok, ready for the science? Here it is, condensed down:
1) Fly over 11% of an area of study and count 4 swimming polar bears
2) Repeat flyover a week later and count 3 dead polar bears
3) Perform 3rd grade ratio mathematics and determine that in week one there were 36 swimming bears and in week two there were 27 dead bears…. ta da! 75% fatality rate!
4) Assume that the 75% fatality rate was due to a strong storm that ran through between the two observations.
5) Assume that the storm and ice melt were caused by global warming
6) Therefor, in a completely serious manor, predict that 75% of swimming bears die per year due to global warming.
7) Profit
All this from three dead bears and one storm.
Is this misconduct or malpractice? It certainly isn’t science.

Professor Phil Jones will soon be on the blower:-
“hullo Charles, sorry about all this palaver – there’ll be an inquiry but don’t worry Al [Gore] will get you a good brief [ legal representation] and we’ll parachute in some alarmist ‘experts’ [no bias then] – well send over Oxburgh…….. he’s alright!”
And; “when you have to leave for ‘personal reasons’ – you’re just the type of chap we need at CRU!”

The following excerpt really caught my attention:
“It was over a – it was about a week later, over that period, um, and, again, you know, we had no, uh, notion that it would be a important observation. And it was sometime later I think that we started to realize that it was probably something that was worthy of, of writing a note, you know, for a journal. And we were looking for quick, clean products, um, because that‟s how we, uh, justify our work, our study, you know.”
So right from the start this was never about actual scientific data. It was all about something that could be sensationalized to try to “justify our work” and get more study funding. Yes, that’s scientific misconduct when you suddenly start going outside the boundaries of the study to sensationalize an abnormal one-time observation to “justify” your otherwise boring -but designed to be scientifically rigorous- study. Real science is boring, and accurate results are usually only exciting to other scientists. If you find something sensational that will “justify our work” in the 24/7 news cycle, it’s not likely to be very scientifically rigorous data.

I had extensive dealings with with the US Forest Service and US Department of Fish and Wildlife concerning their listing of the listing of the northern spotted owl and marbled murrelet pursuant to the Endangered Species Act. This included both administrative and judicial proceedings involving the listed and subsequent selection and designation of critical habitats.
Peer review as used in federal agencies for internal research papers is a far cry from the peer review applied in scientific journals. Monnett’s peer review likely to come from other biologists, perhaps a statistician, and supervisors within his bureau. Like minded people working for the same employer collaborate to achieve specific objectives.
Monnett’s work was also published in the Journal of Polar Biology. It is unclear to me whether or not papers submitted to this journal are peer reviewed prior to acceptance. My point is that “peer review” can be an elusive term when used in federal agencies.
I suspect, base upon my experience that Charles Monnett is a designated hit man in the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. His job is to establish barriers to limit or prevent exploration and development of oil and gas deposits in Alaska and its adjacent waters. He currently manages $50 million worth of federal research grants. You can bet with confidence that the research concerns fish, sea mammals and wildlife that maybe potential proxies to prevent discovery and extraction of oil and natural gas. That is the case with polar bears and ongoing studies of Alaskan walruses.
Chances are that Monnett’s polar bear study may not be the only target of the investigation. His administration of $50 million in grants may also be in question. Time will tell.

@ Grizzled Bear, July 29, 2011 at 11:44 am:
Thanks for that information, especially that on the hypothesis of the guard hair acting like fibre optics. I remember that, and I too thought it was cool.
So when the ‘scientists’ in that report in the guardian linked above say that ‘they can’t hold their noses when they swim’, we can confidently preclude that they are “scientists’ of the same calibre as Mr Monnett, can we not?
A snippet in regard to the hollow guard hairs: polar bears in South American zoos looked green because algae had colonised the interior of those hairs. No link – this info goes back to times before the internet …

cagw_skeptic99 says:
July 29, 2011 at 12:59 pm

Great point! I for one had not thought about it, but if true, it signals the beginning of the end. The movement is turning upon itself and now it is every reputation for itself!

C’mon Guys, we’ve known this for a long time. It’s known as the subdiscipline ‘Climate Change Statistics’.
‘You look twice and se no living bear, you look one more time and see no dead bear. Ergo, half the population must have died. From the process of your looking’

“survived”
surveyed

I read the paper and it is really as bad as the interview suggests in my opinion.
I don’t see how any reasonable person could draw such wide conclusions from such a narrow sample. They can’t be that (I don’t want to say “dumb”)? I can only conclude logically that this unsupported interpretation of the data was intentional.
Gavin, if you truly believe the conclusions of this paper you are not the brilliant (but misguided) man I assumed you to be. Since I do not believe you are a fool, then what can I deduce other than you are corrupted?
I need a drink.

This resoning by DR. Monnnett is typical of the circular reasoning of the AGW crowd. He presents the drownings as a new phenomena caused by global warming even though recordign of polar bear sightings didn’t start until 2004. He justified the assumption of no polar bear drownings 1987-2003 (when such data wasn’t even being recorded) by saying:
“You know, you don’t see it, so – and there‟s a reason, uh, why it’s changed, which is in, in, in a lot of the early years, there was a lot of ice out there, and there just weren’t opportunities for there to be dead bears. You know, bears don’t drown when there’s ice all over the place.”
Yet the original purpose of the study, stated later in the interview, was to study changes in whale migration caused by increased human activity. Whales breathe air. So if you are tracking the migration of the whales, they need to breathe so the area must be ice free. Please make up your mind DR. Monnett: Either the area was ice covered 1987-2003 and all your whale migration data is wrong since the whales can’t breathe through ice, or the area wasn’t ice covered so you are wrong to say there was no possibility of drowned bears.

I read this earlier in the day and thought it was a spoof put out by Never Yet Melted, only to see that no, it’s actually true. Reading through it, I have a hard time believing that this guy was the major driver, he seems more of a “useful idiot” to me. I actually felt sorry for him.
My real ire is for the people who advised him to write the paper in the first place and those who peer reviewed and published the paper subsequently. The damage they’ve caused in terms of human progress is incalculable. Shame on them. Maybe when those people are held to account, I’ll believe we’re starting to turn a corner on this debacle.

We can call it fluff, but it is not reasonable for his employer to retropectivily complain now as they signed off on it at the time. There is no indication of dishonesty. Therefore it is our duty to express our concern about harisment. The fact we are underwhelmed by the product does not mean we can let harisment slide. How can we help a “denier” in the same boat if we find it OK to do this to an Alarmist.
Mike,
The url you give points to a newpaper account of unpublished. We need to read the paper itself. Newspaper have more trouble on science details than tapping phones.

Robert of Ottawa
I suggest you read up on the topic then, as this is absolutely straightforward technique for making estimations.
In the area sampled, an abnormally high number of polar bears were swimming. After a major storm (with wave conditions much higher than average due to a lower than average sea ice level) sampling indicated that 75% of the swimming bears were dead.
I suggest you look at the technique (for example, at any of the books from http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=sampling+transect&x=0&y=0#/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=transect+sampling&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Atransect+sampling) and see if you can find issues with their work. As someone with some experience in the field, it looks just fine, if a bit underfunded.

Paddy, above, was pointing out that Monnett is incharge of Government money. He is a Contracting Officer – note capital letters, this is a formal title – with the authority to bind the US Government in contractual agreements. There is a WHOLE raft of ways to get in trouble that way. As bad as his science is, I suspect that his problems are coming from the contractual side of the house – he’s his own CO, he’s also his own Project Manager and – apparently – his own Quality Control Officer. Lots and lots of room for incompetence to play.

Wow, the interview was something else. lol, Even Monnett states that his math was of 5th grade level and there is a lot of damning information about the current scientific process, but, most of it only confirms what we already know. Peer- review doesn’t mean squat and for the most part, this guy didn’t do anything that any other alarmist doesn’t do…… over reach with his assumptions.
However, from reading the manuscript, here’s the part that has smoke and fire.
Start at line 14 pg 40…….
———————————————————————————————————————-
ERIC MAY: Do you recall seeing this? And it‟s a, it‟s a – where the (inaudible) – for you guys, it‟s a – from ESS, a manuscript review approval, like a signature. Do you recall reading those? And I believe it‟s from man- – like Cleve Cowles and –
CHARLES MONNETT: Hold on, February 10th. Ah, no, I don‟t recall seeing this. This must be what Cleve gave to Paul when he asked him to review the, the document.
ERIC MAY: Well, this was in, uh, Mr. Gleason‟s possession and –
—————————————————————————————————————————
The exchange continues after that…… apparently, this Cleve Cowles also had problems with their numbers and maths….. And, if this goes anywhere…. Here’s the funny part Monnett let loose a tell. I’ll bold the part that any investigator would perk up on…..
CHARLES MONNETT: Hold on, February 10th. Ah, no, I don‟t recall seeing this.
That’s classic. I’m betting he has seen it.
To those whining that we didn’t see any malfeasance and therefore should leave him alone, sorry, we’re paying this guy. He has a doctorate for heaven’s sake!! If this passes as the type of science he does, then he needs to move on and get off of our payroll.
Incompetence is just as dangerous as malfeasance.

An inconvenient truth about what happened to polar bears

KR – It seems you are not understanding that alhtough the original whale study did appear to use a well designed transect study to gather data, the polar bear die off claims did not. the polar bear claims were arrived at by looking at two individual data points, cherry picked to produce spectacular results, from among all the data collected during the transects.
In a proper transect study, as your earlier posts describe; you sample a representative portion of the total, analyze the changes over time, and then extrapolate those results to the total area. The whole idea is that a large number of data points over a large area will “average out” all the differences due to isolated causes associated with time and location and that what changes remain to be discovered are more universal in nature. That’s not what the dead polar bear conclusion did. It took one “4 live bear sighting” from all the myriad transect data, then compared it to a “3 dead bear sighting” at different place, time, and set of conditions. They used these numbers and their own preconceptions to come up with the final conclusion of only a 25% survival rate due to AGW.
A proper transect study would have recorded the live bear vs. dead bear numbers over the total area covered by the transects and then extrapolated to get larger numbers for the total area covered. And the analysis would have looked at how these numbers changed over time as AGW worsened if that’s what they suspected to be the cause. Instead they took a single dead bear data point and expanded it to represent the total area. Next they took a seperate single live bear data point and expanded it to represent the total area. And they just assumed that each individual data point was representative of the whole. That’s how a grab sample works, not how a transect study works. A grab sample study only works when the parameter being studied is homogenous, which bear deaths are not. They just assumed that the differences in their grab samples were caused by AGW. That’s called anecdotal evidence, not science.

How is this any worse than estimating global temperature from one tree?

KR says:
July 29, 2011 at 2:32 pm
For those of you criticizing the technique Dr. Monnett used, I strongly suggest going to Amazon and doing a quick search on “transect sampling”. This is a very well established technique for estimating biological populations. Or for estimating vegetation amounts, or the number of unexploded ordinances in a region, or…
=============
Get used to it, the scientists will be “thrown under the bus” by the bureaucrats.

Richard S Courtney
An interesting comment, Richard. It is ever more clear to me that you do not work in a scientific field. Or, for that matter, with statistics. And that your statements regarding scientific techniques should be weighted accordingly.
Donald Shockley
This study properly used transect sampling to determine the statistics at that time point, but did not represent a temporal evolution except for the fact that no drowned bears had been sighted prior to that point.. The temporal evolution was that drowned bears were completely new!
Keep in mind that the surveys did see swimming bears from time to time (standard record point), and also analyzed sea ice levels (I noted in the transcript that they tallied 20 different kinds of ice, a real challenge). The 4 swimming bears represented a large count according to their sampling, and the 3 drowned bears a complete anomaly. NOTE: I don’t think those bears would have drowned without the Beaufort 6-7 storm (land levels, ocean levels likely higher), and the lack of sea ice that made wave conditions that much worse. But given that no drowned bears had been seen before in these surveys, reporting it is actually an interesting bit of science. Which Monnett qualified quite properly in his paper/posters.
I’m waiting for the IG to actually announce charges (if they decide to do so) – this really seems like a researcher being punished for stating scientific results that don’t agree with agency aims. Keep in mind that the MMS was noted for receiving, how do I put this, hookers and blow, from the energy companies. And that Monnett received a ton of agency pressure over this…

Anthony – “You may recall that he single-handedly inspired Al Gore (not that it takes much) into producing this piece of science fiction for his even larger fiction, An Inconvenient Truth. Gore cited Monnett’s research.”
This seems like an overstatement to me. Gore talked about a lot of data in his movie; this was a fairly minor note about visible threats to a specific species. “Single-handedly” seems to be quite an exaggeration…

Luther Wu says:
July 29, 2011 at 4:31 pm
gpp says:
July 29, 2011 at 9:20 am
“there is word the polar bears seen floating dead in the water were actually shot with a tranquilizer, they ran to the water where they drowned.”
__________________________________________________________
Well? We’re waiting…
You aren’t just going to toss that grenade and run off, are you?
===========================================================
I think he’s conflating two separate events. But, yes, actual drowning of polar bears are caused by man…….. once again we see the researchers causing harm to the study objects. They killed off their share of penguins down south, too, by banding their wings. They are really a very stupid lot.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/story/2007/09/24/bear-deaths.html

There is nothing wrong with speculating in a scientific article as long as you are clear that that is what you are doing. They saw three dead bears in surveying roughly 11% of the range and estimated that about 27 bears may have died over the whole range. Anyone reading the article would realize this is a very rough estimate.
Newer work seems to be confirming Monnett’s concerns.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jul/19/polar-bear-cubs-drowning-ice
Not that the science matters when ideology is at stake.
————————————————————————————————————————
This demonstrates the huge problem of misdirection that lies in “science” nowadays that some commenters here have touched upon already.
For arguments sake, let’s say this study is an accurate representation of polar bear deaths. The problem is that it doesn’t matter because the premise that it is a new trend cannot be supported because there is no long term study on polar bear drownings. Arguing over how many bears drown is irrelevant especially when framed in the context of alarmism.
This is the same argument that is at the crux of the AGW scare in which it is assumed the earth is heating at an unprecedented rate on a geological timescale which there is no real way to know.
You can’t make a blanket statement like “Polar bears are dying because of global warming” and then go around counting bear carcasses with the assumption that the more you find the more right you are.
This is the oldest trick in the book. Make a huge claim, provide some numbers, then argue about how bad the problem really is plus or minus some figures. Everyone starts arguing about a decimal point in the extrapolation and the original claim becomes valid, just in need of “better proof”.
“He’s not wrong because someone else found dead polar bears!”
Ridiculous!

Warm and cozy in the wildlife cabin, Charles Monnett is surveying the bay through his binoculors.
Charles Monnett: Quick Mr Gleeson, grab your binoculors come have a look at this.
JS Gleeson: What is it Mr Monnett?
CM: Is that a polar bear out on the bay?
JSM: Why yes Mr Monnett, it is a polar bear. But it seems to be floating face down.
CM: I think it has drowned Mr Gleeson
JSM: Poor unfortunate bear
CM: Unfortunate for the bear, but fortunate for us Mr Gleeson
JSM: Good thinking Mr Monnett
CM: How many bears did we see this excursion Mr Gleeson?
JSM: Errrr ummm none Mr Monnett
CM: Yes yes I know but how many did the locals say they saw?
JSM: 25 locals said they saw a bear, that could just be one bear
Monnett gives Gleeson a death stare
JSM: Or it could be 25 bears Mr Monnett
CM: Exactly Mr Gleeson
JSM: So 4% of the bears have drowned?
CM: Possibly Mr Gleeson, but take a closer look, is that a female bear?
JSM: Hard to say Mr Monnett
CM: Yes but statistically there is a 50% chance that that is a female bear Mr Gleeson
JSM: Yes that’s true
CM: And almost all mature female bears have cubs this time of year
JSM: Yeeesss?
CM: So this momma bear has lost her 2 cubs as well Mr Gleeson
JSM: Darn you’re good Mr Monnett
CM: That would make it 11.11% of polar bears drowned due to Global Warming Mr Gleeson
JSM: Not just good, you’re amazing Mr Monnett
Meanwhile, on a party charter boat 95 miles away…
Party Goer 1: Hey it’s time, where is the stripper with the polar bear suit?
Party goer 2: last I saw he was leaning over the rail throwing up.

Remember that there are also human victims of this research. This winter many thousands of people will die of hypothermia as they can not afford the increases in fuel prices. ‘Research’ like this caused governments to panic and give a blank cheque for so called ‘renewables’. It won’t be the people getting rich on the back of AGW, it will be poor people living on the edge. Not important people – they will just appear as a statistic next spring.

Ok – here’s another take: the Investigators are letting him believe its about the CALCULATIONS – when in fact – there is something else afoot. You have to remember – the LAST person the investigators interview is the object of the investigation. Not the first.
But the guy (rattled or not) went from “There were four drowned bears seen” to “Well, I’m pretty confident that it was four” on their “partially randomized transects” to a calculation that implied the transects were unique.
But the part of the interview that caught MY eye was “Um, well, um, we flew transects. That was our basic methodology. They were partially randomized. And we, uh, we looked at a, a map. I think we probably used GIS to do it”.
Bwoop! Bwoop! Bwoop! Claxon Horns! Ahh-OOO-gah! Ahh-OOO-gah!
Hmmm….

This is from an article written in 2006, a response to Al Gore’s film, and was one of the first things I read when I started researching AGW :
‘Polar bears are not becoming endangered. A leading Canadian polar bear biologist wrote recently, “Climate change is having an effect on the west Hudson population of polar bears, but really, there is no need to panic. Of the 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are stable or increasing in number. They are not going extinct, or even appear (sic) to be affected at present.” ‘
The point is that there ARE experts looking at the polar bear populations, although they seem to be excluded when it comes to studies such as this. Green organisations are characterised as people who fly around in helicopters for a few days and then go away without consulting those who monitor all year round.
Obviously with good reason.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/218011/gorey-truths-iain-murray

For those concerned PEER have selectively edited the transcript, perhaps a barrage of FOI’s directed to the Inspector General would help. That office is soaking up your tax dollars, after all.

“except we made the further assumption, which is implicit to the analysis. Seems obvious to me.”
Yep, clear as mud mate! How many bears did they see alive and how many dead? I mean real empirical bears!
Imagine, you question your M.D. over treatment you receive for an illness and he tells you….”If anything, it‟s sloppy.”! Inspires confidence huh!
I can only imagine Monnett was crapping himself at being the subject of this investigation and hence lost the power of coherent thought. They should have strapped Lie Detectors to the buggers, it would have been fun to see the pens arcing across the travelling paper!

KR says:
July 29, 2011 at 7:06 pm
…”apparently polar bears have no reflex to keep their head above water if they fall asleep.
========
Do you believe this statement , that you reproduced ?

Richard S Courtney says:
July 29, 2011 at 3:52 pm
KR:
Many thanks for your informative post at July 29, 2011 at 2:32 pm which says:
“For those of you criticizing the technique Dr. Monnett used, I strongly suggest going to Amazon and doing a quick search on “transect sampling”. This is a very well established technique for estimating biological populations. Or for estimating vegetation amounts, or the number of unexploded ordinances in a region, or…”
I always wondered why estimates of biological populations, extinctions, etc. are bollocks.
I now know because you have explained it. Thankyou.
Richard
*********
I would like to add my humble thanks to those of Richard.

Polar bears never die of natural causes? Oh, I don’t know, like heart attacks, cancer or any number of things that all animals contract as they get older? Were any bears spotted on ice or land that were dead? It appears not. Therefore, we can conclude that bears, knowing their time is short, enter the water to die. And this is indicative of AGW how, again?
As to Monnett’s answers to the investigator, I have heard more intelligent reponses from a nine year old being asked why he wasn’t in school on a given day when he should have been! I know transcription can make one sound foolish at times but, Holy Moly!
Perhaps the investigators are trying to determine just how competent this man is, at this point, not very, to figure out what he may have done with $50 million? Is any money missing? We don’t know yet, however, I would guess, a lot, based on Monnett’s handling of “research”!

My ribs my ribs my ribs, this must be an April Fools day joke

Extrapolating the number of drowned beats in that 603 sq km seach area to the entire Arctic Ocean means 66,976 bears died in that storm. No wonder they are endangered.

I am disappointed by the caliber of the accusations. I was expecting that they would at least have a proof that Monnett poisoned and killed the polar bears.
Extrapolating from 3 selectively seen dead polar bears after the storm that there are billions of dead polar bears for each minute of SUV that runs is surely junk science but one that everyone in the AGW-related establishment (and maybe beyond) is surely going to defend.

“ERIC MAY: So combining the three dead polar bears and the four alive bears is a mistake?
CHARLES MONNETT: No, it‟s not a mistake. It‟s just not a, a, a real, uh, rigorous analysis. And a whole bunch of peer reviewers and a journal, you know –”
Yes it is a mistake. Dead bears certainly spend a lot more time in the water than live ones moving from one location to another. One cannot make any conclusion whatsoever till you know what percent of all bears were in the water swimming and for how long. That wasn’t done. To do that you need to know lot more info than one can glean from the information he collected.
“CHARLES MONNETT: Well, no, I didn‟t think so. I thought that was perfectly reasonable to ask them, since it isn‟t something – remember, the reason it‟s not in the database is because it, it doesn‟t happen. You know, you don‟t see it, so – and there‟s a reason, uh, why it‟s changed, which is in, in, in a lot of the early years, there was a lot of ice out there, and there just weren‟t opportunities for there to be dead bears. You know, bears don‟t drown when there‟s ice all over the place.”
So he is interjecting his assumptions not using observations to come to your conclusions. Perhaps bears do drown all the time for other reasons when there are plenty of ice floes. Perhaps they drown when weak from old age or lack of food, perhaps they drown when pinched between colliding ice floes. When there is a lot of ice does it not become difficult to impossible to spot live bears let alone dead ones between ice floes? Isn’t it much more likely that a storm would drown a bear in a situation with less ice floes than one with floes. Did he repeat his observations when there were no storms, and did he find dead bears at drown at that point?
His studies are garbage and about as useful as reports on the effectiveness of prayer in curing sickness from priests. As a scientist he has to be skeptical of his own conclusions, and test them. They were not tested at all, period.

benfrommo
Transect analysis is only valid for the region sampled – absolutely true. The study was designed for whales – also true.
However, for that sample area there were (a) an anomalous number of swimming bears, and a week later (b) a number of never seen before dead bears in the water.
“And of course the assumption that 4 bears and the 3 are the same…” Monnett did not claim these were the same bears, and in fact stated they were likely not intersecting groups (he had to correct the investigators on that) – but from the sampling you can reasonably make the estimates of 36 swimming and 27 dead (+/-). Did you actually read the transcript?
“They covered 11% over a long time period. Too long for polar bears I am sure.” I have no idea what you are even trying to say here. Random sampling is random sampling – they often flew considerable distances to the next random transect, not a progressive coverage; the statement “We noted X events of Y in the sample area, extrapolating to X * 100 / %coverage +/- in that period” is completely justified.
So there was a big change from previous data, previous years of observation (including direct observation by Monnett), and that was reportable. In a “Note”, as a small bit of science. Monnett did not go out of his way to publicise it, and in fact appeared to have been keeping his head down due to MMS attitudes on the subject. It could well be argued that those convinced of AGW overinterpreted the data, but that’s hardly Monnett’s fault… he was the one calling for better study methods.
Don K
I actually feel that a lot of the objections here are unreasonable. A scientist observing marine mammals saw a change in behaviors, something he had never seen before. The study wasn’t designed for polar bears, but that does not eliminate the fact that a change was seen. He qualified his data extensively, pointed out that more study and in particular study better designed for polar bears would be helpful to see if this was an ongoing issue. Your residence time issue affects the numbers – it doesn’t mean that a change was not seen.
So – residence time, study design, and that for matter whether or not there was a dead bear entry column prior to ’99 when Monnett started observing (he had 4-5 years of his own observations at that time) – none of these refute the fact that Monnett observed a change.

Don K – “But, I’m far from convinced that the data supports the assertion of change with any great confidence.”
I would agree with that. He spotted a change, and it’s probably worth looking into further to see if it is significant with a study actually designed to look more fully (fluffy?) at polar bears. Some of the more interesting science comes from these “Hey, what’s that” moments when you’re looking at something else entirely. I don’t think that MMS (or it’s descendents, based upon this investigation) are the folks to do it, though, and I don’t know who else would be able to fund such a study.

So, these rare and very rare, not ever seen before, events can be extrapolated up as if normal populations? This is what is doing my head in. That anyone can defend such a paper or this method and see nothing wrong, especially to continue to do so when two posters have already shown the absurdity by taking the extrapolations to logical conclusions…

@Larry in Texas
“Good enough for government work”! Hilarious statement after reading the transcript, even if it is a golden oldie! It bears (couldn’t help it!) keeping in mind, climate science is practically all “government work”!

barry Thanks for the link to the actual article.
The bears apparently died during a stretch of bad weather, when a lack of sea ice required long swimming distances – if the weather had been fine, they might have been OK. IMO Monnett’s methodology looks good, and the numbers worth considering. It was a significant change in observations.
Changes in habitat (in this case, ice coverage, sea conditions in part dependent on those, and swimming distances) will drive changes in animal populations dependent on those habitats. Saying that isn’t the case is just silly.
REPLY: YBS 3 bears does not a trend nor paper make. It’s a single data point.

As someone said earlier, the transect method used is a pretty normal thing, especially as it was designed to COUNT WHALES! That’s the problem with Monnett’s crappy paper. He and his organization were hired and funded to COUNT WHALES, not bears.
The thing that elevates Monnett’s actions to the level of a criminal investigation is the use of Government funds to take on projects that are not approved by the custodians of our tax money. No wonder his supervisors were antsy about this idiot paper.
This misuse of Federal funds may called many things, but it is in my opinion a criminal act. It is akin to SEC attorneys looking at porn for eight hours a day when the financial system is being looted by crooks and government bureaucrats.
Suppose they lost some whales while playing poker, surfing porn, or counting dead polar bears. Who answers for that?

bob – “The thing that elevates Monnett’s actions to the level of a criminal investigation is the use of Government funds to take on projects that are not approved by the custodians of our tax money.”
Oh – I see… Monnett should have steadfastly ignored odd data in his observations, not analyzed data collected in the course of whale studies WRT the bears, not spent any time (a couple of weeks?) writing up a paper and a poster presentation on it. Said paper having been approved by his supervisors at the time, which rather invalidates your claims of unapproved misuse.
I’m curious, “bob” – have you ever been prescribed an antibiotic? Like, for example, penicillin? (http://inventors.about.com/od/pstartinventions/a/Penicillin.htm) You obviously have no idea how the scientific approach leads to considering your observations, looking at the outliers, to new data, to significant new discoveries, etc. With your approach we would still be in the Stone Age.

a paper on those containing some hypotheses as to why that occurred, pointers to future study

Exactly. It’s a hypothesis, not a formal study on polar bear mortality, that calls for more research in this area.
But people are erroneously treating it as if it was a definitive study. Like this;

“Monnett automatically and leftishly assumed they would behave like air molecules, and couldn’t see the problem with his assumption.”

Of course, he didn’t assume any such thing. The closest he gets to a definitive statement is:

“Our count of dead polar bears related to the 2004 wind storm almost certainly represents an underestimate of the actual number of bears affected.”

Translation: it is almost certain that more than 4 bears were affected. Monnett assumes nothing about the actual number of dead bears, merely makes a tentative and very simple extrapolation to illustrate a potentiality regarding the hypothesis.
It’s not definitive. It doesn’t claim to be, and it should not be cast as such.

One year of record low ice he saw a bunch of polar bears swimming way out from shore to try to get to the ice, and, after a big wind event and high wave event (global warming, like hurricanes he explained.) some obviously drowned (4 in total observed.) Since then, there have been few repeats.

That’s interesting. Could you link to any post-2004 data on this?
I read an article from 2008, IIRC, where 9 bears had been spotted in the open water in summer. This was quite a lot compared to previous years, but not as much as seen in 2004. I don’t know if the area examined, or the time frame, was anything similar to Monnett’s 2004 overflights.

He published his one year’s observation as a short note, but obviously couldn’t resist piling on with the warming stuff.

What ‘piling on’? It’s pretty clear the globe has warmed, and no one doubts (not even Lindzen, Spencer, Christy, and Pielkes Snr and Jr) that it will continue to warm to some degree if CO2 concentrations continue to rise. The Arctic had been warming through the study period and before, the ice had retreated, and Monnett refers to expert opinion that it will continue to do so. A hypothesis on bear stress and mortality based on these observations is quite reasonable. Whether or not you agree with any of the above is immaterial. Monnett simply refers to expert opinion on Arctic climate.

Others really ran with it. Can’t blame him for that, can you?

Exactly.

Talk about speculation from a small amount of data.

Yes, that’s exactly what the note is. That’s why the authors recommended further study – to test the hypothesis.

They should make him publish his latest data on polar bear drownings, which would show none or very few. He didn’t. He only published his positive findings.

Monnett participated in the overflights for 2 summers after the 2004 sightings, then took a new position in the company. He published this finding because it was the first recorded observation of the phenomenon. There is already data for the previous 17 years, which shows no dead bears in the water. I don’t think that there is a dedicated flight program like BWASP for polar bears. Do you reckon more funding for such research would be a good idea?

@KR
“Some of the more interesting science comes from these “Hey, what’s that” moments when you’re looking at something else entirely.”
Defending the indefensible again KR. Maybe government money could be spent on a study of leprechauns, or fairies at the bottom of the garden. Far more observations of these than of dead polar bears so on that basis plenty of government cash should be made available for these studies. But what I really love is the way you have tried to focus attention on exactly what this money grubbing idiot Monnett was saying rather than the pious nonsense that Al Gore was able to spout unchallenged as a result of this tripe. The whole global polar bear drowning meme is based on just three unrecovered corpses. Maybe they just ate a bad seal?
It’s pretty clear that this “witch-hunt” is very well justified, because the flimsiest of pretexts is being used to justify the biggest revolution in global politics since Lenin took power in Russia (and that revolution didn’t end nicely either).

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I see two drowning scientists, but if you want to compare them, then let’s do this little ratio estimator and correct for the percentage of the scientists under investigation. And just doing that, then there might be as many as 2735 scientists out there who are drowning in their own slop. There might be as many as 3669, plus or minus. There could be 5043. We don’t know. But the way I am posing it is that it’s serious, because it’s not just two. It’s probably a lot more. And then I say that with the further assumption, you know, that the scientists will be exposed or, you know, the ones we will measure later that are carcasses out there, it looks like a lot of them, you know, won’t survive, so – but it’s, it’s discussion, guys. I mean, it’s not in the results…
When you read it like that, it’s quite plausible. I’m sure Monnett and Ruch would agree.

Apparently, none of you guys actually know anything about statistical methods. Ignorance is an ecstasy of self-congratuation, it would seem…