Polar Bear Scientist Faces New Questions
by Nell Greenfieldboyce
A wildlife biologist is continuing to face questions about an influential paper he wrote on apparently drowned polar bears, with government investigators reportedly asking whether he improperly steered a research contract to another scientist as a reward for reviewing that paper.
“They seem to be suggesting that there is some sort of conspiracy that involves global warming and back scratching that appears to be frankly just nuts,” says Jeff Ruch, a lawyer with Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.
Ruch’s group is providing legal representation to Charles Monnett, a wildlife biologist with an agency of the Department of the Interior. Monnett was flying over the Arctic in 2004, doing a routine survey of whales, when his team spotted an unusual sight — dead polar bears floating in the water.
Monnett’s report on what he observed raised public alarm about the threat of climate change and melting ice, and the sighting of dead bears was cited by Al Gore in his movie An Inconvenient Truth. The dead bears became a potent symbol of the perils that the bears face as the sea ice retreats.
But now Monett is under an official investigation by the Department of Interior’s Office of Inspector General.
In February, agents from that office questioned Monnett about the dead bear sightings and his 2006 report on them in a scientific journal. “We’re not sure why the Inspector General felt it needed to open an investigation on this. They indicated there are allegations,” says Ruch. “We don’t know who they’re from or why, after review, they thought this 2006 note was worth assigning criminal investigators to.”
Investigators again quizzed Monnett about that polar bear paper during a second interview on August 9, Ruch says.
As part of his job, Monnett helped manage contracts for government-funded research. Ruch says in this latest interview, the investigators seemed to accuse Monnett of improperly steering a contract for a new study of polar bears to the University of Alberta. They pointed to the fact that a university scientist who got the contract gave Monnett comments on his polar bear paper.
“They asked whether there was a quid pro quo or whether there was some connection between the University of Alberta professor providing some sort of peer review on the polar bear paper and his getting the award of the contract,” says Ruch.
Ruch says the investigators focused on one exchange between the two scientists about the polar bear paper that took place on the same day that the research contract was being finalized. “That was the big A-ha moment for them,” Ruch says. “And if that’s all they have, then this has been a colossal waste of time.”
The research contract had been in negotiations for months and that Monnett’s supervisors had signed off on it, says Ruch, who added that the University of Alberta was the only organization considered for this new polar bear tagging project because the contract piggybacked on research it was already doing.
And while Monnett asked the university scientist to read his soon-to-be-famous paper on dead polar bears, Ruch says others—both agency officials and the scientific journal—reviewed it before it was published.
The University of Alberta research project being funded by the contract in question received a stop-work order around the same time that Monnett was put on administrative leave by his agency last month. But that stop-work order was rescinded and the research is now continuing.
A spokesperson for Monnett’s agency has stated that “the agency placed Mr. Monnett on administrative leave for reasons having nothing to do with scientific integrity, his 2006 journal article, or issues related to permitting, as has been alleged. Any suggestions or speculation to the contrary are wrong.” The Inspector General’s office did not return calls requesting comment.
Some advocacy groups say, this whole episode looks like political interference with science and it will intimidate other government researchers.
“There’s no way this can have anything but a chilling effect on the ability of other scientists to carry out their work,” says Kassie Siegel, director of the Climate Law Institute with the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit that campaigned to have the polar bear listed as a threatened species. Her group has teamed up with Greenpeace to ask the administration for an investigation into this investigation.
But others caution against rushing to any judgments.
“We won’t know, until the [inspector general] is done, exactly what the charges are and exactly what they are finding,” says Francesca Grifo, director of the scientific integrity program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
She says in the past, the inspector general’s office has actually uncovered political interference with science. “In previous administrations, we’ve been very grateful for what the inspector generals at Interior have found,” says Grifo. “They’ve brought to light a lot of things that we just wouldn’t have known about or been able to document otherwise.”
Some polar bear scientists worry that, for the public, this investigation has created doubt about both the original observations of dead bears and the threat of climate change.
Steve Amstrup, senior scientist with a group called Polar Bears International, says Monnett wasn’t the only person to have seen those dead polar bears in the water. “But yet, the news that he was being investigated caused some people to right away jump to the conclusion that those observations may be flawed,” says Amstrup.
He says there’s no reason to think that, and that other research also shows that climate change and retreating sea ice is a real danger for polar bears.
h/t to reader bollabob
I have to agree with the “follow the money”/conflict of interest folks. Several years ago one of our contracting types was investigated because he invited a contractor to his backyard cook out. Eventually the investigators decided that since 1) the contractor was his next door neighbor, 2) their wives were friends, and 3) the kids played together that probably his actions were acceptable. But he was careful to recuse himself from any actions that his neighbor might have been withing smelling distance of. “Avoiding the appearance of improprity” is just as important (for those outside of DC) as avoiding actual improprity.
Would someone who has actually read the polar bear research paper have mercy on me and tell me if any of the dead bears were recovered and had impartially conducted necropsies to determine cause of death? I’m betting not, but would be nice to know.
In addition to causes of death mentioned already in other comments, I’ve got to suspect that there are occassional shark, jellyfish, or other types of kills that occur too.
Why is the lawyer for a pressure group like PEER allowed into an internal BOEMRE investigation?
“Monnett was interviewed a second time by investigators from the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement’s (BOEMRE’s) inspector general’s office.” “Jeff Ruch, the director of the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility in Washington, D.C., who monitored the interview via teleconferencing.”???
http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/08/senator-inhofe-has-questions-abo.html?ref=hp
“Follow the money!”
May be apt here.
Do you remember what film that was from?
I was once in a trial and the judge told that jury that lawyers were born story tellers and their words were not to be trusted. I’ve found this to be good advice.
That article states that this was the first time ever they had noticed dead polar bears since they started their program in 1979. It involved overflights of Arctic during which they took notice of other wildlife besides the whales that they were supposed to be observing. No dead bears have been reported since that time which makes it also the last time. At the time they were also unsure about whether it was three or four bears they saw. According to them there had been a storm just before it which could be what drowned the bears. It is likely that without that storm the bears would have survived as did the others swimming around. They state that their flight path covered only eleven percent of the area where bears are found. From that they concluded that there must be more dead bears that they missed and estimated that there were probably 36 bears that drowned in that storm. This was based on seeing the three dead bears they were sure about. It is that estimate of 36 dead bears that grabbed the activists’ attention. To me that is just speculation. Presence of the storm could have drowned more or less than that but the extrapolation from the area surveyed to the area missed is unreliable and too simple a statistic to rely upon. A more significant observation is that this is the one and only observation of drowned bears within a twenty five year period of Arctic overflights. To base a decision that polar bears are an endangered species on just one such observation of dead bears within a twenty five year period of Arctic overflights is simply an irresponsible action by the EPA.
If polar bears were to be listed as an endangered species, I wonder what effect that might have on the ongoing oil and gas exploration in the arctic region.
” “There’s no way this can have anything but a chilling effect on the ability of other scientists to carry out their work,” says Kassie Siegel, director of the Climate Law Institute with the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit that campaigned to have the polar bear listed as a threatened species. Her group has teamed up with Greenpeace to ask the administration for an investigation into this investigation. ”
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Also see;
Giving the fox a shotgun and telling him to guard the chicken coop.
Multiple dead bears in a single sighting? All together? Or separated by X kilometers? What are the chances of simultaneous drownings? In the highly unlikely event, what are their chances of drifting together till discovery? Once discovered, would not every attempt be made to recover them and determine the cause of death? If this was not done, would this not in itself be cause for suspicion?
Like peregrine falcons diving at 240mph, we would prefer to have witnesses other than the professed observer, preferibly witnesses with names, GPS coordinates, details, explanations for lack of recovery, etc. Other swimming bears were sighted during the same flight? How many? Do we have a mass migration? Have so many bears ever been spotted in the water in a single flight? The whole thing stinks of fraud. –AGF
Rational Debate said
“Would someone who has actually read the polar bear research paper have mercy on me and tell me if any of the dead bears were recovered and had impartially conducted necropsies to determine cause of death? I’m betting not, but would be nice to know.”
In addition to causes of death mentioned already in other comments, I’ve got to suspect that there are occassional shark, jellyfish, or other types of kills that occur too.
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Excellent critical thinking. And the answer is, of course, ” No.”
The dead polar bears were supposedly unrelated to the paper they were working on, ( Whales were the main topic, I believe) and the dead bears were simply flown over by a float plane. The team never stopped to examine the bears, nor did they autopsy them. Therefore, any idea on the cause of death is extreme speculation nothing more.
As for your second question, I live on the West coasts, ( BC) and come from a long line of fishermen. I’ve heard stories of killer whales and sharks sometimes attacking anything that moves. Some sea lions can grow to almost 1000 pounds, not much smaller then the average polar bear. ( Around 1200-1400). Sea lions are occasionally ate by killer whales, ( if the killer whale is gutsy enough, sea lions can be notoriously vicious) so your theory that some other animal took down the bears spotted in the study is very likely.
my opinion. prison time for the professor. hard labor. learn to be respectful of public money and stop lying.
Hey All, Might be worth reading the article. Go to and click on “2006 paper”. It is really interesting. I learned a lot about polar bears and what they’ve been doing and not doing over the last decade or so (at least between 1993 and 2004). It’s pretty clear that “climate change” issues were not even mention per se (the summer retreat of the Arctic ice sheet is mentioned peripherally). The key point about the “deaths” is, “Our observations suggest that polar bears swimming in open water near Kaktovik drowned during a period of high winds and correspondingly rough sea conditions between 10 and 13 September 2004. No other deleterious environmental conditions were present that might have led to the deaths of those polar bears. The only human-related activity in the near-shore marine environment in the eastern Alaskan Beaufort Sea during the relevant time period was limited subsistence whaling which was also hampered by weather conditions during the range of dates above.”
So the article says the bears drowned in a wind storm. What’s the big investigation about?
LOL. Too funny. The incestuous corruption rampant in the save the world industry (Conservation Biology division) is exposed and the usual suspects are acting shocked.
The University of Alberta is a joke in this field. If you don’t get this you need to ask what Mark Boyce is doing there, with his track record of pathetic pseudoscience in the Big Lies about Yellowstone.
But this doesn’t get to the most systematic corruption involved, with the so called ‘species at risk’ listing business. When a species or (real or invented) subspecies or (invented) ‘distinct geographic population’ gets listed at the level of Threatened or worse, somebody has a job potentially for life. Thus the conflict of interest potential for these assessments is too obvious to ignore, but everybody does. The process is simple. Get somebody, anybody, to suggest that species x could be in trouble. Best if an environmental group does it (or even better if Biodiversity Mafia Central in AZ does it because they are a lawyers club). Then send out ‘researchers’ who always seem to find what they are looking for… and then, since those ‘researchers’ become the ‘experts’ in doing that ‘research’ they logically get the lifetime jobs to save what they decided needed to be saved. In the meantime, the environmental group who sponsored this process goes on about what distinguished experts the ‘researchers’ are – for finding what they were expected to – while at the same time the enviro groups promote the ‘threat’ to raise money plus other agendas.
It is hard to imagine a more inbred self-serving corrupt system but the public ignores it because they think that these missionaries are saving the world. This also explains why so many ‘species’ are listed and why those lists keep growing. The eco-crisis industry is a growth industry, not because of any real need but because of a gross oversupply of indoctrinated ‘researchers’ and green lawyers being pumped out by junk faculties.
I guess this site does not like http addresses or links. I’ll try again with some “spaces” and stuff (no “www” needed. If you really want to read some neat stuff you’ll figure the link out —
news. sciencemag. org/scienceinsider /2011/07/suspended-polar-bear-researcher. html
Fact is there is an endless chain of interviewees, enough to keep a generation of Inspectors General in work.
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Don E and Don S.
If a penguin land on the beach and found a polar bear that would really be news – they both live in opposite hemispheres. Although in the Climate Science anything seems to be possible
Don H Southern Hemisphere inhabitant)
“Some polar bear scientists worry that, for the public, this investigation has created doubt about both the original observations of dead bears and the threat of climate change.”
Ya think? Maybe rephrase that: Some polar bear scientists worry that, for the public, this investigation has confirmed doubt about both the original observations of dead bears and the threat of climate change.
Beesaman asks “What film had the quote “Follow the money”
I go to I http://www.imdb.com/ and enter in the quote then select ‘Plot Summaries’ in the ‘More searches for Follow the money’ section and find the following;
Deep Throat eventually tells him to “follow the money”, which leads them to uncover that the burglars had moneys in their bank accounts that were originally donated to the Committee to Reelect President…
The movie is of course ‘All the President’s Men (1976)’.
@Al Gored says:
August 10, 2011 at 7:52 pm
Thats the problem for the scammers they where hoping that the tropical hot spot would give them all a chance to go and study AGW in the tropics but when it turned out the only place they can actually go and study animals that maybe/(are) affected by AGW was the Arctic they all decided to stay at home and play with models instead.
“There’s no way this can have anything but a chilling effect on the ability of other scientists to carry out their work,” says Kassie Siegel, director of the Climate Law Institute with the Center for Biological Diversity,
Why?
According to Monnet these bears were spotted swimming along way from shore. Now most people would assume that they were lost and had swum too far out from shore until they were out of sight of land and didn’t know how to get back, thus they drowned. Monnet seems to be suggesting that they went for a little swim, turned around and all the ice had melted. Say what?
There is absolutely no likelihood that ice melting had anything to do with this single sighting of polar bears drowning. The fact that this ridiculous nonsense was then used as a pathetic excuse to make a money grab for public cash clearly deserved to be investigated and as an outcome at the very least the public deseve to know that their money is being used to fund science based on reasonable hypthesis. If this is not done then next year the same group will be claiming millions of dollars in research grants for following up sightings of leprachauns in Dublin on St Patricks day.
Still no word on the autopsy report, Monnett?
Or was it just some pieces of ice you saw from that high-flying helicopter?
What is the statistical uncertainty of extrapolations from a single event?
e.g. on seeing four polar bears from 1500 ft, then assuming they had drowned – with no hard evidence, and then assuming that all other flights by other observers hand not seen any?
Global Warming Link to Drowned Polar Bears Melts Under Searing Fed Probe
Funny how “drank the kool-aid” politicians and save-the-planet governmental agencies seem all too ready to accept very poor research conclusions based on very poor research methods regarding climate change, yet other politicians and agencies involved in other areas of research require gold standard research endeavors before any endorsements are made. Know why? Money potential.
To wit: The government sponsors a website called the What Works Clearing House. This website reviews published research on educational interventions and regular school programs in all the content areas. Its purpose? To weed out poorly designed studies and nefarious conclusions to such an extent that few studies get through their process and are then recommended as solid evidence of efficacy in improving educational outcome. To be sure, there is no potential for money. Taxing schools for using questionable methods cannot be an incentive for the governmental agency, and providing tax breaks or giving extra funding for using gold standard proven methods has no money return potential for government agency coffers.
So, because of the potential for tax collecting, any old study will do when it comes to AGW. Hypocrites.
Steven Kopits says:
August 10, 2011 at 3:40 pm
According to polarbearsinternational.org, “legal hunting continues to kill more than 700 polar bears a year” throughout the Arctic.
This looks like science from another Greepeace brochure.