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
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Speaking of govt interference in media coverage – take a look at the loonies who are reporting – National Public Radio – a longtime haven for left wingers. There was a much more balanced reporting of this by a conservative website. They actually provided more data about the nutty
behavior of these “scientists.” I would call them “observers,” not scientists, since that would imply a competence not in evidence.
lubos over at the reference frame has the handle on this
Hi! We’re the polar bears Monnett claimed were floating dead in Arctic waters.
As you can see, we aren’t really dead. Not then, not now. When Monnett claimed to to have seen us, we were merely asleep on the waves. We do that all the time. We polar bears practically live in the water. But even if we didn’t sleep in the water all the time, it would be pretty hard to tell if one of us was dead or asleep from a moving aircraft traveling at an altitude of 1,500′. Too much distance, dude.
Anyway, we’re real glad that Monnett didn’t bother to conduct necropsies on us. That would have really been painful, with us not being dead and all. But all the same…you guys should get every last penny back from this Monnett guy. He’s just another grifting “climate change” hack.
This is very encouraging as it suggests that finally government agencies are no longer viewing “global warming scientists” as untouchable.
I don’t know how they could call it an unusual sight. My understanding is they kept no records and were actually counting live whales, not dead polar bears. From this sighting of 3 (or was it 4?) dead polar bears, they extrapolated at death rate of 75% of polar bears due to drowning because of ice loss due to global warming.
I am not making that up; 3 (or 4?) dead bears equals a massive death toll for the entire population, and it’s because of the decline in sea ice. I know they did not mention climate change in their paper, so they’re off the hook for that outright falsehood, but to extrapolate from such limited data is scientific fraud. No matter how you look at it. In fact to refer to the sighting as data is fraud; it’s an anecdote.
To use it as the basis for a statistical analysis is beyond absurd. For it to survive peer review is outright damning of the peer review process.
For the alarmist to claim this is some kind of witch hunt is comical. Wait ’til the masses realize they’ve been snookered and that snowball get’s rolling downhill. Then they’ll see what a witch hunt really looks like.
The funny thing about that is; climate science just about resembles witchcraft at this point; a pinch of brisle cone, toasted just so to get the right flavor, hair of a polar bear drowned in the arctic ocean, a touch of inverted thermometer and say the magic incantation; IPCC science is settled deniers funded by big oil, IPCC science is settle deniers funded by big oil and POOF; you’ve got Anthropogenic Global Warming.
And the people will pay you to keep it away. Not so different from the witchdoctors of old.
Polar bears live around 25 years, which is about 9000 days. If there are north of 20,000 polar bears alive today, then they die off at a little over two per day.
It seems reasonable to me that, over the decades of research in the arctic, eventually somebody will see a couple of these dead polar bears floating around in the water.
So Monnet’s paper was peer reviewed by his wife and Andrew Desrocher, who disinvited polar bears world specialist Mitchell Taylor in 2009… and who received a research grant from a committe in which Monnet was an influent member.
Here is Desrocher’s 2009 claim to fame:
“Hi Mitch,
The world is a political place and for polar bears, more so now than ever before. I have no problem with dissenting views as long as they are supportable by logic, scientific reasoning, and the literature.
I do believe, as do many PBSG members, that for the sake of polar bear conservation, views that run counter to human induced climate change are extremely unhelpful. In this vein, your positions and statements in the Manhattan Declaration, the Frontier Institute, and the Science and Public Policy Institute are inconsistent with positions taken by the PBSG.
I too was not surprised by the members not endorsing an invitation. Nothing I heard had to do with your science on harvesting or your research on polar bears – it was the positions you’ve taken on global warming that brought opposition.
Time will tell who is correct but the scientific literature is not on the side of those arguing against human induced climate change. I look forward to having someone else chair the PBSG.
Best regards,
Andy (Derocher)”
There are a lot of misconceptions surrounding this issue.
Firstly, the observational note was a hypothesis – that is, an Inference to the Best Explanation, a bog standard fundamental in rational thinking and science. It took what data there was and constructed the most parsimonious (economical) explanation relating the phenomena observed. Using only the information available, the likeliest explanation is that the polar bears drowned during a storm. It’s possible they died under different circumstances, but there is no available data for the period to support a different conclusion. They may have been shot by hunters, but none were observed, therefore a hypothesis postulating hunters as cause of death is much weaker. There is no data for that.
The first paragraph of the study makes it clear that the hypothesis is concerned with natural mortality of polar bears. Climate change comes into it as part of the consequent prediction (remember, a good hypothesis has to be falsifiable), and the prediction is this: if Arctic sea ice continues to recede, we should see more dead polar bears in the water. The possibility of sea ice decline is mentioned as a potentiality. Climate change in the Arctic is a premise, not a conclusion.
To make that clear, the mongraph doesn’t argue that climate change is definitely occurring, or that global warming caused polar bears to drown. It says that if the Arctic ice edge continues to retreat, more floating dead polar bears fshould be observed. This is something that can be tested, and indeed there are current research projects, at least one of which Monnett was overseeing until he was suspended, where bears have been collared so they may be tracked.
If this was a criminal investigation, Monnett’s note would analagous to a detective finding evidence and constructing a case. Not a proven case, just a lead that bears (no pun intended) further investigation – and that is what Monnett recommends.
There is also some misconception regarding the polar data. It is referenced in the monograph, and again in the interviews with Monnett and with his co-worker, Gleason. Both refer to a computer database and hand-written notebooks from which observational data was taken. Monnett could not remember if the notebook data had been transferred to computer. Gleason vouched that it had been. Observed data included, “date, time, latitude, longitude [of the aircraft], aircraft heading, species, total number, observer, behaviour… size… habitat… sea ice type, sea ice coverage, sea state, visibility, weather, glare and response to aircraft” of bo2w whales and polar bears (that’s a direct quote from the 2005 monograph). The database extends over 36 years (from the Gleason interview), and Monnett referenced data from the period 1987 – 2004, presumably because that period had sufficient information on polar bears. Researchers included more and more detailed data of sightings over the years. You can easily see in the monograph annual figures of bear sightings and distance from land when in the water. Obviously, this was not gleaned from Monnett querying previous researchers on the flyover program – that was something he did in addition to formalizing the data for the study. And it was a responsible thing to do because, as many here have noted already, polar bears were not the primary interest on the field trips. Basically, talking to other researchers about it was double-checking.
Finally, Monnett does not say that there have never been polar bears floating in the water before. From the monograph: “To our knowledge we report here the first observations of polar bears floating dead off-shore and presumed drowned..”
There is no substitute for going to the source material. Speculation is fine, but worthwhile speculation should be based on facts, whether you are Charles Monnett or an internet blog commenter.
Out of curiosity, if anyone has fully read the 2005 study prior to this post, could you say so? I hypothesise, based on the comments here (that’s my data source), that virtually no one has done so, and I’d like to test that against honest replies.
(Of course, I have no way to test for honesty, so the results would be provisional)
todays NYTimes.
opinion piece by someone who isnt game to put their name to it…
and the blind insistence its a small matter and warmings still going to be killing bears
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/13/opinion/a-polarizing-polar-bear-investigation.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha211
Bob Shapiro says:
August 12, 2011 at 10:01 am
Polar bears live around 25 years, which is about 9000 days. If there are north of 20,000 polar bears alive today, then they die off at a little over two per day.
It seems reasonable to me that, over the decades of research in the arctic, eventually somebody will see a couple of these dead polar bears floating around in the water.
Strange that no one has seen/photographed any dead polar bears floating in the sea since 2006 though
“not counting the one shot two weeks ago in Svalbard”
For anyone interested in a ‘cooler heads’ take on this, globalwarming.org, a conservative blog on global warming policy, gets the facts straight.
http://www.globalwarming.org/2011/08/11/is-boemre-harrassing-polar-bear-biologist-charles-monnett/
Don’t be put off by the site name – this is the opening paragraph form their ‘contributors’ page.
The article on the investigation of Monnett concludes:
As an aside, It is supremely difficult in this debate to reach across the political divide and have a conversation that progresses from simple facts. Political differences and self-interest mire contributors in a game of sides, where winning is more important than understanding, and the talk focuses on character rather than content. Demonizing the target du jour is a much easier, self-satisfying pursuit than wrestling with the complexities and the result is that the basics are so distorted the conversation is almost always worthless. And this applies across the spectrum of views on climate change. I would love to see a post at WUWT, as there have been at other climate blogs, where the nature of the debate itself is examined critically as a way to improve it. As it stands, most of it is cowboys and indians firing bullets and arrows with ‘science’ etched on them. There has to be a better way.
Knut, the Berlin Zoo polar bear died of an apparent aneurism and fell into the water dead on the spot. Nothing to do with “global warming”. Now whilst I’m not making light of any animals death in the wild, to observe bears floating in the ocean (no mention of how far out to sea the bears were observed) and not being in a position to do study on the corpses to find out the cause of death, it appears awfully presumptuous to link their death to “global warming”.
And Al Gore has been proved time and time again to be an A class Richard Cranium, so no great surprises there that he tries to make a story out of unproved data.
Monnett didn’t do that. Who did?
POLAR-BEAR-GATE 2011 – That Feb 23rd Grilling …..
An Actor reads the Charles Monnett Grilling Transcript
In this audio recording, an actor reads the transcript of the interview between
Special Agent, Eric May from the US Government, and Dr. Charles Monnett,
the so called, “Polar Bear Expert” who caused such a panic with regard to reports
about several bears deaths, which he claimed at the time, were caused by AGW
At the time Dr. Monnett was supposed to be studying Bowhead Whales
When you hear this read, the disingenuous nature of this “research” becomes obvious
The recording lasts for about 2 hours & 30 minutes. Hear it at the website Linked to
the name “Axel”. – The Fraudulent Climate of Hokum Science – Loads of other recordings.
@barry (August 15, 2011 at 1:52 am)
Monnet unjustly exaggerates the number of dead bears by extrapolation. Furthermore he attributes the scarcity of sea ice to man’s activities. He then goes on to claim that they must have died as the result of high seas, due to a storm, and that they must have drowned because of the shortage of ice. In this roundabout way he alludes to these conclusions.
However the interview reals a level of scientific ineptitude that is hard to comprehend. Monnet was supposed to be studying the Migration Habits of the Bowhead Whale, yet he seems to have been bumbling along, with almost a contempt for proper scientific accounting. Unable to even take photographs because he couldn’t see (“my eyesight has gone you know”). “Some of the data recorders were better than others”, Monnett tells us casually, that the computer program wasn’t any good for recording the things they wanted to.
Then instead of employing a professional photographer, he sent “Jeff (Gleason) to take pictures of ducks, at the hotel”, in an effort to learn to use the camera, and that Gleason’s pictures of Polar Bears were blurred and looked like a “Pillsbury Doughboy”, ( http://is.gd/doughboy ).
His explanations of how he arrived at the extrapolated figures for more than 20 dead Polar Bears, which he never even saw (imaginary) are a muddle of gobbledegook, and seem like an attempt to confuse the investigators with pompous jargon. Neither Monnett, nor any of his advisors appear to have realised just how incompetent and ineffectual he is revealed to be. Monnett & Gleason’s Arctic “research” antics comes across like an episode of “Pingu”.
$50 million dollars of disbursements, for that sort slapdash farcical “research” is not good value for the taxpayer, quite apart from anything else. The fact that Al Gore and others used this as proof is reprehensible, deplorable, and probably criminal.
Axel,
Monnett reports exactly how many dead bears he saw, and multiplies that number by the percent of area hit by the storm but not overflown, to suggest the possible number of bears that may have been affected. The first number is that observed. The second number is hypothetical as he clearly states. And that’s what you do when making a hyothesis. What would have been faulty reasoning was if he had said that the bears that he had observed represented the actual total number of dead bears for the entire research area.
At no time does he attribute the scarcity of sea ice to ‘man’s activities’. Or if you think I am wrong, please cite from the study where this is done.
Wrong language. The hypothesis is constructed from only the data at hand, and the methodology is straightforward, bog standard scientific speculation – Inference to the Best Explanation. Less ice means choppier water during a wind storm and more distance for the bears to swim, four bears are discovered in the one week after the storm, this is the first time floating dead bears have been observed – simplest, most economical explanation of the deaths is that they drowned in high water. It is speculation, not what ‘must’ have happened, as you put it.
The paper doesn’t say “this is what happened”, it says, “this is the most likely explanation based on the data.” It’s not about ‘claims’, or what ‘must’ have happened, it’s speculation. A hypothesis.
You are mistaking the political consequences of this paper with the science that underpins it. Climate change activists are guilty of stretching components of this study way beyond its scientific limits, and they certainly have made bold ‘claims’. The monograph itself is properly caveated as speculative. Monnett is the wrong target here.
Axel, you are also conflating two separate issues. The $50 million is the alleged total funding for the research portfolios Monnett is overseeing in his recent capacity as projects manager. That figure has nothing to do with the original polar bear study, which was managed by someone else.
The maths is so simple even a maths dummy like me can do it. But I’ll simplify it even more here.
In the transect area representing 11% of the total study area affected by the wind storm, there are four live bears in the water, and three dead ones. Multiply 11 by 9 to get 99 (virtually 100%) per cent of land area. multiply 4 by 9 (36) to estimate potential total number of live bears, and 3 by 9 (27) to estimate potential total number of dead bears in the water. This is extrapolation in its most basic form, and this is what was done in the paper.
It’s junior school maths, and if the investigators had trouble understanding it, that raises concerns about their fitness for the investigation, and about the premise for the investigation itself.
And the figures are hypothetical, remember, not meant to be actual. Nor are they presented as actual. It’s all part of the ‘what if’ nature of hypothesis.
So what’s been happening with Monnett?