WUWT readers may recall our coverage of Charles Monnett, whose antics with polar bear sitings and attribution led Al Gore to put this famous animated video clip into An Inconvenient Truth and make wild claims about polar bears drowning for lack of sea ice:
Monnett’s legal case is over, and he has been forced to resign:
Scientist settles legal case over study of polar bear drownings
Becky Bohrer, The Associated Press / 37 min agoJUNEAU, Alaska — An Alaska scientist whose observations of drowned polar bears helped galvanize the global warming movement has retired as part of a settlement with a federal agency. Charles Monnett was briefly suspended in 2011 from his work with the U.S.
…
Under the settlement, signed in October but released by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility on Wednesday, Monnett will receive $100,000 but cannot seek Interior Department work for five years. His retirement was effective Nov. 15, at which point the agency agreed to withdraw the letter of reprimand and issue Monnett a certificate for his work on the tracking project.
Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/science/scientist-settles-legal-case-over-study-polar-bear-drownings-2D11691760
So the message is: be a dimwit, make stuff up, and get paid for it. No word yet on whether he’ll get to keep the cushy retirement package that Federal Employees get.
Looking further, it appears that he’ll be able to keep it.
According to the PEER Union, they claim “vindication”:
http://www.peer.org/news/news-releases/2013/12/04/vindicated-arctic-scientist-retires-with-cash-settlement/
Revisit three-year IG investigation
See the Monnett whistleblower complaint
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
It’s quote obvious that Monnett didn’t think that his work was being misrepresented.
Far too many people on here are defending Monnett simply because they don’t think that his actions rise to threshold of fraud.
Regardless, since when does fraud need to be proven in order to fire a scientist for being a shoddy scientist? A shoddy engineer working for the government should be fired even if the engineer doesn’t commit fraud. A shoddy engineer working for the government should be fired even if the engineer’s work includes disclosures that it might be wrong.
The damage caused by Monnett’s shoddy work can most certainly be put on par with a collapsed bridge.
I wrote a column about the Department of Interior IG’s investigation of Monnett in August 2011, a month after BOEMRE suspended the polar bear biologist. Although I blasted Al Gore for hyping Monnett’s study in An Inconvenient Truth, I did not find the study itself to be junk science and did not come away with a very favorable opinion of the IG investigator. Some WUWT readers may not like my column, but I post it here in case anyone is interested: http://www.globalwarming.org/2011/08/11/is-boemre-harrassing-polar-bear-biologist-charles-monnett/
I want a five year vacation, a hundred grand, and a cushy retirement. Where do I sign up?
Wobble,
They didn’t, from the settlement we can infer that Monnett having become a whistleblower, was subsequently targetted by his [employer] for it, quite illegally. Rather than go to court, a settlement was reached that allowed Monnett to retire early. I would have done the same thing. Just because the I don’t like the outcome of his whistleblowing doesn’t mean he wasn’t 100% right in doing it. He did the right thing in exposing the withholding of evidence, if he had exposed withheld smoking-gun emails exposing CAGW as a fraud would you judge the same way?
Lois Lerner is still a government employee, Monnett is not. Which speaks more to the putrefaction of government bureaucracy than the quality (or lack thereof) of the work.
Now he’s freed up to run for President. Has both qualifications:
1) Has political connections
2) Is a professional liar
Note: If you get PAID for lying-that makes you a professional liar.
Anthony, I’d like to be clear about what you mean. When you accuse Monnett of “making stuff up” are you accusing him of fraud? If not, what do you mean?
.
That may be true, but we call such people “lobbyists” today, to be politically correct. It is what a many “climate scientists” have become. Run of the mill lobbyists for the CAGW religion’s cause… is all. GK
“So the message is: be a dimwit, make stuff up, and get paid for it.”
That’s the message of the entire great global warming scam.
Monnet’s NOT the problem; it’s the halfascist hierarchy. For an equivalent example, OUR country’s waters were all supposed to be pure* A Quarter CENTURY Ago! ( And Poppy Bush claimed in 1988 that “every wetland, NO MATTER HOW SMALL should Be PRESERVED”!). And the same deseption and intentional dereliction is at work throughout Club FED:
* FEDERAL WATER POLLUTION CONTROL ACT
(33 U.S.C. 1251 et seq.)
AN ACT To provide for water pollution control activities in the Public Health Service of the Federal Security Agency and in the Federal Works Agency, and for other purposes. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
TITLE I—RESEARCH AND RELATED PROGRAMS
DECLARATION OF GOALS AND POLICY
SEC. 101. (a) The objective of this Act is to restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation’s waters. In order to achieve this objective it is hereby declared that, consistent with the provisions of this Act— (1) it is the national goal that the discharge of pollutants into the navigable waters be eliminated by 1985.
You ever see “Lonesome Dove”? One of the principle characters is an affable type with an “as long as I get mine, right n wrong don’t enter into it much” philosophy of life.
It allowed him to bully then abandon his common law wife, and although one is left with the impression Jake would never lead a gang into horse thievery and murder, this moral ambiguity allowed him to join one.
No foul! Standing on the sideline keeping mum while the gang plunders the innocent because it’s easier, and if there is the slightest chance some of the violence of that gang he joined might spill over onto him, why not go with the flow?
Lord Monckton, in the case of Monnett, calls this virtue, or at least no crime.
I tend toward Captains Call and McCray’s judgement on the matter.
Monnett was more then a little slow taking his leave, and has yet to denounce “the gang” he
fell in withactively sought to join up with.The reason for the investigation doesn’t excuse the activist claims he made in the name of science.
Would Michael Mann’s shoddy work be any less shoddy if Penn State had had a difference reason for conducting it’s investigation?
Your column omits quite a few pertinent details.