Polar bear under water: Image via Wikipedia
UPDATE 2! It seems that the famous dead-bear photograph may have been photo-shopped.
UPDATE! Extracts from a transcript of the Inspector General’s interview with Charles Monnet is available at WUWT.
Monnet comes across as a blithering idiot. Let alone algebra (and let’s not include statistics), Monnet’s arithmetic leaves a lot to be desired!! And he disbursed 50 million $!!! Fraud may not have been the intention – even if that was the result, but this was not science.
Scientific misconduct together with political opportunism is a heady combination.
No further comment needed.
Fed Polar Bear Defender Placed on Leave
A federal wildlife biologist who sounded the alarm about drowning polar bears in the midst of global warming has been placed on leave pending the outcome of a scientific misconduct probe. Charles Monnett is being investigated for unspecified “integrity issues” apparently linked to his report that polar bears could face an increased threat of death if they’re forced to swim farther as Arctic ice recedes, reports AP. ……
Monnett is in charge of monitoring some $50 million in studies from his Anchorage office of the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement. He and fellow researcher Jeffrey Gleason spotted four dead polar bears in the Arctic sea during an aerial survey following a 2004 storm in the first known sighting of bears floating offshore and presumed drowned while apparently swimming long distances. They theorized that bears’ “drowning-related deaths may increase if the observed trend of regression of pack ice and/or longer open water periods continues.” Monnett’s conclusions helped galvanize the movement to stem global warming, and the drowned polar bears were cited by Al Gore in his film An Inconvenient Truth. Gleason was asked by an “integrity” investigator his thoughts on the bear citation in the Gore film, according to transcripts. Gleason responded by saying that none of the polar bear papers he has written or co-authored has said “anything really” about global warming.
According to The Blaze
Monnett, an Anchorage-based scientist with the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, or BOEMRE, was told July 18 that he was being put on leave, pending results of an investigation into “integrity issues.”
Tags: Al Gore, global warming, Polar bear, Scientific misconduct
The k2p blog 
July 29, 2011 at 3:27 am
This entire quandary relates to equine excreta. The bears aren’t “drowning at sea. the climate is ruled by the Earth’s orbital relationship to the Sun. It’s a scam. Period.
July 30, 2011 at 2:20 am
[…] Al Gore’s polar bear scientist suspended, being investigated for scientific misconduct (ktwop.wordpress.com) […]
August 4, 2011 at 8:06 pm
[…] Al Gore’s polar bear scientist suspended, being investigated for scientific misconduct (ktwop.wordpress.com) […]
August 13, 2011 at 10:07 am
[…] An earlier post carried the story of Charles Monnett who apparently when flying over the Arctic to survey whales thought he saw 3 or 4 dead polar bears in the water. He did not get any pictures and did not retrieve any carcases but instead wrote a paper published in Polar Biology and which was supposedly peer-reviewed. He baldly presented his observations and then speculated that the bears had probably drowned in a storm and that many more of them would drown of global warming led to the melting of Arctic ice in the summers and forced the poor polar bears to spend more time in open water. […]
September 22, 2011 at 1:26 am
If you’ve found something exceptionable in Monnet’s paper, you’ve had 5 years to publish a refutation in a scientific journal.
Very telilng that no such refutation has been published, but a bureaucratic witch-hunt is being conducted instead.