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 if 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.
It was all speculation even if one supposes that he actually saw some dead polar bears. His speculations were taken as established fact and blown up by the Global Warming orthodoxy. Al Gore, the almost -President of the US and the self-proclaimed inventor of the internet, picked up the story with gusto which then played a major part in his science fantasy movie, “An Inconvenient Truth”, which helped to win him a Nobel prize.
Panic over the dead bears and Monnett’s wild hypotheses about them helped fuel calls for declaring the bears endangered, despite all evidence that their populations have actually been increasing over the last few years. Monnett did quite well from the work, parlaying his fame into management of a $50 million study budget, the dream of all academics. – Coyote Blog
Monnet is now being investigated by the Interior Department’s Inspector General’s office for some kind of wrong-doing associated with his award of research contracts which has also led to interrogations about his sightings and his paper and subsequent research grants. Investigators are apparently examining Monnet’s procurement of one of those research studies on polar bears conducted by Canada’s University of Alberta, as well as the “disclosure of personal relationships and preparation of the scope of work,” according to a July 29 memo from the Interior Department’s inspector general’s office.
In particular, investigators are asking questions about the peer review on Monnett’s drowned polar bear paper, which was done by his wife, Lisa Rotterman, as well as by Andrew Derocher, the lead researcher on the million dollar Canadian study funded by Monnet’s generosity.
Monnets co-author Jeffrey Gleason is back-pedalling and is in damage-control mode.
Although the four dead bears cited in the paper were observed from 1,500 feet during flights over the Beaufort Sea, and the carcasses were never recovered or examined, Gleason told investigators it is likely the creatures drowned in a sudden windstorm that produced 30-knot winds, not for lack of an ice pack.
“We never mentioned global warming in the paper,” Gleason told the investigators.
Gleason told investigators that reaction to his and Monnett’s paper was overblown and spun out of context.
Monnett is being legally defended by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility who have also demanded an investigation of the investigation. They should perhaps pick their causes a little more carefully. Even the New York Times weighs in but tries to trivialise the impact of the wrong-doing. Though just how they take computer model results to be a “broad array of evidence” that “polar bear populations — and the health of the planet — will be threatened by climate change in future decades” is just a bit mysterious if not plain gullible.
A modest scientific observation about a few drowning polar bears has enmeshed a government wildlife biologist in an investigation into whether he is guilty of scientific misconduct. The investigation has taken on symbolic importance in the debate over global warming. …… Whatever the ultimate verdict on Dr. Monnett, the controversy over his observations is a minor sideshow in the global warming debate. A broad array of evidence suggests that polar bear populations — and the health of the planet — will be threatened by climate change in future decades even if not a single additional polar bear drowns while swimming far from shore.
That peer-review is often corrupted is not new but Monnet must be congratulated on getting his wife and a “friend” to be the reviewers.
But the Journal Polar Biology has been silent. How were the reviewers chosen?
Monnets original paper is here : Observations of mortality associated with extended open-water swimming by polar bears in the Arctic Beaufort Sea
Tags: Al Gore, Beaufort Sea, Charles Monnet, global warming, Jeffrey Gleason, peer review, Polar bear, Polar Biology, polargate, Scientific misconduct
The k2p blog 
August 18, 2011 at 6:17 pm
You’re mixing up separate aspects of the paper. His wife and Derocher advised him on the paper, as did others, but that’s not the ‘peer-review’ carried out by the journal itself.
The Journal of Polar Biology reviewers are anonymous, as is the case for many scholarly journals.
August 19, 2011 at 12:04 am
I think you might be confused. In the transcript Monnett says that his wife, and some colleagues ‘reviewed’ the paper, however that was not the official peer-review. The journal (Polar Biology) undertook an independent, anonymous peer review, and those anonymous reviews, conducted for the journal form the basis of the official “peer review”.
August 20, 2011 at 4:52 pm
Thanks for the clarifications. But I am not completely sure precisely what role the friendly-reviewers had – if any – in the journal review.
If they were not the journal reviewers it begs the question as to who these were and what they were up to. There is a hint in the transcripts that the suggestion to actually write a paper about the rather trivial observation may have initially come from an external source who was a member of the global warming clique.
August 22, 2011 at 4:14 am
In acknowledgments at the end of the paper, Monnet and Gleason write:
“This paper benefited greatly from reviews by, and discussions with, Andrew Derocher, Lisa Rotterman, Richard Shideler, Ian Stirling and Cleveland Cowles. This paper was improved by useful comments from Rolf Gradinger and three anonymous reviewers.”
Rolf Gradinger is on the Editorial Board of Polar Biology, and is presumably the editor who handled Monnet and Gleason’s paper. The official peer reviewers are the three anonymous reviewers mentioned, whose names are known to Gradinger, but presumably not to Monnet or Gleason.
Clearly Monnet and Gleason have discussed their paper with their colleagues and with Monnet’s wife before submission, and possibly in response to criticisms from the anonymous reviewers, and have considered those discussions helpful. What beggars belief is that such discussions should be considered as some how underhanded or a corruption of the peer review process.
The only disturbing thing here is that it took about 15 minutes on google to establish these facts. Evidently neither you nor the author of Coyote Blog have taken that 15 minutes to fact check your claims before launching scurrilous accusations. So much for actual skepticism.
August 22, 2011 at 7:25 am
Are we quite sure that the 3 “anonymous” reviewers did not include his wife or his friends?
What beggars belief is that this drivel passed any form of peer review. In fact the only defence for such reviewers would be if they could claim that they were “friends”.
They saw 4 swimming bears and say they saw 3 dead bears – at different times. There was a storm they say. They assume that the 3 dead bears were from the group of 4 swimming bears sighted earlier. They say they surveyed 11% of a particular area. Therefore they conclude that there could have been 36 swimming bears of which 27 would have died. And they also conclude in a burst of higher mathematics that the survival rate was (36-27)/36 = 25%!! (Why not just say that 3/4 = 75%). It was due to the storm they say. And since global warming will increase amount of open water, more bears will be found in open water, more will experience storms and therefore more will die.
The quality of this discourse does indeed beggar belief as does the competence of the peer-review process this paper was subjected to.