Scientists: You Are No Longer Politically Useful
Charles Monnett is a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement in the US Department of the Interior. He has published in the peer-reviewed literature on polar bears. He also has just been suspended by the agency (PDF) under claims of possible scientific misconduct related to his polar bear research and was recently interviewed by criminal investigators. (Roger Pielke Jr.)
Drowned Polar Bears and Scientific Misconduct
Charles Monnett, the wildlife biologist working for the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement(BOEMRE), who popularized the notion that Global Warming was causing polar bears to drown and endangering the arctic predators, was placed on administrative leave while he is being investigated for scientific misconduct in relation to his drowning polar bears publication.
We might never have heard of any of this, but Monnett is being passionately defended by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), and the staff of that organization is so thoroughly infatuated with its own assumptions and perspective that it cannot even imagine what the material it is disseminating enthusiastically in Monnett’s defense would look like to parties less ideologically committed than themselves.
News Agency story
The Inspector General interview transcript (excerpts) had me, for instance, in stitches.
Disclosing as it does the level of rigor of methodology being employed: (Never Yet Melted)
