No, DON'T go easy on Monnett - the "study" was crap to begin with and he should be drummed out of BOEMRE just for publishing it.
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Go Easy on the Polar Bear Fraud
July 29, 2011, 11:57 am
The skeptic side of the blogosphere is all agog over the academic investigation into Charles Monnett, the man of drowning polar bear fame. The speculation is that the investigation is about the original polar bear report in 2006. A couple of thoughts
- If you read between the lines in the news articles, we really have no idea what is going on. The guy could have falsified his travel expense reports
- The likelihood that an Obama Administration agency would be trying to root out academic fraud at all, or that if they did so they would start here, seems absurd to me.
- There is no room for fraud because the study was, on its face, facile and useless. The authors basically extrapolated from a single data point. As I tell folks all the time, if you have only one data point, you can draw virtually any trend line you want through it. They had no evidence of what caused the bear deaths or if they were in any way typical or part of a trend — it was all pure speculation and crazy extrapolation. How could there be fraud when there was not any data here in the first place? The fraud was in the media, Al Gore, and ultimately the EPA treating this with any sort of gravitas.
[The fraud was even presenting this factoid (3 dead polar bears) as meaningful. And Monnett did that.]
Category: Effects of Warming | Comment ( RSS)
2 Comments
stan: The heck with the fraud. The news is how pathetic the study is. And what it tells us of the rigor of peer review.
This paper would flunk a jr high science fair. This is what the consensus science consists of.
July 29, 2011, 12:40 pm
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