OK, technically, the exclusive I have is an internal email from the head of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement that was sent to his entire staff on Friday about the actions being taken against polar bear researcher Charles Monnett.  I will repost that below, but the bottom line is that the decision to place him on administrative leave “had nothing to do with his scientific work , or anything relating to a five-year old journal article” on polar bears.

This whole story is Kafkaesque.  Let’s take it from the beginning.  Here’s the lede from NYT blogger Andy Revkin:

There’s been a rush to all manner of judgments over the strange case of Charles Monnett, the biologist for the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement who provided a powerful talking point for climate campaigners, including former Vice President Al Gore, with his description of several drowned polar bears spotted during an aerial marine-mammals survey in 2004 — an observation enshrined in a short paper published in Polar Biology in 2006.

Hmm, I guess that isn’t really the beginning, since Monnett’s work didn’t provide a talking point, powerful or otherwise, for Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth.

The fact is that the scientific  community had already come to the conclusion that  the polar bear would not survive an ice-free arctic.  The 2004 Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, by leading scientists from the eight Arctic nations, including the United States, summarized the state of scientific understanding:

Changes in the extent and type of sea ice affect the distribution and foraging success of polar bears (Ferguson et al., 2000a,b; Mauritzen et al., 2001; Stirling et al., 1993). The earliest impacts of warming will occur at their southern limits of distribution, such as at James and Hudson Bays; and this has already been documented by Stirling et al. (1999)….

The survival of polar bears as a species is difficult to envisage under conditions of zero summer sea-ice cover.

In short, there was a broad scientific understanding by the leading experts on the Arctic that unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gases would be catastrophic if not fatal to polar bears — back in 2004.

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The climate denier blogosphere is going mad over “Polarbeargate,” supposedly the story of a rogue government scientist manipulating the evidence that polar bears are threatened by melting Arctic sea ice. The scientist, Dr. Charles Monnett, is on administrative leave and forbidden from communicating with co-workers pending an investigation by the Department of Interior’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG).

In reality, Dr. Monnett, one of the country’s top Arctic scientists, “is being hounded in a political attempt to impugn his observations on polar bears’ vulnerability to retreating sea ice,” according to a scientific misconduct complaint filed today on his behalf by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) against Interior Department officials. Dr. Monnett, who has monitored bowhead whales in the Arctic since 1984, was the co-author of a seminal paper that recorded polar bears found dead in the open Arctic Ocean, stranded by retreating sea ice and a powerful storm, both symptoms of the region’s rapid warming.

PEER has posted the interview conducted by OIG Special Agents Eric May and Lynn Gibson with Dr. Monnett on February 23, which offers the only public clues to the reasoning behind his persecution. The transcript shows May and Gibson to be primed with skeptical questions about Dr. Monnett’s research observing sea life as a wildlife biologist for the Minerals Management Service. Dr. Monnett points out that many of the questions are “stupid” and “goofy,” evidently composed by someone “deficient in fifth grade math.”

A few months later, the OIG locked down the scientist, spurring a feeding frenzy among climate deniers who somehow don’t realize that the evidence that polar bears are going extinct has only grown starker each year, independent of Dr. Monnett’s work.

Monnett’s wife, scientist Lisa Rotterman, is concerned his persecution will send a “chilling message” at the agency right as it decides whether to open the Arctic to drilling by Shell Oil. “I don’t believe the timing is coincidental,” she told the Associated Press.
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The government is too strapped for cash to prevent the “imminent” extinction of a critical member of the Rocky Mountain forests, the Obama administration has determined. On Monday, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared that global warming pollution is causing the spread of the pine bark beetle and white pine blister rust into the the once-cold Rockies, killing off the whitebark pine in staggering numbers. However, because of budgetary limits, the service said it would defer instituting any attempt to save the trees:

The Fish and Wildlife Service determined Monday that whitebark pine, a tree found atop mountains across the American West, faces an “imminent” risk of extinction because of factors including climate change. The decision is significant because it marks the first time the federal government has identified climate change as one of the driving factors for why a broad-ranging tree species could disappear. The Canadian government has already declared whitebark pine to be endangered throughout its entire range; a recent study found that 80 percent of whitebark pine forests in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem are dead or dying. The Natural Resources Defense Council asked the Fish and Wildlife Service to place the tree on the endangered species list. In its determination, the agency said that it found a listing was “warranted but precluded,” meaning the pine deserved federal protection but the government could not afford it.

There are now 265 candidate species waiting for protection — or until their extinction eliminates the urgency.

The whitebark pine has been in decline for decades. Protection requested over 10 years ago, in February 1991, was rejected in 1994. Since then, the collapse of the species, which sustains the entire ecosystem from nutcrackers to grizzlies, has been “dramatic and catastrophic.”

Our ability to be responsible stewards of the planet is likely to get even worse, thanks to the Tea Party. “This month, the House Appropriations Interior Subcommittee voted to eliminate any funds for listing species under the Endangered Species Act as part of the 2012 budget,” the Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin notes.

The polar bear, elkhorn coral, and staghorn coral are all species listed as threatened because of global warming, but with the caveat that no action be taken to fight greenhouse pollution.