In early September 2004, two government scientists peered through the bubble windows of a Twin Otter whale-monitoring aircraft, scanning the Alaskan Beaufort Sea at 1,500 feet. They unexpectedly sighted the floating carcasses of four dead polar bears in open water far from pack ice or land. A year later in San Diego at an important biology conference, the two scientists, Charles Monnett and Jeffrey Gleason, and their co-author Lisa Rotterman — all three with the Department of the Interior — displayed their findings on a large poster card jammed with charts and graphs and a gripping title indicating that diminished Arctic ice was forcing polar bears into fatal open-water swimming.
They published their seven-page “observational notes” in Polar Biology, an obscure peer-reviewed science journal. Suspiciously missing from the original author credit line was Rotterman’s name: She’s the wife of lead author Charles Monnett, and an internal peer review official.
Monnett himself was chairman of a powerful technical committee doling out millions in grants and contracts. He’s under investigation for violating scientific integrity rules, but that’s not the real story. This is:
While writing their report, the two named authors put on their Carnac the Magnificent fortunetelling turbans and, without retrieving or examining the bears for cause of death, suggested that “40 bears may have been swimming and many of those probably drowned as a result of rough seas caused by high winds.” They concluded that “drowning-related deaths of polar bears may increase in the future if the observed trend of regression of pack ice and/or longer open water periods continues.”
The evening news wasn’t interested in such guesswork, but it only took one Wall Street Journal headline to turn America’s regulatory world upside down: “Is Global Warming Killing the Polar Bears?”
Big Green jumped into hyperdrive, pushing public sympathy toward two powerful new rules: First, list the polar bear as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, but use the unprecedented justification of global warming melting the Arctic ice. To look scientific, such prophecies need computer modeling.
Industry immediately saw the ploy — Global warming models showing danger to the polar bear were a backdoor way to regulate carbon dioxide, since cap and trade was losing favor fast. It was so transparent that congressional staffers joked with each other about software engineer Charlie Martin’s cynical Iron Law of Federal Modeling: “All modeling efforts will inevitably converge on the result most likely to lead to further funding.”
President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address — remembered mostly for its “military-industrial complex” warning — actually stated Charlie’s law in other terms: “The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present — and is gravely to be regarded.”
No government climate scientist dared rumple the meal ticket. So the Interior Department listed the polar bear in 2008.
The second polar bear weapon was the “critical habitat designation,” a federal zoning law that severely limits human use of any place a species lives, might live or might think about living. Interior bureaucrats imposed the unprecedented designation of more than 187,000 square miles as critical habitat for polar bears on Alaska’s North Slope, an area larger than the state of California.
The Arctic Slope Regional Corporation and a dozen other Alaska Native groups, along with the state of Alaska, are suing Interior in federal appeals court. They lost in federal district court, because judges are intimidated by the scientific community and will not challenge agency science decisions. That is the real story.
The voluntary servitude of our courts, beginning in unlikely places such as an airplane skimming Arctic waters, is ample reason for America to undertake a vigorous reform program and rebuild its government science community to serve rather than rule our nation.
Eisenhower had one last thing to say about that: “In holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
Examiner Columnist Ron Arnold is executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.
