In another article about the current USA administration putting pressure on scientists to avoid talking publicly about the impact of global warming, Juliet Eilperin at the Washington post describes several cases of the administration censoring or obstructing scientists trying to discuss global warming publicly [LINK]. This time the problem is at NOAA and the USGS. I hadn't heard anything about trouble at USGS, but probably because most of their work doesn't directly involve climate change. The NOAA stories I had heard about, especially about the CO2 conference in Boulder, where the organizer, Pieter Tans, was asked to have the presenters avoid using climate change buzz words in the publicly available parts of the talks (the titles and abstracts). I was outraged when I heard about that, which was during the meeting. Luckily that request was ignored, since having a conference about carbon dioxide and not talking about climate change would be pretty silly.
I think there's something to this behavior by the administration, but I haven't got it straight in my head yet. There might be some reasoning behind keeping government agencies from interacting with the public about climage change, and leaving university-types to do it. There's something sinister, but I don't know how to articulate it yet. Comments would be helpful in that regard.
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