USGS Scientists' Complaint On Trump's Bullshit Science "Policy" Becomes The Basis To Overturn It
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In late December, with just a month left in Trump's term, Reilly issued an instructional memorandum requiring researchers to use models and data suggesting climate change will not be as dire as many scientists think. The memo was incorporated into the Interior Department’s overall operating procedures a week before Trump left office. In their complaint, career officials at USGS said the memo was “based on his unsupported and non-peer-reviewed views” and included “fatal flaws” that agency scientists had “flagged as problematic” several times. They added, “this is to our knowledge the only topic where a USGS Director, as a political appointee, has ever tried to prescribe and dictate how the USGS does science.”
The USGS is the research arm of the Interior Department, which oversees about one-fifth of the U.S. landmass. Their scientists study everything from how rising seas will erode coasts, higher temperatures will melt glaciers and changing conditions will impact plants and animals as the heat builds up in the atmosphere over the century. But Reilly, a former NASA astronaut and petroleum geologist, has urged researchers to limit forecasts to just the next two to three decades, saying it is too difficult to predict the future further than that. “[P]redicting short-term, global climate changes … is far more certain than making long-term projections,” Reilly wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in December.
Career officials also took issue with Reilly's op-ed, titled “USGS Gets Politics Out of Climate Forecasts.” In their complaint, they wrote Reilly's article “may represent breaches in scientific integrity” because it was not properly reviewed by scientists before publication. The USGS is now reassessing the Trump team's restrictions on climate science. “This document is currently under bureau review to determine whether it meets our rigorous scientific standards and practices,” an agency spokesman told The Energy 202.
The complaint could end up becoming a pretext for the incoming Biden team to scrap Reilly's last-minute moves. Last week, Biden kicked off a 120-day review of scientific integrity policies across federal agencies, aiming to find instances of “improper political interference” under Trump.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/02/01/energy-202-biden-puts-trumps-climate-policies-under-microscope-career-officials-lend-hand/
