The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration justappointed a climate denier一个机构leadership position. I went onCNN’s Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer yesterday to explain why the appointment ofDr. David Legates is dangerousfor NOAA, for the future of federal climate change leadership, and for the public. Here’s why this appointment is a reckless move.
David Legates has a long history of accepting fossil fuel industry funding andspreading misinformation about climate change. He does not accept long-established climate science and spends time sowing doubt about the science, evendirectly to Congress. This is not the kind of person that should be in a leadership position at NOAA—an agency that leads the world in conducting climate science and communicating climate information to the public.
First and foremost, we shouldn’t overlook the absurdity of appointing a climate denier to federal leadership at the exact moment thatclimate-fueled wildfiresareravaging the Westand a(nother) hurricane is about toslam into the Gulf Coaston top of higher seas, driven by climate change. We need government leaders ready to address these huge threats, not deny their very existence.
The presence of a climate denier in the senior ranks of a federal agency can have devastating impacts on scientific integrity across the agency. With climate deniers at the helm, the US Environmental Protection Agency and the US Department of the Interior have seenclimate science and climate scientists sidelinedleft and right since 2017—with entire webpages removed, climate communications altered, and scientists blocked from speaking publicly. Such losses of scientific integrity at agencies harm the ability of our government to inform and protect the public from the threats of climate change. Even before Legates, dozens of NOAA scientists reported, in a2018 surveyconducted by the Union of Concerned Scientists and Iowa State University, being told not to use the term “climate change” in their work. Leadership hostile to climate science is likely to worsen this censorship.
Below the overt tampering with climate science we’ve seen in recent years, climate-denying leadership at agencies can also lead to harmful self-censorship. On that 2018 survey, scientists at agencies with climate deniers in leadership, such as the EPA and the US Geological Survey, reported higher numbers of scientists choosing to avoid use of the term “climate change” or doing climate-related work even though they weren’t explicitly directed to. A reason for this effect is that a climate-denying leadership creates a culture of fear that threatens federal scientists’ ability to freely conduct and communicate scientific work.
The good news is that we can expect NOAA employees to resist any attempts to suppress science. Scientific integrity policies and practices areespecially strong at NOAA,and as we learned during theSharpieGate fiasco, NOAA scientists areready to push backif their work is challenged. But importantly, they shouldn’t have to. We deserve federal science leadership that’s competent, credentialed and fit to lead.