A top scientist studying climate change at USDA has quit, following others who say the Trump administration has politicized science
Nutrition
Ziska, in describing his decision to leave, painted a picture of a department in constant fear of the president and Secretary Sonny Perdue’s open skepticism about broadly accepted climate science, leading officials to go to extremes to obscure their work to avoid political blowback. The result, he said, is a vastly diminished ability for taxpayer-funded scientists to provide farmers and policymakers with important information about complex threats to the global food supply.
When Donald Trump was elected president in November 2016, however, scientists began to worry that the incoming administration would be fundamentally different. The USDA lab Ziska worked under decided preemptively to drop the term “global change” from its name to avoid attracting unwanted political scrutiny.By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Other signals have came from Perdue or Trump himself, as both have publicly questioned the scientific consensus on the causes of climate change. "You have farmers who are looking at climate and weather that they've not seen in their lifetimes,” he said. “It's not your father's climate. It's changing. What does that mean? Does it mean that I'm screwed, or does it mean I have an opportunity? ... What does it mean in terms of soil health? What does it mean in terms of diseases or weeds that might be new to the area?
When Ziska joined the USDA’s climate stress lab in 1991, there were about 11 scientists dedicated to studying climate stressors, including air quality and climate change, in the Agricultural Research Service.Ziska told POLITICO he had been frustrated for several years with the USDA’s lack of focus and funding for climate-related research, particularly as scientific authorities have warned the problem is an increasingly urgent one for humanity, but the rice paper saga was the final straw for him.
A communications official went as far as to call the University of Washington and suggest the university reconsider its plans to promote the paper.“The concern was about nutritional claims, not anything relating to climate change or CO2 levels,” the spokesperson said in response to an earlier POLITICO story outlining the department’s failure to promote climate research.
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