PRESS

The Scientific Integrity Act is an important step forward for safeguarding scientific integrity at federal agencies, and it improves the legal options available for federal scientists who are facing increasing levels of censorship, research hindrances, and misrepresentation of established facts.

It is essential that Congress exercise their immense powers to protect scientific research by supporting scientists and challenging anti-science efforts by the Trump administration.

I will say that my experience is that people who reject climate science a non-zero amount of time often overlap with people who are also raging misogynists.

The Climate Science Legal Defense Fund (CSLDF) in conjunction with Columbia’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law has been tracking the ways in which scientific information is being removed from reports and public websites, in addition to how scientists themselves are being sidelined.

The fund's executive director, Lauren Kurtz, said laws addressing online harassment are "behind the times." They tend to focus on bullying of children, not adult victims.

Lauren Kurtz, executive director of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, said that while the conservative groups had pursued researchers’ emails in the name of transparency, there had been “complete lack of transparency in how they were running their own organization.”

Justice Kennedy’s replacement will influence how we protect our air and water, as well as how we respond to climate change, for generations to come.

The presence of people like Milloy shuts out the voices of qualified scientists in the public policy arena, said Augusta Wilson, an attorney with the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund.

This coordinated assault on science in the name of transparency will ultimately harm not only the health of the American people, but the scientific endeavor as a whole.

Despite the administration’s claims that its actions put “America first,” they will in fact undermine our economic competitiveness and our position at the forefront of scientific research.

To date, the tracker has 96 entries, including 41 examples of outright government censorship. For instance, “on December 20, 2017, ninety-two documents describing national parks’ climate action plans were removed from the National Park Service (NPS) website.”

“Political and ideological attacks on science have a long and shameful history, and such attacks are the most dangerous when carried out or condoned by government authorities,” said Lauren Kurtz, CSLDF’s executive director.