{"id":22196,"date":"2018-04-17T13:55:17","date_gmt":"2018-04-17T19:55:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=22196"},"modified":"2018-04-17T13:55:17","modified_gmt":"2018-04-17T19:55:17","slug":"zinke-grilled-over-editing-of-report-on-climate-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2018\/04\/zinke-grilled-over-editing-of-report-on-climate-change\/","title":{"rendered":"Zinke grilled over editing of report on climate change"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Zinke\"<\/a>

Interior Department<\/p>

Wikipedia described this as Ryan Zinke’s “in the field” portrait as Interior secretary.”<\/p><\/div>\n

House Democrats grilled Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke this week about National Park Service officials deleting all references to the human cause of climate change in drafts of a long-awaited report.<\/p>\n

Zinke told<\/a> a House Appropriations subcommittee on Wednesday that he and other political appointees at the Interior Department, which oversees the Park Service, have not seen the draft. And he repeated a vow that he will not censor scientific reports.<\/p>\n

Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting last week reported<\/a> that Park Service officials had edited the scientific report, which outlines the risks of sea level rise and storm surge at 118 coastal national parks. Groups of Senate and House Democrats on Friday requested<\/a> an investigation by the Interior\u2019s inspector general.<\/p>\n

At the hearing, Zinke said the drafts were obtained through a public records request to a university and that he wants an investigation into how the media reviewed the drafts before he did.<\/p>\n

Rep. Chellie Pingree told Zinke she is concerned about sea level rise at Acadia National Park in her home state of Maine.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen that report comes out, I personally don\u2019t want to see it edited to remove any reference,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Zinke responded, \u201cIf it\u2019s a scientific report, I\u2019m not going to change a comma.\u201d<\/p>\n

Earlier in the hearing, Rep. Betty McCollum, a Democrat from Minnesota, referred to a similar vow Zinke made last month at a Senate hearing.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou even challenged any member to find an altered document and now we have that proof,\u201d she said. \u201cThis clear interference of political leadership is forcing employees to violate their scientific integrity policies and it must stop.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reveal has obtained new drafts of the report that show a higher-ranking National Park Service official deleted references to the human cause of climate change.<\/p>\n

In a draft dated March 21, the lead author, University of Colorado researcher Maria Caffrey, rejected the deletions of \u201canthropogenic\u201d and \u201chuman activities\u201d and restored the earlier version of her report, according to a draft obtained through a Colorado open records request. Caffrey confirmed that she had restored all the deleted references to the human\u2019s role in climate change.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>But a subsequent draft, dated April 1, shows that the head of the National Park Service climate change response program, Cat Hawkins Hoffman, re-deleted references to \u201canthropogenic\u201d and \u201chuman activities.\u201d Hoffman, a career Park Service manager, is listed as an author of the report.<\/p>\n

For example, in the executive summary, Hoffman removed a phrase that explains that humans are causing the sea level rise and storm surge that imperils parks.<\/p>\n

Apparently compromising with Caffrey, Hoffman allowed some references to the human role in climate change farther down in the report, but in a watered-down way.<\/p>\n

Caffrey\u2019s version stated that \u201c[A]nthropogenic climate change has significantly increased the rate of global sea level rise.\u201d Hoffman deleted that statement. Her version blurs the connection between human emissions and sea level rise:<\/p>\n

\u201c[R]ecent analyses reveal that the rate of sea level rise in the last century was greater than during any preceding century in at least 2,800 years, with rates almost doubling since 1993. Human activities continue to release carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere, causing the Earth\u2019s atmosphere to warm.\u201d (Note: Scientific references removed by Reveal.)<\/p>\n

Caffrey told Hoffman that the university advised her not to accept any changes, and that her contract with the Park Service establishes that the report is her intellectual property.<\/p>\n

Neither Hoffman nor the media contact for her unit responded to requests for interviews.<\/p>\n

Some veterans of the National Park Service were disappointed to hear about the edits.<\/p>\n

Mike Soukup was a scientist at the National Park Service for three decades and rose to be the\u00a0associate director<\/a>\u00a0with responsibility for science and natural resources from 1995 to 2007. He recalled\u00a0having to stand up to political appointees who wanted to change scientific reports.<\/p>\n

\u201cWashington is a place of compromise. Sometimes you have to go along with political appointees,\u201d Soukup said. \u201cBut changing scientific reports to get along with an administration, that\u2019s uncalled for and unethical and shouldn\u2019t happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

This story was originally published by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Learn more at revealnews.org<\/a> and subscribe to the Reveal podcast, produced with PRX, at revealnews.org\/podcast<\/a>.\u00a0Elizabeth Shogren can be reached at\u00a0eshogren@revealnews.org<\/a>. Follow her on Twitter:\u00a0@ShogrenE<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

House Democrats grilled Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke this week about National Park Service officials deleting all references to the human cause of climate change in drafts of a long-awaited report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":217,"featured_media":22198,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[4660,6910],"class_list":["post-22196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-interior-department","tag-ryna-zinke","prominence-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/217"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22196"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22196\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22201,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22196\/revisions\/22201"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}