Amid all the weekly distractions/destructions in Trumpland, I have been patiently awaiting the release of the National Park Service’s report on how to protect park resources and visitors from climate change. I am afraid that the wait is far from over, so I’m posting snippets from Reveal, 4/2/2018, titled Wipeout: Human role in climate change removed from report. Reveal’s article, by Elizabeth Shogren, outlines alleged deletions and edits that look a lot like the type censorship Secretary of Interior Ryan Zinke says don’t happen in his department. Snips:
National Park Service officials have deleted every mention of humans’ role in causing climate change in drafts of a long-awaited report on sea level rise and storm surge, contradicting Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s vow to Congress that his department is not censoring science.
The research for the first time projects the risks from rising seas and flooding at 118 coastal national park sites, including the National Mall, the original Jamestown settlement and the Wright Brothers National Memorial. Originally drafted in the summer of 2016 yet still not released to the public, the National Park Service report is intended to inform officials and the public about how to protect park resources and visitors from climate change.
Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting obtained and analyzed 18 versions of the scientific report. In changes dated Feb. 6, a park service official crossed out the word “anthropogenic,” the term for people’s impact on nature, in five places. Three references to “human activities” causing climate change also were removed.
The 87-page report, which was written by a University of Colorado Boulder scientist, has been held up for at least 10 months, according to documents obtained by Reveal. The delay has prevented park managers from having access to the best data in situations such as reacting to hurricane forecasts, safeguarding artifacts from floodwaters or deciding where to locate new buildings. …
Reveal obtained almost 2,000 pages of drafts of the report showing tracked changes and dating back to August 2016 – along with dozens of pages of other documents about the report and preparations to release it – in response to a public records request to the state of Colorado. …
The edited national parks report “is probably the biggest scientific integrity violation at the Department of Interior, by far … because this is an actual scientific report,” said Joel Clement, who was the Interior Department’s top climate change official in the Obama administration. …
Reveal obtained almost 2,000 pages of drafts of the report showing tracked changes and dating back to August 2016 – along with dozens of pages of other documents about the report and preparations to release it – in response to a public records request to the state of Colorado. …
The lead author, University of Colorado geological sciences research associate Maria Caffrey, worked full time on the report on contract with the park service from 2013 through 2017.
Caffrey declined to discuss the editing and long delay in releasing her report, instead referring questions to the park service. Asked whether she has been pressured to delete the terms “anthropogenic” and “human activities,” she replied, “I don’t really want to get into that today.”
“I would be very disappointed if there were words being attributed to me that I didn’t write,” she said. “I don’t think politics should come into this in any way.” …
Editing notes in a draft obtained by Reveal indicate that many of the deletions were made by Larry Perez, a career public information officer who coordinates the park service’s climate change response program.
Perez declined to comment on why the changes were made. …
The National Park Service’s scientific integrity policy prohibits managers from engaging in “dishonesty, fraud, misrepresentation, coercive manipulation, censorship, or other misconduct that alters the content, veracity, or meaning or that may affect the planning, conduct, reporting, or application of scientific and scholarly activities.” It also requires employees to differentiate between their opinions or assumptions and solid science.
Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences, said “the edits are glaringly in violation” of the science cited in the report and “such alterations violate” the policy.
The alleged censorship in the park service’s report is the most recent addition to Columbia University Law School’s Silencing Climate Science list of about a hundred Trump Administration problem areas.
Caffrey says that she finished writing the report in October, 2016. That sounds like a year and a half in the editorial queue.
Meanwhile, according to Reveal, Zinke said in a March 13 Senate committee hearing, “There is no incident, no incident at all that I know that we ever changed a comma on a document itself. Now we may have on a press release…” “And I challenge you, any member, to find a document that we’ve actually changed on a report.”
I guess that if departments don’t release controversial reports they can make claims like the one from Zinke. That is, they can make such claims unless one counts “sins of omission” alongside “sins of commission.”
Dave-I think you raise an interesting question… what papers on what topics by whom constitute “science” to which “scientific integrity” rules should apply? And what kind of editing (any word? words that substantially change the results?) would constitute that? Can any government employee who contracts with someone for a paper do any editing (or ask the write to delete a paragraph or add one?).
Quoting what you wrote:
So the Park Service contracted with someone to produce a report on how climate change might impact coastal parks (an 87 page report that the author worked full time on from 2013 to 2017 (?) four years?). To me the problem with this approach is that projections and best science change faster than that.. what seems like a really good synthesis may change with the addition of one important paper.
Last I heard, the Park Service was using scenarios in planning.. and that seems to me to be the best way to do this kind of work (scientists generate some scenarios that cover the widest range of projected changes, and the people who run the Parks develop strategies) given the changes in best available science, practitioner experience with mitigation of the effects, and site specific concerns and opportunities.
So this paper falls in the gap between “science” and “advice for managers” or what we might have called “extension” in the past. I wouldn’t edit it, but on the other hand I wouldn’t have asked for it in that form for the reasons I talked about above.
For those of you who are interested in sea level rise and coastal phenomena, Judith Curry has been doing a synthesis at the popular level of some of the current findings in several parts. You can get an idea of how the science is in flux looking at the number of 2018 papers she cites (I also thought the hot spots were interesting) . Here’s a link.
As Reveal notes, Caffrey’s report too relies on scenarios:
Ahh.. but projected emissions are only one thing that is incompletely understood.. different climate models and assumptions about the way things work (and possible adaptation responses) should also be incorporated in scenarios.
In the Mall case, I wonder whether managing the Mall for 1.74 foot rise be different than 2.62 feet? If she used the IPCC emissions scenarios, some people think that they underestimate impacts, so maybe they should look at scenarios including rises from 1-5 feet? But how would that actually work.. would DC build levees? How can you separate impacts on the Mall from the rest of DC? Shouldn’t the Mall be part of the DC Climate Action Plan?
What to me is most interesting is on the adaptation side. What could you do? What could you do as part of a larger landscape with partners? And the key science part is.. what are the observations in the future that would let us know (e.g., higher water levels in spring) that we are more likely to be on one trajectory than another (and that scientist can use to refine models and improve the projections? Seems to me that this has to all vary by Park.
It might be fun to find what we might think is a good example of climate-related scenario planning. The water people seem pretty good at this and note..
https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-04/documents/scenario_planning_to_support_decision_making_crwu.pdf
They put all potential changes out there, including climate change.
Certainly water providers have a tougher row to hoe than managers of Parks in terms of demand, technology, climate impacts and general complexity, but this seems to be a much more empowering approach in terms of mutual learning.
Sharon:
Agreed. But the problem with the study I posted about is simply that there is a strong scent of unacceptable political censorship afoot that may preclude it being used as yet-another good example of scenario planning as a substitute for “prediction.” And such censorship is at least alleged to be by public affairs people, not science advisors or copy editors.