The Union for Concerned Scientists, led by Andrew Rosenberg, who served as northeast regional administrator, and later deputy director of the National Marine Fisheries Service, has established a hotline for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) employees to report allegations of “political meddling” by President-elect Trump and his incoming Administration.
“I am hearing a lot of worry,” Rosenberg told Bloomberg regarding a potential Trump selection to head the agency. “The worry is that they will be putting another ideologue in place,” Rosenberg said.
December 21, 2016 — The following is excerpted from a story by Michael Bastach. It was published yesterday in The Daily Caller.
Environmentalist worry over President-elect Donald Trump reached new heights when activists set up an anonymous hotline for government climate scientists to report “political meddling” by the incoming administration.
Bloomberg reports “outside scientists are setting up an anonymous hotline for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s employees to report political meddling” over fears Trump could delete public climate data and silence researchers.
“I am hearing a lot of worry,” Andrew Rosenberg, a top activist at the at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) in Cambridge, Mass., told Bloomberg. “The worry is that they will be putting another ideologue in place.”
UCS set up the hotline for climate scientists in the wake of news Trump’s administration could tamper with taxpayer-funded climate data. Interestingly enough, it’s a rumor they started.
Trump’s transition team has never said anything to indicate they would alter any public databases — a fact Freedman admitted. But it was too late, scientists, activists and media outlets began to preach the story as gospel.
Climate scientist and Slate columnist Eric Holthaus led the charge and asked people to fill it with climate data “you don’t want to see disappear.” Scientists at the University of Toronto and the University of Pennsylvania created a “Guerrilla Archiving team” to download data before Trump could “delete” it.
Holthaus, to his credit, argued budget cuts are more likely to force agencies to jettison climate data rather than malicious acts by Trump appointees. But it’s hard to say since Trump has not nominated anyone to head NOAA or NASA.
Budget cuts could shrink some efforts to monitor the climate, but it’s unlikely to result in wholesale deleting of taxpayer-funded databases, along with the planes, buoys and weather stations that go along with it.