New Documents Show How Trump Interior Official Pushed Climate Misinformation into Federal Reports

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A major New York Times investigative report, published March 2, revealed efforts by Indur M. Goklany, a Department ofย Interior employee with ties to the Heartland Institute and other fossil-funded denial organizations, to modify federal reports to include misleading information about climateย science.ย 

DeSmog has obtained some of the emails cited by The Times in that investigation, published here for the firstย time.

โ€œThe misleading language appears in at least nine reports, including environmental studies and impact statements on major watersheds in the American West that could be used to justify allocating increasingly scarce water to farmers at the expense of wildlife conservation and fisheries,โ€ The Timesย found.

The direct consequences from the phrasing inserted by Goklany, nicknamed the โ€œGoks uncertainty languageโ€ by other employees, could be meaningful, advocates told Theย Times.

โ€œBoth scientists and environmental groups are concerned that Mr. Goklanyโ€™s campaign will start to build a body of evidence that will undermine the agencyโ€™s response to climate change in a region where water is already a highly contested resource,โ€ The Times reported. โ€œThe language could โ€˜create a loophole that would prevent future legal challenges from succeeding,โ€™ said Jayson Oโ€™Neill, deputy director of Western Values Project, a public-lands advocacyย group.โ€

The Times investigation was picked up by other venues nationwide. Viceย headlined itsย coverage, โ€œTrump’s Interior Department Is Claiming Climate Change Is Actually Good for Plants,โ€ a reference to an email Goklany sent suggesting โ€œthat CO2 may have increased the water use efficiency of plants globally.โ€ New York magazine’s Intelligencerย summed up its coverage in the headline, โ€œTrumpโ€™s Interior Department Reportedly Changed Scientific Reports to Say Climate Change Is Good.โ€ And Vanity Fair cut right to the crux with a piece titled, โ€œThe Trump Administration Is Just Flat-Out Lying About Climate Change.โ€

Uncertainty Language ‘Aย Requirement’

In addition to the documents DeSmog is first publishing here, other documents related to Goklanyโ€™s efforts to insert uncertainty into discussions of climate change โ€” despite a scientific consensus on the topic and the fact that climate models have proved to be very predictive over the past several decadesย โ€”ย were published by E&E News in 2018.ย ย 

โ€œPlease, however, make sure that the attached uncertainty language is incorporated somewhere within the document,โ€ the U.S. Bureau of Reclamationโ€™s David Raff wrote in a Decemberย 13, 2018 email to others at the bureau, referring to a final environmental impact statement draft. โ€œThis was a requirement established within the department in 2017 and I havenโ€™t heard that it isย changed.โ€

The documents suggest that there was tension inside Interior over the language Goklany promoted, indicating that the Goks uncertainty language was the product of โ€œdelicateโ€ conversations and that the requirement was created as the result of an agreement inside Interior resulting from discussions withย Goklany.

In May 2017, Raff had sent an email to Goklany defending climate change models, linking to a scientific study. โ€œThe performance seems pretty darn good,โ€ Raff wrote, โ€œespecially when the point for us at a regional level is to describe the risk possibilities and not to pin point any specificย projection.โ€

Pushing Inaccurate Informationย onย Climate

In the 2017 email exchange, Goklany appears to refer to a then-debunked hypothesisย that climate warming had reached a โ€œhiatus.โ€ (In his email, Goklany objects to the term hiatus, writing, โ€œThe correct terminology should be slowdown, possible [sic] followed by a questionย mark.โ€)

In June 2015, The New York Times reported that those โ€œhiatusโ€ claims had been based on inaccurate data. โ€œThe slowdown, sometimes inaccurately described as a halt or hiatus, became a major talking point for people critical of climate science,โ€ the Times reported. โ€œWhen adjustments are made to compensate for recently discovered problems in the way global temperatures were measured, the slowdown largely disappears, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared in a scientific paper published Thursday. And when the particularly warm temperatures of 2013 and 2014 are averaged in, the slowdown goes away entirely, the agencyย said.โ€

In 2017, the notion of a โ€œhiatusโ€ was once again debunked by more recent scientific research, as Inside Climate News reported in January of that year. โ€œUsing a global network of buoys, robotic floats, and satellites to trace the rise of sea surface temperatures, the study, published Januaryย 4ย in Science Advances, shows there was no slowdown in the pace of global warming,โ€ they wrote. โ€œThe so-called hiatus was widely reported and used by climate science deniers to bolster their political opposition to cutting greenhouse gasย emissions.โ€

The emails also show Goklany circulated research he had not yet read, writing, โ€œAlso, just for information, following is the abstract of a new paper that indicates that CO2 may have increased the water use efficiency of plants globally. Unfortunately, I donโ€™t have access to the full text version,โ€ Goklany wrote in one Septemberย 12, 2017ย email.

Public Trust in Governmentย Science

The recent New York Times report found that Goklany, a long time Interior employee, saw his career reach new heights when the Trump administration arrived inย Washington.

โ€œIn interviews, four current and former Interior Department officials said Mr. Goklanyโ€™s rise was abrupt and unexpected,โ€ The Times reported. โ€œโ€˜They were like, โ€œWho the hell is this guy?โ€โ€™ said Joel Clement, a former top climate-policy expert at the Interior Department who quit in 2017 and testified in Congress that former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke was purging the agency of government scientists working to address climate change โ€” allegations later backed by the agencyโ€™s inspector general,โ€ The Times reportย said.

The news comes at a time when the credibility of government science is particularly consequential, given the recent spread of COVID-19, known broadly as the coronavirus,ย to countries including the Unitedย States.

โ€œWhen you learn you have a dangerous disease, you need to be able to trust your doctor,โ€ Dr. Leana S. Wen, an emergency physician and visiting professor at George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health, wrote in a January 22 op-ed in the Washington Post. โ€œWhen entire populations face a dangerous public health crisis, they need to be able to trust theirย governments.โ€

The Trump administration has already come under fire for its mixed messages on COVID-19. A Februaryย 27 op-ed column, also published in the Washington Post, makes the case that the Trump administrationโ€™s credibility on science (or lack thereof) could play a role in how the public responds to reassurances from the Trump administration about the extent to which the spread of the disease and its economic fallout can beย contained.

Contention Over Goklany’s Actions Notย New

Goklany, who has been at Interior since the 1980s,ย has been at the center of controversies over the Trump administrationโ€™s response to climate change in the past. In 2018, a Washington Post profile noted that Goklanyโ€™s supervisor resorted to filing a Freedom of Information Act request for Goklanyโ€™s emails, because, the Post quoted his supervisor as saying, โ€œhe refused to discuss these activities with his supervisors while I was there at [Department of Interior], and his work products, a mystery to all of us in the career ranks, were likely to represent threats to scientificย integrity.โ€

โ€œGoklany also interpreted media coverage of climate for high-level Interior officials,โ€ the Post reported. โ€œHe described a Los Angeles Times article about Californiaโ€™s brutal wildfire season as โ€˜better than mostโ€™ while deriding a New York Times story about the impact of sea-level rise and other climate effects on Guam by arguing that โ€˜tide gauge data, however, doesnโ€™t show any acceleration in sea level rise due to man-made global warming orย whatever.โ€™โ€

E&E News had also earlier reported on Goklanyโ€™s influence over climate science information at Interior. At one point, emails show Goklany questioning whether the melting of glaciers in Montanaโ€™s Glacier National Park might offer benefits. โ€œI could also make the argument that it’s not clear that tourism would necessarily suffer since touring season may expand, and hiking may replace glacier-viewing, but that might be a secondary effect,โ€ heย wrote.

In fact, visits to the park peaked in 2017, and the following year visits were down 10 percentย due in part to a wildfire in one of the parkโ€™s most renowned destinations. Those wildfires, including ones sparked on a day that temperatures in Glacier National Park reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit for the first time, were linked in press reports to the impacts of climateย change.

Itโ€™s a small detail, perhaps, but one that shows that off-the-cuff predictions like Goklany’s can often be even less useful for guidingย actions today than the climate models developed by scientists that have been confirmed byย observations.

Because after all, if youโ€™d put what climate science deniers like Golkany have predicted about climate science in recent decadesย to the test against computer models and the product of scientific research into human-caused climate warming, they might not like the endย results.

โ€œThe hallmark of good science, however, is the ability to make testable predictions, and climate models have been making predictions since the 1970s,โ€ NASAโ€™s Jet Propulsion Laboratory wrote in a January 2020 feature on climate models. โ€œNow a new evaluation of global climate models used to project Earthโ€™s future global average surface temperatures over the past half-century answers that question: most of the models have been quiteย accurate.โ€

Main image: Screenshot from YouTube video ofย Indur Goklany speaking at the Heartlandย Institute’s 12th International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC12)

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Sharon Kelly is an attorney and investigative reporter based in Pennsylvania. She was previously a senior correspondent at The Capitol Forum and, prior to that, she reported for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, Earth Island Journal, and a variety of other print and online publications.

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