Government scientists fear Trump will suppress climate change study: report

Climate scientists who work for the federal government fear that President Trump or his administration will try to suppress a new study on climate change’s impact on the United States, according to a new report.

The New York Times obtained a copy of the report, which is waiting for approval from the Trump administration before it can be made public.

The report concludes that Americans are already feeling the effects of climate change and says it is “extremely likely” that the majority of global temperature increases in the past 60 years are partially due to human influence.

The report also details the warming trends of more than 1.6 degree Fahrenheit from 1880 to 2015 are likely linked to human activity.

{mosads}“Many lines of evidence demonstrate that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases, are primarily responsible for observed climate changes in the industrial era,” one portion of the report reads. “There are no alternative explanations, and no natural cycles are found in the observational record that can explain the observed changes in climate.”

At least one government scientist who worked on the report said he and others are worried the Trump administration will suppress the findings, according to the Times.

The report follows reports earlier on Monday that staffers at a U.S. Department of Agriculture office were told to avoid the term “climate change” in communications and use phrases like “weather extremes” instead.

“We won’t change the modeling, just how we talk about it,” Bianca Moebius-Clune, the Natural Resources Conservation Service’s director of soil health, wrote in an email to staff on Feb. 16, according to the report.

Trump has refused to say whether or not he believes global warming is influenced by human activity, and his Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt is an outspoke skeptic of climate science.