Mar 11, 2015 3 min read

A lot of us no doubt had the experience, before a family get-together, of our mother or another family member pulling us aside and saying something like, “Don’t ask your cousin Roy about his job. He got fired because of an incident with a young lady in the copier room,” or, “Don’t ask Uncle Jack how he’s feeling unless you want to hear about his gout for an hour.”

Certainly, all of us have tried to avoid what might be considered unpleasant conversations. But in Florida, some are accusing the administration of Gov. Rick Scott of trying to tamp down communications about what the state government apparently considers unpleasant facts.

According to a recent report from the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting, officials at Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection, the agency charged with responding to the threat from climate change in the state considered most at risk from shifting weather, got word from the top they are not to use the terms “climate change” or “global warming” in any form of official correspondence.

“We were told not to use the terms ‘climate change,’ ‘global warming’ or ‘sustainability,'” Christopher Byrd, an attorney with the DEP’s Office of General Counsel in Tallahassee from 2008 to 2013, told FCIR. “That message was communicated to me and my colleagues by our superiors in the Office of General Counsel.”

FCIR, in the course of interviews with former DEP employees and consultants, and a review of state records, also spoke with Kristina Trotta, who formerly worked for the DEP in Miami. She said she got a warning much like the one Byrd received, during a staff meeting last year.

“We were told that we were not allowed to discuss anything that was not a true fact,” said Trotta.

Of course, if you ask pretty much any reputable climate scientist, they will tell you that the world’s climate is drastically changing, and it is being influenced by human activity. They believe it is true, and factual.

Neither of the men who served as Scott’s DEP secretary would even talk with FCIR for its report, though after the fact, Scott claimed there was no truth to the report.

Whom do we believe? Would it be an investigative news operation that spoke with various people who worked for or with the DEP, and obtained and scoured official reports, or a politician who comes from the Republican “I’m Not a Scientist” cabal that takes a “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” approach to climate change?

They don’t like it when you call them “science deniers,” but by and large, a great percentage of prominent GOP officials in state and federal offices are steadfast science skeptics, especially when that science supports the existence of climate change that leading scientists warn will have disastrous effects.

If these politicians admit human-influenced climate change is real, then they would be expected to take action to combat it, and that would not sit well at all with the corporations and industries to which they are beholden.

Scott was smart enough not to leave a paper trail about a ban on certain phrases in DEP documents, but we have little doubt about what he believes – or disbelieves – and we feel fairly certain that his views have trickled down to every level of the agency.

As the old saying goes, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”