A Trump administration official has repeatedly added sections of climate denial to scientific research produced by the Interior Department, according to the New York Times. The newspaper states that at least nine reports include inaccurate claims which try to make it seem like there’s a lack of consensus among climate scientists that the earth is getting warmer. The effort has reportedly been led by Indur Goklany, deputy secretary at the Interior Department since 2017, who is said to have responsibility for reviewing the agency’s climate policies. The Times has seen emails in which Goklany told scientists to say that they “may be overestimating the rate of global warming.” Another email shows Goklany instructing department scientists to add that rising levels carbon dioxide could actually be good because they “may increase plant water use efficiency.” Samuel Myers, a research scientist at Harvard University’s Center for the Environment, said the claims added by Goklany “take very specific and isolated pieces of science, and tries to expand it in an extraordinarily misleading fashion.”
