Climate Science At NASA: Building Back Better After The Trump Era

NASA's Climate Communications Might Not Recover From the Damage of Trump's Systemic Suppression, Time

"After that Post piece came out in February 2017, Veronica McGregor, manager of JPL Media Relations, imposed strict approval requirements on our climate web team. The new editorial policy mandated "both management and Media Relations review all posts." Every blog, tweet or Facebook post--even something as simple as a photo of a glacier--needed to go back and forth among a manager or more often two managers, a scientist and a team from Media Relations, which meant there were times when a single post had as many as six authors and took hours or even days to publish. ... Soon after, I was told by higher-ups including JPL's director of the Office of Communication, also a career employee rather than a political appointee, to stop reporting on and sharing climate-related content from other government agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Weather Service and the Department of Energy--groups I'd been collaborating with for years. I was also banned from working with non-NASA academic climate scientists and educators."

Keith's note: From what I saw during the Trump Administration NASA managed to fare somewhat better than NOAA and other agencies when it came to science communication in general and climate science in particular. But that is just a relative comparison. This is a must-read account about how pervasively anti-science the Trump Administration was. One would hope that the official behavior of JPL PAO as described in this article comes to an end.

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