Thread by @reveal

1/ In this week’s episode: Officials from @NatlParkService heaped pressure on scientist @Dr_Caffrey to get her to remove all mentions of manmade climate change from a trailblazing scientific report.

It’s part of a larger pattern. revealnews.org/episodes/silen…

2/ Maria Caffrey, a University of Colorado researcher under contract with the @NatlParkService, spent years calculating how much flooding 118 national parks should expect from sea level rise and storm surge.

3/ But after @realdonaldTrump took office, the release of Caffrey’s research was stalled. Officials began trying to censor it.

We reported that first, in April 2018: revealnews.org/article/wipeou…

4/ Then came the harassment.

A senior @NatlParkService official from D.C. called Caffrey to a meeting, smacked reports on a table and demanded to know why she had to mention humans’ role in climate change when other scientists didn’t. He raised his voice “a lot,” Caffrey said.

5/ Another @NatlParkService official told Caffrey that ”anthropogenic” and ”human” activities were banned words under the Trump administration.

He warned that the research might never be published if she refused to remove them.

6/ Other officials told Caffrey their careers and families would suffer if Caffrey persisted.

It began to wear on her.

7/ After we reported the attempts at censorship, members of Congress demanded an investigation. revealnews.org/blog/democrats…

8/ Senator @maziehirono pressed Interior’s Inspector General to investigate: hirono.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/…

9/ In the House, @RepRaulGrijalva led a parallel effort to get @Interior’s Inspector General to investigate.

“This follows a pattern of climate change information being limited, restricted, and censored by the Trump administration,” he wrote.

10/ In May 2018, @NatlParkService released the report, which included projections for 2030, 2050 and 2100.

11/ In North Carolina, the Wright Brothers National Memorial has the highest projected increase in sea level among parks nationwide – 2.69 feet by 2100 if emissions keep rising at the rate they are now.

12/ But the park service still refused to release the data for mapping the future flooding at individual parks – or an interactive website, an idea Maria came up with.

13/ The website depicts how flooded parks will be in 2050 and 2100. It compares flooding under two scenarios: if fossil fuel emissions keep growing and if they don’t.

More here: apps.revealnews.org/slr/preview/in…

14/ This spring, after speaking with @ShogrenE, @Dr_Caffrey was taken off the project.

“Essentially, I feel I've been shut out from my project,” she said. “It certainly feels like there could be some retribution playing a role in this."

15/ Finally, just before Christmas, @NatlParkService quietly posted a link to the interactive website.

However, the link has stopped working, apparently because of the government shutdown. maps.nps.gov/slr/

16/ Documents we received after suing the @NatlParkService for failing to respond to our #FOIA request were heavily redacted.

Still, they back up Caffrey’s account of the intense pressure she was under to delete references to humans causing climate change.

17/ Emails show @NatlParkService officials deleting all mentions after their boss shared concerns about “anthropogenic.” 👇👇

18) And drafts of the report we got from a #FOIA request show a park service spokesman and the head of the NPS climate change response unit deleting references to humans causing climate change: 👇👇

19/ @Dr_Caffrey worries about the impact of all this on her career:

“It appears that I could be punished for this going forward for a long time,” she said.

Still, she hopes other scientists will follow her lead and resist censorship.

20/ We’ve been reporting on the Trump administration’s efforts to silence science since the President took office.

Read our work here: revealnews.org/topic/the-unsc…

21/ And to get our latest investigations delivered straight to your inbox, sign up for our newsletter: revealnews.org/newsletter