WASHINGTON (CNN) — Goodbye climate change. Hello “weather extremes.”
That’s part of a list of language changes suggested in newly released emails among Agriculture Department officials as employees search for new ways to describe their work under the Trump administration.
An email obtained by CNN advised Natural Resources Conservation Service employees to avoid the term “Climate Change” and to instead use “Weather Extremes.”
Instead of “Climate Change Adaptation,” the recommended terms include “Resilience to Weather Extremes.”
Rather than “reducing greenhouse gases,” the emails suggest: “Build Soil Organic Matter, increase nutrient use efficiency.”
President Donald Trump has consistently questioned the scientific consensus behind human impact on rising global temperatures and associated effects.
The President has pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accords and the Environmental Protection Agency is working to roll back regulations meant to limit carbon dioxide emissions.
The Guardian first reported on the emails.
Despite the emails, the agency says the incoming Trump administration did not request the language change.
“These emails, sent in the first days of the new administration to a small number of agency staff, did not reflect the direction of senior agency leadership,” NRCS spokesman Kaveh Sadeghzadeh told CNN.
The NRCS is an arm of the Agriculture Department that advises and assists farmers on topics ranging from finance to conservation.
The language changes were discussed as a messaging shift, not a change in mission.
“We won’t change the modeling,” one NRCS official wrote. “just how we talk about it — there are a lot of benefits to putting carbon back in the soil, climate mitigation is just one of them.”
The reasoning, another NRCS official said: “It has become clear one of the previous administration’s priority (sic) is not consistent with that of the incoming administration. Namely, that priority is climate change.”
News of the emails comes amid reports that scientists working on a mandated report on climate change fear that the Trump administration will “bury” their findings.
The report was commissioned by law through the Global Change Research Act in 1990.
A draft of the report, which insists that humans are primarily responsible for climate change, was published by the New York Times on Monday, at the behest of the authors of the study.
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