https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/05/ziska-usda-climate-agriculture-trump-1445271
[links in online article]
'It feels like something out of a bad sci-fi movie'
A top climate scientist quit USDA, following others who say Trump has
politicized science.
By HELENA BOTTEMILLER EVICH
08/05/2019
One of the nation’s leading climate change scientists is quitting the
Agriculture Department in protest over the Trump administration’s
efforts to bury his groundbreaking study about how rice is losing
nutrients because of rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Lewis Ziska, a 62-year-old plant physiologist who’s worked at USDA’s
Agricultural Research Service for more than two decades, told POLITICO
he was alarmed when department officials not only questioned the
findings of the study — which raised serious concerns for the 600
million people who depend on rice for most of their calories — but also
tried to minimize media coverage of the paper, which was published in
the journal Science Advances last year.
“You get the sense that things have changed, that this is not a place
for you to be exploring things that don't agree with someone's political
views,” Ziska said in a wide-ranging interview. “That's so sad. I can't
even begin to tell you how sad that is.”
The departure comes soon after several other government officials
resigned from their posts over accusations that the administration is
censoring climate science — reports that have raised alarm about
scientific integrity in the federal government.
Last week, an intelligence analyst at the State Department said he left
his post after administration officials blocked his testimony to
Congress about the wide-ranging national security implications of
climate change. A National Park Service employee also stepped forward,
alleging she lost her job after refusing to scrub mentions of
human-caused climate change from a peer-reviewed paper that was set to
publish.
A POLITICO investigation revealed last month that USDA has routinely
buried its own climate-related science and other work on climate change
that continues. POLITICO also recently reported USDA suppressed the
release of its own plan for studying and responding to climate change.
The USDA has repeatedly denied having any policy to discourage
dissemination of science or the use of any climate-change-related terms.
In response to Ziska’s resignation, the department said in a statement
that objections to promoting his rice study were based on scientific
disagreement involving career officials, not politics.
“This was a joint decision by ARS national program leaders — all career
scientists — not to send out a press release on this paper,” the
statement said.
Ziska, in describing his decision to leave, painted a picture of a
department in constant fear of the president and Secretary Sonny
Perdue’s open skepticism about broadly accepted climate science, leading
officials to go to extremes to obscure their work to avoid political
blowback. The result, he said, is a vastly diminished ability for
taxpayer-funded scientists to provide farmers and policymakers with
important information about complex threats to the global food supply.
Ziska, or “Lew” as he’s known to his colleagues, has researched plants
at USDA across five administrations, Republican and Democratic,
contributing significantly to the country’s understanding of how rising
carbon dioxide levels and changing temperatures affect everything from
crops to noxious weeds and even plants grown to make illicit drugs.
Over the years, Ziska has published studies finding that climate change
could exacerbate allergy seasons, render herbicides important for
fighting weeds less effective, and fuel a decline in the nutritional
quality of pollen important for bees. He and his colleagues have been
investigating which strains of wheat and rice will be best suited for
future climate conditions.
Each administration has had its own priorities, which sometimes nudged
agricultural research in certain directions, but the changes were seldom
dramatic, he said. For much of Ziska’s career at USDA, for example, his
work fell under what’s known as the U.S. Global Change Research Program,
an interagency initiative launched during the first Bush administration
that continues to research the changing climate.
When Donald Trump was elected president in November 2016, however,
scientists began to worry that the incoming administration would be
fundamentally different. The USDA lab Ziska worked under decided
preemptively to drop the term “global change” from its name to avoid
attracting unwanted political scrutiny.
“That was not something that had ever happened before,” he said.
USDA, in its statement, emphasized that the change was not in response
to political pressure.
The overriding fear among scientists within USDA, Ziska said, was that
the administration would take an ax to the department’s science budget
and research priorities that perhaps didn’t align with its agenda. The
Trump administration has repeatedly proposed significant cuts to ARS’
budget, but Congress has so far largely kept funding flat.
Anything related to climate change was seen as extremely vulnerable, he
said.
“We were careful,” he said. “And then it got to the point where language
started to change. No one wanted to say climate change, you would say
'climate uncertainty' or you would say 'extreme events.' Or you would
use whatever euphemism was available to not draw attention.”
Ziska said there was never a department memo that directed legions of
USDA scientists to be more careful with their language, it was simply
well understood.
The signals to scientists have been subtle but frequent. For example,
the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, which funnels hundreds
of millions in taxpayer dollars to colleges and universities for food
and agriculture research has dropped the term “climate change” from its
requests for applications from scientists. Instead, the agency uses
"climate variability and change."
Other signals have came from Perdue or Trump himself, as both have
publicly questioned the scientific consensus on the causes of climate
change.
“There was a sense that if the science agreed with the politics, then
the policymakers would consider it to be ‘good science,’ and if it
didn’t agree with the politics, then it was something that was flawed
and needed to be done again,” Ziska said, noting that other scientists
are feeling the same pressures. “That was a sea change in how we viewed
our role.
“We’re not a political agency,” he added. “Our goal is to deal, in a
very pragmatic and very cost-effective way, with some of these issues.”
Ziska told POLITICO he’s concerned the politicization of climate science
poses a threat to the future of agriculture in the U.S. and abroad.
"You have farmers who are looking at climate and weather that they've
not seen in their lifetimes,” he said. “It's not your father's climate.
It's changing. What does that mean? Does it mean that I'm screwed, or
does it mean I have an opportunity? ... What does it mean in terms of
soil health? What does it mean in terms of diseases or weeds that might
be new to the area?
“This is a fundamental change across all different aspects,” he added.
“To ignore it. To just dismiss it and say, ‘Oh that's political.' ... I
don't have the words to describe that. It's surreal. It feels like
something out of a bad sci-fi movie.”
Ziska’s concerns about the Agriculture Department’s lack of
prioritization of climate research began before Trump took office.
There’s been a slow and steady erosion of the number of scientists
dedicated to studying all the ways climate change is affecting — and
will continue to affect — agriculture, and even fewer scientists
researching what all of this could mean for human health.
When Ziska joined the USDA’s climate stress lab in 1991, there were
about 11 scientists dedicated to studying climate stressors, including
air quality and climate change, in the Agricultural Research Service.
Today, he reckons there are maybe four or five.
Ziska told POLITICO he had been frustrated for several years with the
USDA’s lack of focus and funding for climate-related research,
particularly as scientific authorities have warned the problem is an
increasingly urgent one for humanity, but the rice paper saga was the
final straw for him.
Ziska and another leading researcher at USDA, Naomi Fukagawa, director
of USDA’s Human Nutrition Research Center in Beltsville, Md., had
collaborated for more than two years with scientists at the University
of Washington, University of Tokyo, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the
University of Southern Queensland, and Bryan College of Health Sciences
on what they considered a groundbreaking achievement. The paper looked
at how an atmosphere increasingly rich in carbon dioxide could affect
rice, which some 600 million people rely on for the majority of their
calories, particularly in developing Asian countries.
The researchers not only found that rice loses protein and minerals,
which confirmed earlier research, but they also found for the first time
that levels of key vitamins in the cereal grain can drop.
The journal editors anticipated that the paper would attract
international media interest, so they asked the researchers to have
their institutions help prepare a press packet. USDA officials wrote
their own news release to tout the findings, but ended up spiking the
release at the last minute because they said senior officials within ARS
had concerns about the paper, according to emails from one of the
study’s other co-authors that POLITICO obtained.
A communications official went as far as to call the University of
Washington and suggest the university reconsider its plans to promote
the paper.
A USDA spokesperson said department leaders simply disagreed with the
paper’s conclusions.
“The concern was about nutritional claims, not anything relating to
climate change or CO2 levels,” the spokesperson said in response to an
earlier POLITICO story outlining the department’s failure to promote
climate research. “The nutrition program leaders at ARS disagreed with
the implication in the paper that 600 million people are at risk of
vitamin deficiency. They felt that the data do not support this.”
The episode was unusual. The paper had already gone through the typical
internal clearance processes within USDA, had undergone a lengthy
peer-review process, and had been set to publish within a matter of days.
Ziska, speaking about the episode for the first time, said he suspected
something was seriously wrong after he had rebutted the points raised by
national program leaders and asked to schedule a meeting to discuss
their concerns, point by point. There was no response, he said.
“That's when it occurred to me,” he said. “This isn't about the science.
It's about something else, but it's not about the science.
“When that happened, I realized it's not just a question of language,”
he said. “It's not just a question of philosophy. They're saying we're
not going to support this work. And the reason that they're not going to
support the work is because the science doesn't suit their — I don't
know what. Ideology?”
Earlier this year, Ziska saw another worrying sign that scientific
discourse was being discouraged.
A CNN producer requested an interview to discuss his rice research.
Ziska followed the typical protocol and sent the ask to the press
office. It denied the request.
“That was the first time that had ever happened,” Ziska said.
A spokesperson for the department said the agency “reserves the right to
accept or deny any media interview request.”
Amid his growing frustration with how the department tried to block
dissemination of the rice study, Ziska began to look for a new job. His
last day at USDA was Friday. He begins a new research post at Columbia
University this week. In his new post, he is likely to rely to some
degree on USDA funding, making his willingness to speak out against the
department’s political biases more striking to his fellow scientists.
“I’m happy for Lew to go into a situation where he can pour his whole
mind into global change and health — it seems clear he wasn’t going to
be able to do so at USDA,” said Kristie Ebi, a University of Washington
researcher and one of the co-authors of the rice study. “A mind is a
terrible thing to waste.”
“It’s a loss for USDA,” said David Lobell, an agricultural ecologist at
Stanford University, noting Ziska’s body of work has not only been
impressive in volume, but also in its reproducibility. “He’s been right
about a lot, and changed how the field thinks.”
Last month, for example, researchers from Harvard University confirmed
the findings that rice loses vitamins in a carbon-rich environment and
flagged concerns about how such a change could affect the health of
hundreds of millions of people.
Jeff Dukes, director of Purdue University’s Climate Change Research
Center, praised Ziska’s work as groundbreaking: “I see him as being a
real beacon in identifying the ways in which CO2 and climate change
affect plants in ways that immediately affect people ... the sort of
studies that should serve as wake-up calls.”
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