Officials who are in charge of ensuring Florida's preparedness to respond to the warming climate are barred from using the terms climate change and global warming in official communications, reports and emails, reveals the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting.
Although the state is one of the regions in the U.S. that are most susceptible to the effects of global warming having unique vulnerability to sea level rise, officials from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection were barred from using the most widely used terms denoting the phenomenon of the warming climate and other related terms such as sea level rise. Employees used the word "nuisance flooding" for sea level rise instead.
"We were told not to use the terms 'climate change,' 'global warming' or 'sustainability," said Christopher Byrd, an attorney with the Office of General Counsel of the DEP in Tallahassee from 2008 to 2013. "That message was communicated to me and my colleagues by our superiors."
Other former employees said that although they were dealing with the effects and impact of climate change, they were not allowed to reference it.
The unwritten policy took effect in 2011 after Gov. Rick Scott appointed Herschel Vinyard Jr. as the director of the DEP. Scott, who now serves his second term in office, has said several times that he is not convinced that human activity is the cause of climate change despite scientific evidences that show deforestation and burning of fossil fuels contribute to the global warming.
In a 2014 report for policy makers worldwide, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said that human influence had a clear impact on the climate system citing that anthropogenic emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases are the highest in history. The report was prepared by scientists from 27 countries.
Tiffany Cowie, DEP's press secretary, and Jeri Bustamante, a spokesperson for the governor's office, denied the existence of the policy but former employees of the DEP said that the order was well known and was verbally distributed statewide. An unidentified former DEP employee, for instance, said that the staffers were warned that the usage of the terms could result in unwanted attention to their project.
The employees said that the ban has left damaging holes ranging from the educational materials that the agency published, training programs and yearly reports on the environment that could be used for making policies on business and energy.
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