Saturday, March 4, 2017

WI DNR flubbed response to climate change FUBAR, records show

After this blog disclosed in late December that the Wisconsin DNR had quietly scrubbed climate change science and links from its climate change web pages - - 
Smoke stacks from a factory.
- - the DNR was flooded with angry, mocking calls and emails yet couldn't respond for days with a credible script to hand to staffers handling the contacts, according to a fascinating story in The Wisconsin State Journal based on DNR records it obtained:
Documents released to the Wisconsin State Journal under the state open records law show how the DNR tried to manage the outpouring that was unleashed after a blogger discovered the rewritten climate change pages around Christmas and the word spread through other news outlets...
A DNR employee told a supervisor it was hard to stick to the official DNR response because she was trained as a scientist and knew there was essentially no scientific debate about the cause of climate change...
The change was made to the website on Dec. 21 and blogger James Rowen wrote about it a few days later...
By Dec. 29, the communications office had provided a script to workers that specified that the changes to the DNR web site were meant only to indicate that there was debate about the cause and effects of “any climate change” among “the general public” — not the scientific community...
By the next morning, DNR employees were sending the word that the public wasn’t buying the scripted response they’d been given...
I wonder if the agency was similarly flooded with unhappy contacts after it was recently revealed that Gov. Scott Walker intends to kill the DNR's popular magazine next year after a 100-year run even though it has more than 80,000 subscribers does not receive taxpayer funding.

We know that subscriptions are now spiking; I wonder if the record would show that DNR learned anything about serving its customers from its climate change FUBAR?

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