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"Prohibiting people from speaking out about climate change, pressuring people not to study climate change, or terminating programs on climate—it's been a very holistic approach to silencing science," said Lauren Kurtz, executive director of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund.

Lauren Kurtz, executive director of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund in New York City, said what is happening at the CDC is part of a larger trend of Trump officials telling scientists and nonscientists that they shouldn’t refer to climate change.

Lauren Kurtz – who is tracking evidence of censorship for a database by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and Climate Science Legal Defense Fund – said it extends beyond the climate crisis, to pesticide safety and reproductive health.

The nonprofit Climate Science Legal Defense Fund was created seven years ago to help climate scientists fight back against politically-motivated and industry-funded harassment, and has been heavily involved in the Arizona open records case.

“You can imagine if you handed out 38,000 of your emails to people who openly disputed the validity of your work, they might be able to find a phrase or two that they could use to make you look bad, so there were some real concerns about doing that,” says Lauren Kurtz, executive director of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, referring to Michael Mann’s experience.

The Scientific Integrity Act is an important step forward for safeguarding scientific integrity at federal agencies, and it improves the legal options available for federal scientists who are facing increasing levels of censorship, research hindrances, and misrepresentation of established facts.

It is essential that Congress exercise their immense powers to protect scientific research by supporting scientists and challenging anti-science efforts by the Trump administration.

I will say that my experience is that people who reject climate science a non-zero amount of time often overlap with people who are also raging misogynists.

The Climate Science Legal Defense Fund (CSLDF) in conjunction with Columbia’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law has been tracking the ways in which scientific information is being removed from reports and public websites, in addition to how scientists themselves are being sidelined.

The fund's executive director, Lauren Kurtz, said laws addressing online harassment are "behind the times." They tend to focus on bullying of children, not adult victims.

Lauren Kurtz, executive director of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, said that while the conservative groups had pursued researchers’ emails in the name of transparency, there had been “complete lack of transparency in how they were running their own organization.”

Justice Kennedy’s replacement will influence how we protect our air and water, as well as how we respond to climate change, for generations to come.