Sez Nurture (via SR’s fb feed). Notice how good I’ve been: I didn’t even put a question mark at the end, because Nurture is a WP:RS. Let’s quote:
Multiple researchers who received grants from the US Department of Energy (DOE) say that they have been asked to remove references to “climate change” and “global warming” from the descriptions of their projects, they say.
As usual, exactly why this is done is lost in a bureaucratic maze or mirrors (the official…’s office told Nature that she was unavailable for comment, and a PNNL spokesperson referred questions to DOE headquarters in Washington DC. Department spokeswoman Shaylyn Hynes declined to answer questions about the situation, but said that “there is no departmental-wide policy banning the term ‘climate change’ from being used in DOE materials” and so on). But the ultimate source appears to be Trumpian: it appears that DOE programme managers are being careful to make it clear that they are, in fact, following the president’s budget directive. “What else can they do?” he asks. Whether they are actually following it, or being over-cautious, is rather hard to tell. It seems unlike that the budget says explicitly “Thou shall not fund climate change science”. More likely, this is just a change of preferred boilerplate. For years, people have been expected to stuff “…and this research is really terribly exciting and desperately relevant because of #include <std.GW>” into their proposals; now there’s some new boilerplate they should use.
On which point, notice the most important bit, which Nurture ignores: Multiple researchers who received grants (my bold). As far as can be told from this, no-one is having their proposals rejected due to mentioning GW; they’re just being asked to re-write the boilerplate. Would it be better if they didn’t have to? Yes; but better still would be not having to write boilerplate in the first place.
Notes
1. The pic is the path to our chalet for our second week, in Vallouise. It has a rather lovely oil-painting quality to it I think. What you can’t see from that is that it was also hot and dry, but if you moved slowly all was well.