On Tuesday, one of the many official Twitter accounts for the National Park Service basically went rogue and decided to post a series of tweets about man-made impacts on climate change.

https://twitter.com/historysmith/status/824004313647153153

The tweets by the official Twitter account belonging to the Badlands National Park in South Dakota were short-lived as they were deleted after being re-tweeted thousands of times.

Update, 5:10 p.m.: Hours after the National Park Service deleted the tweet, the agency told a BuzzFeed reporter that the tweets were “posted by a former employee who was not currently authorized to use the park’s account.”

https://twitter.com/ClaudiaKoerner/status/824060157361430528

Earlier in the day, it was unclear whether the account was hacked or possessed by a staff member who decided to act alone, but the account gained about 12,000 followers in the hours the tweets were up. CNN’s Brian Stelter said on Twitter that the account had 7,000 followers the day before.

In one tweet, it wrote: “Today, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is higher than at any time in the last 650,000 years. #climate”

In another, it wrote: “Burning one gallon of gasoline puts nearly 20lbs of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere. #climate”

The tweets come on the same day that President Donald Trump reportedly stopped the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Agriculture from issuing press releases and posting on social media.

The orders apparently don’t apply to the NPS, which falls under purview the Department of Interior, but this also wouldn’t be the first time the NPS has acted in defiance of the new president.

Last week, the NPS was temporarily banned from posting on twitter after re-tweeting two posts that didn’t sit well with the administration. In one instance, the NPS retweeted a photo that compared Trump’s inauguration crowd size to that of Barack Obama’s in 2009. In the other, the NPS re-tweeted someone who pointed out that references to climate change were removed from the official White House website.

But as the rogue tweets came out Tuesday, the internet lost its collective mind knowing that the NPS tweeting about climate change was, in effect, a show of defiance of Trump.

https://twitter.com/dlbessette/status/824018722235056129

https://twitter.com/AnamorphPhoto/status/824018295967731712

https://twitter.com/lindajjacobs/status/824016654174658560

https://twitter.com/craigcalcaterra/status/824001977461997573

https://twitter.com/kate_sheppard/status/823992434992574464

https://twitter.com/dannyboi965/status/824005548895072257

We’ll update this story as new information emerges.

On Tuesday, Jan. 24, 2017, an official Twitter account for the National Park Service sent out a series of tweets about man-made impacts on climate change. (Union Tribune)

Email: luis.gomez@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @RunGomez

UPDATES:

5:10 p.m.: This article was updated with a statement from the National Park Service.

This article was originally published at 2:55 p.m.