Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt has long insisted it is difficult for scientists to precisely measure the extent to which humans cause climate change.

Now EPA’s regional staff engaging with local communities and Native American tribes have been instructed to push the same message too.

This week, EPA staffers received an email instructing them to underscore the uncertainties about how human activity contributes to climate change.

Here are a few of the “talking points” in the email, first reported by HuffPost and confirmed by The Washington Post:

– “Human activity impacts our changing climate in some manner. The ability to measure with precision the degree and extent of that impact, and what to do about it, are subject to continuing debate and dialogue.”

– “[C]lear gaps remain including our understanding of the role of human activity and what we can do about it.”

Pruitt, along with other administration officials and President Donald Trump, has repeatedly and publicly highlighted uncertainty about the role humans have played in contributing to the warming of the planet since becoming EPA administrator. Now it’s official internal guidance.

Consider how closely the talking points match Pruitt’s rhetoric during a March 2017 interview on CNBC, with the use of words such as “precision,” “impact” and “debate” that also appear in the memo:

“I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see. . . . We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.”

Yet some of the talking points are also at odds with the vast majority of climate scientists abroad and at home. A 2017 interagency report by federal scientists concluded that “it is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.”

The talking points appear to be an effort to narrow the gap between what Pruitt and the rest of the EPA bureaucracy say publicly about climate change.

For example, among the many scientific communicators that disagreed with Pruitt’s position that carbon dioxide is not a “primary contributor” to global warming was the EPA’s own website. At the time Pruitt gave that interview, it stated that “human activities have contributed substantially to climate change by adding CO2 and other heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere.”

Over the course of 2017, though, the agency updated its parts of the website to reflect the administration’s de-emphasis on climate change. That web page linking human activity to global warming has since been archived, with a message at the top stating “[t]his is not the current EPA website.”

Other efforts to question climate science have not yet been realized. Pruitt also has pushed for a government-sponsored exercise to scrutinize climate science, but the White House reportedly nixed the idea.

The EPA is not alone. According to another email obtained by The Post, the Fish and Wildlife Service also issued guidance instructing staffers that the grant solicitations they send out “must not include any broad, generic phrases or terms that are known to be related to divisive political issues or otherwise have a political association, meaning, or inference.”