From years of reporting on government employees, I know that they're in it for the long haul. Governors and news cycles come and go. The public's attention is beagle-fickle. But there are 25 years to go before pension. So I wasn't expecting any heroes to rock the boat from inside the vast bureaucracy that is Florida's government when I began to investigate the silent treatment given the terms "climate change" and "global warming" within state agencies.

After we at the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting (FCIR) broke that story, I still found the idea galling: that professionals, many of them scientists, allowed themselves to be cowed from using basic scientific language. After all, that keep-your-head-down mentality has allowed the administration of Republican Gov. Rick Scott to get away with this for the past four years. But perhaps it's also comforting. The employees I've found during my reporting are nonetheless the ones doing the long thinking, working to address the effects of climate change, even as they have to hunker to avoid political interference. They know they'll be here when Rick Scott is gone. So will the problems they're working on.

Until that day, the story has once again made Florida the punch-line state. Several ex-state employees, as well as contractors, researchers and volunteers, have come forward to say that they were told not to use the terms “climate change” and “global warming” in any official communications, reports and emails. References to climate change in Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) reports and documents plunged after Scott was elected governor, according to an FCIR analysis.

The extent of what all of this means, we don't yet know. While some inside the DEP have expressed relief that the word is out (pun intended) and sure as hell ain't going back in, they also expressed fear that their projects are now in peril. They worry that they've been outed, and that funding for climate change work will be cut.

This is the ridiculous balance state employees are being asked to perform. The Department of Transportation is studying how to accommodate sea-level rise in future road plans, and how to protect existing infrastructure. The state's water management districts are modeling sea level rise projections. The DEP is managing the damage to the coasts and monitoring saltwater incursions into freshwater aquifers. They're preparing for the effects of climate change … yet to do so without interference, they dare not whisper the very phrase. It's Kafka as interpreted by Orwell and performed by Tallahassee's finest.