A story in the Miami Herald details how officials at Florida's Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) have been "ordered not to use the term 'climate change' or 'global warming' in any official communications, e-mails, or reports." The Florida Center for Investigative Reporting (FCIR) uncovered the discrete policy by talking with former DEP employees, consultants, and volunteers while also obtaining official DEP records.

“We were told that we were not allowed to discuss anything that was not a true fact,” Kristina Trotta, a former DEP employee in Miami, told the FCIR. Specifically, Trotta's supervisor told her not to use the terms "climate change" and "global warming" in a 2014 staff meeting, according to the findings.

The Herald calls the DEP the state agency "on the front lines of studying and planning" for climate change issues. According to the paper, DEP has about 3,200 employees and a $1.4 billion budget.

The FCIR report states this unwritten policy went into effect following Rick Scott becoming the state's governor in 2011. Oddly enough for an environmental agency, a quick Google search for "site:www.dep.state.fl.us/ 'global warming'" returns only one page of results if limited to pages from 2012 and beyond (a similar search for "climate change" sees significantly fewer results than one without time restrictions, though 2012 and beyond still returns more than a single page of sites and documents).

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Scott won reelection in November, but he's not even Florida's highest profile climate denying politician. That honor belongs to Republican US Senator Marco Rubio, who was given the chair of the Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries, and Coast Guard in 2015. That subcommittee oversees NOAA, a major source of data on our changing climate.

Although Rubio is probably most noted for having dropped the “I'm not a scientist, man,” phrase when asked about the age of the Earth, he's perfectly happy to tell scientists they don't know what they're talking about. “I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it,” Rubio said on TV. The Los Angeles Times, naturally, lists a report that says climate change is already affecting the US as a related story.

A DEP press official and an official from Governor Scott both responded to the FCIR in order to say there was no official policy. Each declined further comment.