re: Trump mandates all EPA data to be reviewed prior to release

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Tell me how that works, if I'm a scientist who has externally reviewed something from the EPA that appears would show something really bad and I find out that the EPA has been "ordered" not to release it or release it in some sort of altered form? What happens to me if I decide to go public with it?

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You'd be a whistleblower. How'd that work out for Snowden? They aren't exactly treated well.

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A. Tittle
Tell me how that works, if I'm a scientist who has externally reviewed something from the EPA that appears would show something really bad and I find out that the EPA has been "ordered" not to release it or release it in some sort of altered form? What happens to me if I decide to go public with it?

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Here is the thing. If I put out a paper with my research data, if you read it and have serious questions about the claims and conclusions, you're going to try to reproduce the experiment to see if you get the same results. You also examine the methods that were used. Did methods used contaminate data? If you can't independently verify the data, or in some cases you find the data was falsified, the paper is retracted. It's sounds simple enough, but papers represent often several years of people's lives that they devoted to the research. They don't exactly react very well with other scientists telling them their work is crap.

It gets even worse when the research has an obvious political bias as is the case with climate change research. When an organization as powerful as the EPA is producing research aimed at combatting climate change, it becomes extremely difficult to refute their findings and have their research retracted. They have a lot of power to push back against other scientists questioning the validity of their work. Then there are other scientists who aren't going to rock the boat and take on the EPA because climate change research is where all of the grant money is. They aren't going to chop off the hand that feeds them to take on the EPA.