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Megan Gass-December 13, 2016 at 6:30 PM UTC

The U.S. Department of Energy said it would not provide the Trump transition team with a list of staff involved in climate change issues on Tuesday, despite the team's request for such information.

Trump publicly called climate change a hoax, and just this weekend, he told Fox’s host on Sunday that “no one really understands” climate change. These are Trump's blatant lies, because decades of research by climate scientists have shown that climate change is happening. The latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shows that 95% of the statistical confidence believes that humans are the main cause of this undeniable warming trend.

The Trump transition team asked for the names of all staff attending meetings on the social cost of carbon and any conferences of the parties hosted by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, suggesting to the Department of Energy staff that the team may be looking for dismissal from working on climate change The working staff may marginalize their role in the department.

According to the Washington Post, U.S. Department of Energy officials sent an email to employees this morning, assuring them that they will not provide personal names to the Trump transition team:

After the issue of the transition team was released, the Department of Energy received important feedback from employees of the entire department, including the National Laboratory. Some of the questions raised make many in our workforce uneasy. Our professional workforce, including our contractors and our laboratory employees, is the backbone of the U.S. Department of Energy, and it is also an important work done by our department for the benefit of the American people. We will respect the professional and scientific integrity and independence of our laboratory and entire department employees.

We will work with the transition team to provide all public information. We will not provide any personal names to the transition team.

According to the "Washington Post" report, the last sentence of the bold text appeared in an email sent by the U.S. Department of Energy spokesperson Eben Burnham-Snyder.

This morning, the Trump transition team announced the nomination of Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas with ties to the fossil fuel industry that rejects climate science, to lead the U.S. Department of Energy. His appointment needs to be approved by the Senate before it can take effect.

In the uncertain future of climate science under the leadership of the new government, the Washington Post also reported this morning, “Scientists have begun to frantically try to copy large amounts of government data to independent servers in order to protect it from any political issues. Interventions,” including efforts to copy irreplaceable data from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in Toronto’s “Guerilla Archive” campaign, and efforts to compile online portals to obtain scientific information.

Meteorologist Eric Holthaus asked scientists on Twitter this weekend to use Google spreadsheets to list what they didn’t want to see. The links to the .gov database disappeared, prompting scientists to submit dozens of entries, as well as investors, lawyers, and databases. The manager provides help to protect and store the data. Although it is not clear whether the Trump administration will destroy these databases, many scientists are not waiting to find out. In addition, at the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco this week, lawyers from the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund will conduct one-on-one consultations with researchers who believe they may need to help protect data.

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