Walker's WI DNR dissed climate change; UW researcher is go-to climate source

You can laugh or cry at the irony:

Cathy Stepp, an ultra-partisan pol without a science background was tapped by GOP Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker to run the state's Department of Natural Resources with "a chamber of commerce mentality."

She rewarded Walker and his corporate donor base by deleting climate change information and materials from the agency's climate change web page.

On Tuesday it was Jack Williams, a University of Wisconsin scientist working on the Madison campus about a mile from the DNR's offices who explained to readers of The Washington Post how real is the climate change threat:

Climate change is destroying our national parks at an alarming rate, study finds

Jack Williams, a climate researcher at the University of Wisconsin, told The Post Glacier National Park in Montana, which draws admirers for its snowy peaks and mirror-like lakes, may lose its namesake because of rising temperatures and glaciers already in retreat. 

“It’s very likely under the highest rates [of warming] that the glaciers would melt,” he said. 

Further north, in Alaska’s Glacier Bay, the once enormous Muir Glacier has melted hundreds of meters from the 1950s to 2010. 

At Yellowstone, drought and wildfires have thinned towering forests, and scientific projections point to fires that burn more frequently. It could turn the region into rolling grasslands, Williams said.

Makes you wonder what Stepp and Walker know that the UW's Williams has missed. 

Here's something Stepp claimed she had missed: that she had campaigned for Donald Trump (Stepp is now director of the US EPA's Great Lakes regional office) without knowing Trump had said climate change was a hoax.

Muir Glacier, 1994