(Bloomberg Politics) -- Florida's government may havefigured out a way to beat climate change: ignore it.

A report by the Florida Center for Investigative Reportingpublished Sunday details the claims by employees of the FloridaDepartment of Environmental Protection, who say that they wereordered to refrain from using the terms "climate change," and"global warming" in official communications.

“We were told not to use the terms ‘climate change,’‘global warming’ or ‘sustainability,’ ” Christopher Byrd, anattorney with the DEP’s Office of General Counsel in Tallahasseefrom 2008 to 2013, told FCIR. “That message was communicated to meand my colleagues by our superiors in the Office of GeneralCounsel.”

The unwritten policy went into effect shortly after GovernorRick Scott, a global warming skeptic, took office. With thepublication of FCIR's report, several climatechange believers took to Twitter to express theirdismay.

The Florida policy is reminiscent of a 2012 law passed bylawmakers in North Carolina that prohibits the statefrom basing coastal policies on scientific predictionsregarding sea level rise. Scientists have warned that, like much ofFlorida's coastline, North Carolina's outer banks are at particularrisk from climate change.

As January's votes on amendments to the Keystone XL Pipelinebill, and Senator James Inhofe's tossing of a snowball on theSenate floor last week have shown, the semantic aspects of thedebate over global warming often serve to underscore thelevel of mistrust between the opposing sides of theissue.

Florida's DEP is, in part, charged with planning for how totry and combat what could be the catastrophic sea level rise due tothe the very thing that its employees say they are supposed tomention by name.

“We were dealing with the effects and economic impactof climate change, and yet we can’t reference it,”one former employee told FCIR.

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