Two US national parks appear to have taken a public stand against President Donald Trump less than a week after he took up office.
Official National Park Service Twitter accounts in Dakota and California defied a Trump administration ban on using the social media site in order to post about climate change.
It comes days after the Department of Interior suspended all activity on its agencies’ Twitter accounts – allegedly because the main National Park Service (NPS) account retweeted images comparing crowds at Mr Trump’s inauguration with Barack Obama’s in 2009.
An NPS official later told the Huffington Post the tweet had been posted by a former employee and was quickly deleted.
However, Badlands National Park in South Dakota broke the strict ban to fire off three since-deleted tweets about climate change on Tuesday.
The posts, detailing scientific facts, were live for about two-and-a-half hours during the afternoon. One read: "The pre-industrial concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 280 parts per million (ppm). As of December 2016, 404.93 ppm.”
Then on Wednesday, Golden Gate National Park’s social media manager risked their job by tweeting a report on climate change with the words: “2016 was the hottest year on record for the 3rd year in a row.”
The tweets may appear apolitical but Mr Trump has previously said climate change is a hoax and should be ignored.
In a 2012 tweet which he has never retracted, he said: “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”
He has not yet spoken publicly about the national parks' tweets.
