If you want to know what is causing climate change and how it affects where you live, don't look to the Environmental Protection Agency for answers. Last week, the government agency removed basic facts about global warming from its website, including references to how human activity is releasing planet-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Environmental Protection Agency page explaining the causes of climate change the focus now is on how “natural processes” such as changes in Earth's orbit and solar activity affect climate.
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“Human causes aren't even on the list, and that's just misinformation. It's false,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at California A&M University. “And what's more, this is clearly intentional because a week ago this page correctly reflected the scientific understanding of climate change.”
At least 80 pages climate change-related materials disappeared from the Environmental Protection Agency's website in early December. It is one of the largest removals of climate change information from government websites since President Donald Trump took office in January. “So far, we've seen virtually no changes to the EPA's pages,” said Gretchen Gehrke, who monitors federal websites for the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative.
Although important resources have already disappeared from other government sites, including National climate assessmentsa series of congressionally mandated climate reports translated for public use. Many of the previous changes were a language swap, replacing the word “climate change” with more harmless phrases for example, “future conditions” or “extreme weather”. The EPA's latest revision represents a more radical departure from mainstream science.
“Yes, there has been climate information coming out, but until now it hasn’t necessarily been detailed climate information,” Swain said. “It's pretty basic physical science.” Resources on the EPA website have been used by teachers, businesses, local and tribal governments, and the public as they translate the jargon-filled language of scientific reports into something more useful and accessible.
For example, the agency removed resource explaining the signals of global warming—from rising temperatures and melting ice sheets to damage to wildlife and human health—with more than 100 charts and maps. Also left website quantitative assessment of physical and economic risks. According to Gehrke, the goal is to isolate climate change from the issues that affect people's lives: “It's specifically aimed at communicating why we should care.”
From left to right: An archive of an EPA webpage from October showing how humans have contributed to climate change. By December, the Environmental Protection Agency had updated its climate change page to remove references to human activity. Courtesy of the Internet Archive; courtesy of EPA.gov
In response to questions about why EPA resources on climate change were removed, the agency said it stood by the “gold standard of science.”
“Unlike the previous administration, the Trump EPA is focused on protecting human health and the environment while promoting America's great comeback, rather than on left-wing political agendas,” an EPA spokesperson said in a statement. “So this agency is no longer under the orders of the climate cult.”
Swain said the changes could be a way for the Environmental Protection Agency to bring its public information into line with proposal to overturn the agency's own “threat finding” the scientific basis that allows the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. Agency cancellation is expected to be completed soonEnvironmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin promised it would be “the largest deregulatory effort in the history of the United States.”
Changes on the EPA website remind Department of Energy report released this summerwritten by a group of five climate deniers who argue that climate change is not as bad as leading scientists say. People may be under the impression that there is a “debate” about climate change being a serious problem, when in fact it is not, Swain said. In any case, the last few years suggest that the consequences of the warming that has already occurred turned out to be worse than many scientists expected.
Official government websites used to be a source of objective information, but as federal agencies have changed them to fit Trump administration talking points, some are becoming unreliable. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently changed its position on the link between vaccines and autism, posting on a new page that a connection between them cannot be excluded — terrifying current employeeswho stated that their employer was spreading misinformation. However, much of the information on government websites is still trustworthy. For example, the National Weather Service still publishes accurate weather reports.
“Until recently, despite all the damage done to trust in government agencies over the last few years, I would say government and agency websites were still some of the most trusted sources,” Gehrke said. “And I worry that this is slipping away really quickly.”
As a result, the public must navigate a situation where some government agencies share accurate facts while others generate misinformation. At the same time, access to high-quality and objective information is no longer as easy as before. AI-generated scum increasingly pops up in search results, while social media algorithms tailor posts to individual preferences, giving people a distorted picture of reality.
“Disparate information really tears society apart,” Gehrke said. “People make logical choices and logical analyzes based on the information they have, but they're working with very different sets of information. And that's a real problem.”
