Secure \u00b7 Tax deductible \u00b7 Takes 45 Seconds<\/p>\n
Secure \u00b7 Tax deductible \u00b7 Takes 45 Seconds<\/p>\n
\u201cHuman causes are not even on the list, which is simply misinformation. It\u2019s false,\u201d said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources. \u201cAnd moreover, it\u2019s clearly deliberate, because a week ago, that page correctly reflected the scientific understanding of climate change.\u201d<\/p>\n
At least 80 pages<\/a> related to climate change vanished from the EPA\u2019s site in early December. It\u2019s one of the most far-reaching removals of climate change information from government websites since President Donald Trump took office in January. \u201cUp till now, we really had not seen hardly any changes on EPA pages,\u201d said Gretchen Gehrke, who monitors federal websites with the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative.\u00a0<\/p>\n While important resources have already disappeared from other government sites \u2014 including the National Climate Assessments<\/a>, a series of congressionally mandated climate reports translated for public consumption \u2014 many of the previous changes were language swaps, replacing \u201cclimate change\u201d with more innocuous phrases<\/a> like \u201cfuture conditions\u201d or \u201cextreme weather.\u201d The EPA\u2019s most recent overhaul represents a more radical rejection of mainstream science.<\/p>\n \u201cYes, there\u2019s been climate information coming down, but so far it hasn\u2019t actually necessarily been the nuts-and-bolts climate science information,\u201d Swain said. \u201cThis is pretty fundamental physical science.\u201d The resources on the EPA\u2019s site were used by teachers, businesses, and local and tribal governments, as well as the public, since they translated the jargon-filled language of scientific reports into something more useful and accessible.<\/p>\n For example, the agency deleted a resource<\/a> explaining the signals of a warming world \u2014 everything from rising temperatures and melting ice sheets to the damage toll on wildlife and human health \u2014 with more than 100 charts and maps. Also gone is a website<\/a> quantifying the physical and economic risks. The effect is to isolate climate change from the issues that affect people\u2019s lives, Gehrke said: \u201cIt\u2019s specifically targeting the information about why we should care.\u201d<\/p>\n From left: An archive of an EPA webpage from October highlights how humans have contributed to climate change. By December, the EPA had updated its page on climate change to remove references to human activity.\u00a0Courtesy Internet Archive; courtesy epa.gov<\/p>\n In response to questions about why the EPA\u2019s climate change resources were removed, the agency said it was upholding \u201cgold-standard science.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cUnlike the previous administration, the Trump EPA is focused on protecting human health and the environment while Powering the Great American Comeback, not left-wing political agendas,\u201d an EPA spokesperson said in a statement. \u201cAs such, this agency no longer takes marching orders from the climate cult.\u201d<\/p>\n Swain said the changes could be a way for the EPA to bring its public-facing information in line with the proposal to reverse the agency\u2019s own \u201cendangerment finding,\u201d<\/a> the scientific basis that allows the EPA to regulate carbon emissions. The agency is expected to finalize the repeal soon<\/a>, in what EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has promised to be \u201cthe largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n Read Next<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Why the federal government is making climate data disappear<\/a><\/p>\n The changes to the EPA\u2019s site are reminiscent of a report the Department of Energy released this summer<\/a>, written by a group of five climate contrarians, arguing that climate change wasn\u2019t as bad as mainstream scientists say. It can give people the impression that there\u2019s a \u201cdebate\u201d that climate change is a serious problem, when in fact there\u2019s not, Swain said. If anything, the last several years suggest that the consequences of the warming that\u2019s already arrived are worse than many scientists expected<\/a>.<\/p>\n Official government websites used to be a source of unbiased information, but as federal agencies have altered them to align with the Trump administration\u2019s talking points, some are becoming unreliable. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently changed its stance on the relationship between vaccines and autism, with a new page saying that a link between the two can\u2019t be ruled out<\/a> \u2014 horrifying current staffers<\/a>, who said their employer was spreading misinformation. Most information on government sites remains trustworthy, though. The National Weather Service, for instance, is still putting out accurate weather reports.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cUntil very recently, despite all of the damage that has been done to trust in government institutions over the last several years, I would say that the government websites, agency websites, still were among the most trusted sources,\u201d Gehrke said. \u201cAnd I do worry that that is really slipping away very quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n The result is that the public is left to navigate a landscape where some government agencies are sharing credible facts, while others are generating misinformation. At the same time, quality, unbiased information just isn\u2019t as easy to access as it used to be. Search results increasingly turn up AI-generated slop, while social media algorithms serve up posts targeted to individual preferences, giving people an off-kilter picture of reality.<\/p>\n \u201cSiloed information is really tearing apart society,\u201d Gehrke said. \u201cPeople are making logical choices and logical analyses based on the information they have, but they are working with completely different sets of information. And that is a real problem.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you want to know what\u2019s causing climate change and how it affects where you live, don\u2019t turn…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":348039,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[192,79],"class_list":["post-348038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=348038"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348038\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/348039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=348038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=348038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=348038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Screenshot](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/oct-2025-epa-site.jpg\")
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