{"id":882,"date":"2025-07-21T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-07-21T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/audiomateria.com\/?p=882"},"modified":"2025-07-25T19:12:39","modified_gmt":"2025-07-25T19:12:39","slug":"inside-the-federal-governments-purge-of-climate-data","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/audiomateria.com\/index.php\/2025\/07\/21\/inside-the-federal-governments-purge-of-climate-data\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside the federal government\u2019s purge of climate data"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This story was originally published by <\/em>Grist<\/a> and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk<\/a> collaboration. <\/em><\/p>\n

For 25 years, a group of the country\u2019s top experts has been fastidiously tracking the ways that climate change threatens every part of the United States. Their findings informed the National Climate Assessments, a series of congressionally mandated reports released every four years that translated the science into accessible warnings for policymakers and the public. But that work came to a halt this spring when the Trump administration abruptly dismissed all 400 experts working on the next edition. Then, late last month, all of the past reports vanished too, along with the federal website they lived on.<\/p>\n

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A lot of information about the changing climate has disappeared under President Donald Trump\u2019s second term, but the erasure of the National Climate Assessments is \u201cby far the biggest loss we\u2019ve seen,\u201d said Gretchen Gehrke, who monitors federal websites with the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. The National Climate Assessments were one of the most approachable resources that broke down how climate change will affect the places people care about, she said. The reports were also used by a wide swath of stakeholders \u2014 policymakers, farmers, businesses \u2014 to guide their decisions about the future. While the reports have been archived elsewhere, they\u2019re no longer as easy to access. And it\u2019s unclear what, if anything, will happen to the report that was planned for 2027 or 2028, which already existed in draft form.<\/p>\n

So why did the reports survive Trump\u2019s first term, but not his second? <\/p>\n

You could view their disappearance in a few different ways, experts said \u2014 as a flex of executive power, an escalation in the culture war over climate change, or a strategic attempt to erase the scientific foundation for climate policy. \u201cIf you suppress information and data, then you don\u2019t have the evidence you need to be able to create regulations, strengthen regulations, and even to combat the repeal of regulations,\u201d Gehrke said. <\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t climate denial in the traditional sense. The days of loudly debating the science have mostly given way to something quieter and more insidious: a campaign to withhold the raw information itself. \u201cI don\u2019t know if we\u2019re living in climate denial anymore,\u201d said Leah Aronowsky, a science historian at the Columbia Climate School. \u201cWe have this new front of denial by erasure.\u201d<\/p>\n

By cutting funding for research and withholding crucial data, the Trump administration is making it harder to know exactly how the planet is changing. <\/p>\n

In April, the administration pulled nearly $4 million in funding from a Princeton program to improve computer models predicting changes in the oceans and atmosphere, claiming the work created \u201cclimate anxiety\u201d among young people. That same month, the Environmental Protection Agency failed to submit its annual report to the United Nations detailing the country\u2019s greenhouse gas emissions. In May, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ended its 45-year tradition of tracking billion-dollar weather disasters. Trump also hopes to shut down the Mauna Loa laboratory in Hawaii, which has measured the steady rise in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide since the 1950s \u2014 the first data to definitively show humans were changing the climate.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThis kind of wholesale suppression of an entire field of federally sponsored research, to my knowledge, is historically unprecedented,\u201d Aronowsky said.<\/p>\n

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In a response to a request for comment, a NASA spokesperson said that it has \u201cno legal obligations to host globalchange.gov\u2019s data,\u201d referring to the site that hosted the National Climate Assessments, adding that the US Global Change Research Program had already \u201cmet its statutory requirements by presenting its reports to Congress.\u201d The EPA directed Grist to a webpage containing past greenhouse gas emissions reports, as well as a version of what was supposed to be this year\u2019s report obtained by the Environmental Defense Fund. However, the agency confirmed that the latest data has not been officially released. The White House declined to comment, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration did not respond.<\/p>\n

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Climate denial first took off in the 1990s, when the oil and gas companies and industry-friendly think tanks started sowing doubt about climate science.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n

Last year, a leaked training video from Project 2025 \u2014 the policy roadmap organized by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank \u2014 showed a former Trump official declaring that political appointees would have to \u201ceradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.\u201d The strategy appears to be designed to boost the fossil fuel industry at a time when clean energy has become competitive and the reality of climate change harder to dismiss, as floods, fires, and heat waves have become perceptibly worse. \u201cWe will drill, baby, drill,\u201d Trump said in his inauguration speech in January.<\/p>\n

The administration hasn\u2019t exactly been subtle about its endgame. Lee Zeldin, the head of the EPA, doesn\u2019t deny the reality of climate change (he calls himself a \u201cclimate realist\u201d), but he\u2019s zealously dismantled environmental programs and has recommended that the White House strike down the \u201cendangerment finding,\u201d the bedrock of US climate policy. It comes from a 2007 Supreme Court ruling on the Clean Air Act that required the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases as pollutants since they endanger public health. If the administration can convince the courts that climate change isn\u2019t a health consideration, it could end that regulatory obligation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re removing information about climate change, its reality, and its impact on people, then I think it\u2019s a lot easier to make the case that it\u2019s not an environmental health issue,\u201d Gehrke said.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a word for the idea that ignorance can serve political ends: agnotology (from the Greek \u201cagnosis,\u201d or \u201cnot knowing\u201d), the study of how knowledge is deliberately obscured. What Trump is doing to information about climate change fits squarely in that tradition, according to Aronowsky: \u201cIf you remove it, then in a certain sense, it no longer exists, and therefore, there\u2019s nothing to even debate, right?\u201d<\/p>\n

Climate denial first took off in the 1990s, when the oil and gas companies and industry-friendly think tanks started sowing doubt about climate science. Over the decades, as the evidence became rock-solid, those who opposed reducing the use of fossil fuels gradually shifted from outright denying the facts to attacking solutions like wind and solar power. What the Trump administration is doing now marks a radical break from this long-term trend, said John Cook, a climate misinformation researcher at the University of Melbourne in Australia. <\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a 180, not just a turn, but diving into something we\u2019ve never even seen before,\u201d he said. On the other hand, Cook said, the administration is taking a classic climate denial tactic \u2014 painting scientists as \u201calarmists\u201d or conspirators who can\u2019t be trusted \u2014 and turning it into government policy.<\/p>\n

Half a year in, the second Trump administration\u2019s treatment of climate information hasn\u2019t yet reached the \u201ceradication\u201d levels that Project 2025 aspired to, at least on government websites. The EPA\u2019s climate change website, for instance, is still up and running, even though all references to the phenomenon were erased on the agency\u2019s home page. Most of the website deletions so far have served to isolate climate change as an issue, erasing its relationship to topics such as health and infrastructure, Gehrke said. Up until the National Climate Assessments disappeared, she would have said that \u201cclimate erasure\u201d was an inappropriate characterization of what\u2019s happening. \u201cBut now, I\u2019m really not so sure,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Rachel Cleetus, the senior policy director with the Union of Concerned Scientists, thinks that the administration\u2019s actions actually go beyond erasure. \u201cThey\u2019re literally trying to change the basis on which a lot of policymaking is advanced \u2014 the science basis, the legal basis, and the economic basis,\u201d she said. Her biggest concern isn\u2019t just what facts have been removed, but what political propaganda might replace them. \u201cThat\u2019s more dangerous, because it really leaves people in this twilight zone, where what\u2019s real, and what\u2019s important, and what is going to affect their daily lives is just being obfuscated.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. For 25 years, a group of the country\u2019s top experts has been fastidiously tracking the ways that climate change threatens every part of the United States. Their findings informed the National Climate Assessments, a series of congressionally…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":884,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-climate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/audiomateria.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/audiomateria.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/audiomateria.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/audiomateria.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/audiomateria.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=882"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/audiomateria.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":885,"href":"http:\/\/audiomateria.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882\/revisions\/885"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/audiomateria.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/audiomateria.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/audiomateria.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/audiomateria.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}