Why the federal government is making climate data disappear

This story was originally published by Grist Sign up for Grist s weekly newsletter here For years a group of the country s top experts has been fastidiously tracking the strategies that circumstances change threatens every part of the United States Their findings informed the National Setting Assessments a series of congressionally mandated reports published every four years that translated the science into accessible warnings for policymakers and the society But that work came to a halt this spring when the Trump administration abruptly dismissed all experts working on the next edition Then on June all of the past reports vanished too along with the federal website they lived on A lot of information about the changing weather has disappeared under President Donald Trump s second term but the erasure of the National State Assessments is by far the biggest loss we ve seen announced Gretchen Gehrke who monitors federal websites with the Environmental Material and Governance Initiative The National State Assessments were one of the greater part approachable information that broke down how setting change will affect the places people care about she announced The reports were also used by a wide swath of stakeholders policymakers farmers businesses to guide their decisions about the future While the reports have been archived elsewhere they re no longer as easy to access And it s unclear what if anything will happen to the analysis that was planned for or which already existed in draft form So why did the reports survive Trump s first term but not his second You could view their disappearance in a scarce different tactics experts stated as a flex of executive power an escalation in the custom war over environment change or a strategic attempt to erase the scientific foundation for weather approach If you suppress information and content then you don t have the evidence you need to be able to create regulations strengthen regulations and even to combat the repeal of regulations Gehrke noted This isn t circumstances 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 I don t know if we re living in circumstances denial anymore declared Leah Aronowsky a science historian at Columbia Setting School We have this new front of denial by erasure Related Trump s USDA tried to erase conditions statistics This lawsuit forced it back online By cutting funding for research and withholding crucial details the Trump administration is making it harder to know exactly how the planet is changing In April the administration pulled nearly million in funding from a Princeton scheme to improve computer models predicting changes in the oceans and atmosphere claiming the work created setting anxiety among young people That same month the Environmental Protection Agency failed to submit its annual description to the United Nations detailing the country s greenhouse gas emissions In May the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ended its -year tradition of tracking billion-dollar weather disasters Trump also hopes to shut down the Mauna Loa laboratory in Hawai i which has measured the steady rise in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide since the s the first information to definitively show humans were changing the atmosphere This kind of wholesale suppression of an entire field of federally sponsored research to my knowledge is historically unprecedented Aronowsky reported In a response to a request for comment a NASA spokesperson revealed that it has no legal obligations to host globalchange gov s input referring to the site that hosted the National Setting Assessments adding that the U S Global Change Research Campaign had already met its statutory requirements by presenting its reports to Congress 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 s description obtained by the Environmental Defense Fund However the agency substantiated that the latest facts has not been officially published The White House declined to comment and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration did not respond Last year a leaked training video from Project the strategy roadmap organized by The Heritage Foundation a conservative think tank demonstrated a former Trump official declaring that political appointees would have to eradicate setting change references from absolutely everywhere The strategy appears to be designed to boost the fossil fuel industry at a time when clean resource has become competitive and the reality of environment change harder to dismiss as floods fires and heat waves have become perceptibly worse We will drill baby drill Trump declared in his inauguration speech in January The administration hasn t exactly been subtle about its endgame Lee Zeldin the head of the EPA doesn t deny the reality of circumstances change he calls himself a setting realist but he s zealously dismantled environmental programs and has recommended that the White House strike down the endangerment finding the bedrock of U S weather framework It comes from a Supreme Court ruling on the Clean Air Act that required the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases as pollutants since they endanger community robustness If the administration can convince the courts that context change isn t a medical consideration it could end that regulatory obligation If you re removing information about atmosphere change its reality and its impact on people then I think it s a lot easier to make the matter that it s not an environmental wellbeing issue Gehrke stated There s a word for the idea that ignorance can serve political ends agnotology from the Greek agnosis or not knowing the review of how knowledge is deliberately obscured What Trump is doing to information about environment change fits squarely in that tradition according to Aronowsky If you remove it then in a certain sense it no longer exists and therefore there s nothing to even debate right Weather denial first took off in the s when the oil and gas companies and industry-friendly think tanks started sowing doubt about circumstances 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 revealed John Cook a atmosphere misinformation researcher at The University of Melbourne in Australia This is a not just a turn but diving into something we ve never even seen before he reported On the other hand Cook commented the administration is taking a classic circumstances denial tactic painting scientists as alarmists or conspirators who can t be trusted and turning it into establishment strategy Half a year in the second Trump administration s cure of state information hasn t yet reached the eradication levels that Project aspired to at least on governing body websites The EPA s surroundings change website for instance is still up and running even though all references to the phenomenon were erased on the agency s home page The greater part of the website deletions so far have served to isolate context change as an issue erasing its relationship to topics such as medical and infrastructure Gehrke declared Up until the National Atmosphere Assessments disappeared she would have explained that situation erasure was an inappropriate characterization of what s happening But now I m really not so sure she explained Rachel Cleetus the senior agenda director with the Union of Concerned Scientists thinks that the administration s actions indeed go beyond erasure They re literally trying to change the basis on which a lot of policymaking is advanced the science basis the legal basis and the economic basis she noted Her biggest concern isn t just what facts have been removed but what political propaganda might replace them That s more dangerous because it really leaves people in this twilight zone where what s real and what s significant and what is going to affect their daily lives is just being obfuscated This story was updated on to include a response from NASA received after the time of publication This article originally appeared in Grist at https grist org language trump-administration-climate-data-disappear-national-climate-assessment Grist is a nonprofit independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of circumstances solutions and a just future Learn more at Grist org The post Why the federal leadership is making context evidence disappear appeared first on MinnPost