Inside the federal government's purge of climate data

Vox

5 days ago

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's 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.
A lot of information about the changing climate has disappeared under President Donald Trump's second term, but the erasure of the National Climate Assessments is 'by far the biggest loss we've seen,' 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 — 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 While the reports have been archived elsewhere, they're no longer as easy to access.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 report that was planned for 2027 or 2028, 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 few different ways, experts said — 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. 'If you suppress information and data, 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 said.
This isn't 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. 'I don't know if we're living in climate denial anymore,' said Leah Aronowsky, a science historian at the Columbia Climate School. 'We have this new front of denial by erasure.'
By cutting funding for research and withholding crucial data, the Trump administration is making it harder to know exactly how the planet is changing.
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 'climate anxiety' among young people. That same month, the Environmental Protection Agency failed to submit its annual report to the United Nations detailing the country's 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 — the first data to definitively show humans were changing the climate.
'This kind of wholesale suppression of an entire field of federally sponsored research, to my knowledge, is historically unprecedented,' Aronowsky said.
In a response to a request for comment, a NASA spokesperson said that it has 'no legal obligations to host globalchange.gov's data,' referring to the site that hosted the National Climate Assessments, adding that the US Global Change Research Program 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 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.
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.
Last year, a leaked training video from Project 2025 — the policy roadmap organized by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank — showed a former Trump official declaring that political appointees would have to 'eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.' 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. 'We will drill, baby, drill,' Trump said 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 climate change (he calls himself a 'climate realist'), but he's zealously dismantled environmental programs and has recommended that the White House strike down the 'endangerment finding,' 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't a health consideration, it could end that regulatory obligation.
'If you're removing information about climate change, its reality, and its impact on people, then I think it's a lot easier to make the case that it's not an environmental health issue,' Gehrke said.
There's a word for the idea that ignorance can serve political ends: agnotology (from the Greek 'agnosis,' or 'not knowing'), 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: 'If you remove it, then in a certain sense, it no longer exists, and therefore, there's nothing to even debate, right?'
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.
'This is a 180, not just a turn, but diving into something we've never even seen before,' he said. On the other hand, Cook said, the administration is taking a classic climate denial tactic — painting scientists as 'alarmists' or conspirators who can't be trusted — and turning it into government policy.
Half a year in, the second Trump administration's treatment of climate information hasn't yet reached the 'eradication' levels that Project 2025 aspired to, at least on government websites. The EPA's climate change website, for instance, is still up and running, even though all references to the phenomenon were erased on the agency's 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 'climate erasure' was an inappropriate characterization of what's happening. 'But now, I'm really not so sure,' she said.